Franz Neuhausen

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Franz Neuhausen , nickname fat Franz or Franz the fat , (born December 13, 1887 in Merzig , Rhine Province , German Reich ; † April 14, 1966 in Munich ) was the regional group leader of the NSDAP / AO in Yugoslavia and, during the Second World War, German “general representative for the economy in Serbia "and" Head of the military administration Serbia ".

Life

First World War and the interwar period

During the First World War Neuhausen served as a major in the air force of the German Empire . Here he was the supply officer in Jagdgeschwader 2 "Richthofen" , the last of which was Hermann Göring . In the interwar period he reached the rank of SS group leader in the National Socialist Air Corps (NSFK) .

Franz Neuhausen led various dubious trading companies in Bulgaria and Yugoslavia, some with bankruptcies and an oath of disclosure (1933). From 1931 Franz Neuhausen stayed in Belgrade. With the support of his long-time secretary and confidante Helene Roßbach, his future wife, he acquired stakes in haulage companies, agencies and trading companies here after 1933. He was a representative of the Deutsche Reichsbahn as well as the interests of Lufthansa and HAPAG in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia.

From 1933 to 1938 he was appointed regional group leader of the NSDAP / AO in Yugoslavia. From 1936 Neuhausen worked as an economic advisor to the German Reich and eventually held the position of German Consul General . Neuhausen launched the Yugoslav renewal movement Zbor in international trade. With its leader Dimitrije Ljotić , he founded the “Technical Union” for compensation transactions for the exchange of Yugoslav agricultural products for German machines. In the 1930s he used his political and economic networks, which reached into Yugoslav government circles, for active secret service work for the German Reich.

With the support of his close friend Hermann Göring, Neuhausen acquired shares in companies in the mining and metal industries through dubious transactions. He was arrested several times for this by the Gestapo , but each time the allegations were tempered by Goering's intervention. In return, Neuhausen provided Göring with foreign currency. At his annual attendance at Goering's birthday, Neuhausen gave the “ Reichsmarschall ” 14 kg gold or silver bars. Göring used these funds to expand his art and jewelery collection at his Carinhall country estate . Neuhausen received a large country estate in the Banat as a gift from Göring , which he had expanded with a great deal of money and material.

As consul general, Neuhausen negotiated the acquisition of the copper mines in Bor, eastern Serbia, from France , which had been defeated in the western campaign , and subsequently assumed the position of chairman of the board of the new German company, "Bor Kupferbergwerke und Hütten AG" in Belgrade.

General representative for the economy in Serbia

In order to implement the goals of the four-year plan , Neuhausen was promoted to NSFK Obergruppenführer in 1937 at Göring's request and appointed “General Plenipotentiary for the Economy in Serbia” (GBW) in the field of military commander in Serbia . In this position, it was his central task as governor of Görings in the Yugoslav economy “to make the economic resources of Serbia and the Banat usable as much as possible for the needs of the empire [...]”. Practically all major companies were transferred to German hands, so German companies took over the entire extraction of raw materials. Most of the agricultural production came - mainly from the Serbian Banat - to Germany.

After the Balkan campaign , he set up his office in the building of the former Yugoslav Ministry of Aviation in the Belgrade district of Zemun , from where he managed the copper mines in Bor as well as the Trepča lead and zinc mines near Kosovska Mitrovica . He had the yield of the company "Jugo-Petrol", which he co-founded, on the Mur island . He was chairman of the supervisory board of the Belgrade branch of the "Wiener Kreditverein" (also "Bankverein") and was further involved in arms deals. Since the spring of 1941 , the general supervision of the Aryanization of Jewish property has been the responsibility of the GBW Franz Neuhausen, alongside the head of administration Harald Turner .

On December 9, 1942, Neuhausen was appointed "Authorized representative for the production of metal ores in Southeast Europe". The German Reich was primarily interested in the Yugoslav copper, lead, zinc, iron ore, manganese, chromium, molybdenum and bauxite deposits. This function was initially limited to the occupied territories and the areas of Yugoslavia annexed by Tsarist Bulgaria . He was also the "Labor Commissioner" in the Occupied Territories.

After the establishment of the German military administration in Serbia, Neuhausen appointed commissioners to oversee the National Bank and other key Serbian companies. From March 1943 he was also responsible for metal ore production in the occupied Kingdom of Greece . After the Armistice of Cassibile, his powers were extended to the formerly Italian-occupied areas of Greece and the Kingdom of Albania . In the course of the rationalization of the German military administration, Neuhausen's previous functions were combined on October 18, 1943 under the key role of "Head of the Military Administration of Serbia". Neuhausen kept his post as chairman of the board of the mining company in Bor, where around 6,200 Jews from the Kingdom of Hungary and its occupied territories were used as forced laborers in July 1943 to make up for the shortage of workers to operate the mine. The workers there were guarded by units of the SS and forced to work in knee-deep water over 12-hour shifts.

Rivalry and arrest

The direct representatives of leading Nazi functionaries in Belgrade, such as Heinrich Himmler and Göring, pursued different interests. As "General Plenipotentiary for the Economy" and favorite of Göring, Neuhausen actually appeared in the occupied territories as an economic dictator on behalf of the "Reichsmarschall". Neuhausen was described as "notoriously corrupt", "enveloped by the smell of severe corruption" and "greasy and unscrupulous". There were numerous disagreements with other high-ranking officials of the occupation regime over the extent of its jurisdiction. He vigorously opposed, in particular, the efforts of the “special representative of the Foreign Office for the Southeast” Hermann Neubacher , who wanted to give more powers to the Belgrade puppet government of Milan Nedić . Neubacher believed that Neuhausen was corrupt and that he had amassed a large fortune while serving in Belgrade.

The Southeast Military Commander in Serbia General Field Marshal Maximilian von Weichs and Neubacher filed a number of complaints against him, after which Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and “Reichsführer” Himmler agreed on how to proceed against Neuhausen.

In Neuhausen's attempt to remove the gold from the Belgrade central bank, the gold bars fell into the hands of partisans led by Dragoljub Draža Mihailović . Since Himmler had already registered claims for the gold, he then had a house search carried out near Neuhausen, in the course of which several hundred kilograms of gold were found. Neuhausen was arrested for corruption in August 1944 and interned in a German concentration camp for 5 months .

Although Göring had ordered his release and the award of the Knight's Cross of the War Merit Cross , Neuhausen remained under arrest until the end of the war. The mining expert Theo Keyser became his successor in his function as “General Representative for Business” ; Justus Danckwerts replaced him as head of the military administration in Serbia.

post war period

Neuhausen was arrested in 1945 by the Western Allies on his estate in Sankt Gilgen on Lake Wolfgang, posing as a "persecuted and resister". He was extradited when requested by Yugoslavia to be heard. There he was sentenced to 20 years of forced labor by the military judge of the 5th Belgrade War Crimes Trial in 1947.

During the German occupation, Neuhausen protected Yugoslav communists and positioned them in offices (quote Neuhausen: “I decide who is a communist”). Thanks to these old clans, he was able to avoid the execution of the verdict. In 1949 he again headed the Bor copper mines and the Trepča lead and zinc works near Kosovska Mitrovica, this time for the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia; "Although still without a salary, but with all the other advantages". In 1955 he was released to Germany. At the end of the war, his wife had fled to the Salzburg state insane asylum and later lived in Munich. Neuhausen owned numerous properties and estates. He died in Munich in 1966.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p Neuhausen kept his head. In: Der Spiegel , issue 47 from November 17, 1949
  2. ↑ a b c d e Ekkehard Völkl , Zsolt K. Lengyel: Westbanat, 1941–1944: the German, the Hungarian and other ethnic groups. Publishing house Dr. Dr. Rudolf Trofenik, Munich 1991. ISBN 3-87828-192-7 , pp. 46, 52f.
  3. ^ A b c d Jozo Tomasevich: War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941-1945: Occupation and Collaboration. Stanford University Press, San Francisco 2001. ISBN 0-80477-924-4 , pp. 76f.
  4. ↑ a b c Peter Broucek (Ed.): A General in the Twilight. The memories of Edmund Glaises von Horstenau, Vol. 3: German Plenipotentiary General in Croatia and witness of the fall of the "Thousand Years Reich". Publications of the Commission for Modern History of Austria 76, Vienna - Cologne - Graz 1988, pp. 452f. In: Arnold Suppan : Hitler - Beneš - Tito: Conflict, War and Genocide in East Central and Southeast Europe. Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2014. ISBN 3-70017-309-1 , p. 941
  5. ^ A b c Mariana Hausleitner : The Danube Swabians 1868 - 1948. Your role in the Romanian and Serbian Banat. Steiner-Verlag, Stuttgart 2014, ISBN 978-3-515-10686-3 , p. 270
  6. ↑ a b The German Empire and the Second World War . Volume 5/2: Bernhard R. Kroener , Rolf-Dieter Müller , Hans Umbreit: Organization and mobilization of the German sphere of influence - Part volume 2: War administration, economy and human resources 1942 to 1944/45. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1999, XIII. ISBN 978-3-421-06499-8 , p. 96.
  7. ^ Frank-Rutger Hausmann : Ernst-Wilhelm Bohle: Gauleiter in the service of party and state. Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2009. ISBN 3-42852-862-X , p. 101.
  8. ↑ a b c d e f Marcia Christoff Kurapovna: Shadows on the Mountain: the Allies, the Resistance, and the Rivalries that Doomed WWII Yugoslavia. John Wiley and Sons, Hoboken (NJ) 2010. ISBN 978-0-470-08456-4 , p. 258
  9. ↑ Kenneth D. Alford: Hermann Göring and the Nazi Art Collection: The Looting of Europe's Art Treasures and Their Dispersal after World War II. McFarland & Company, Jefferson (NC) 2012. ISBN 978-0-7864-8955-8 . P. 17f.
  10. ^ Jozo Tomasevich: War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941-1945: Occupation and Collaboration.  : Stanford University Press, San Francisco 2001. ISBN 978-0-8047-3615-2 , p. 617
  11. ↑ Lothar Gall: The banker Hermann Josef Abs: a biography. CH Beck, Schnellbach 2006. ISBN 978-3-406-54738-6 , p. 112.
  12. ^ Paul N. Hehn: Serbia, Croatia and Germany 1941-1945: Civil War and Revolution in the Balkans. University of Alberta, Canadian Slavonic Papers 13, 1971. pp. 344-373.
  13. ^ Maximiliane Rieder: German-Italian Economic Relations: Continuities and Breaks 1936 - 1957. Campus-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2003. ISBN 3-59337-136-7 , p. 183
  14. ^ Karl-Heinz Schlarp: Economy and occupation in Serbia 1941-1944. F. Steiner Verlag, Wiesbaden 1986. ISBN 3-51504-401-9 , p. 135
  15. ^ Walter Lukan: Serbia and Montenegro: Space and Population, History, Language and Literature, Culture, Politics, Society, Economy, Law. LIT Verlag, Münster 2006, ISBN 3-82589-539-4 , p. 273
  16. ↑ The German Reich and the Second World War . Volume 5/2: Bernhard R. Kroener , Rolf-Dieter Müller , Hans Umbreit: Organization and mobilization of the German sphere of influence - Part volume 2: War administration, economy and human resources 1942 to 1944/45. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1999, XIII. ISBN 978-3-421-06499-8 , p. 216.
  17. ^ Arnold Suppan : Hitler - Beneš - Tito: Conflict, War and Genocide in East Central and Southeast Europe. Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2014. ISBN 3-70017-309-1 , p. 941
  18. ↑ The German Reich and the Second World War . Volume 5/2: Bernhard R. Kroener , Rolf-Dieter Müller , Hans Umbreit: Organization and mobilization of the German sphere of influence - Part volume 2: War administration, economy and human resources 1942 to 1944/45. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1999, XIII. ISBN 978-3-421-06499-8 , p. 39.
  19. ^ Paul Mojzes: Balkan Genocides: Holocaust and Ethnic Cleansing in the 20th century. Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Plymouth 2011. ISBN 978-1-4422-0663-2 , p. 91.
  20. ^ A b Paul N. Hehn: Serbia, Croatia and Germany 1941-1945: Civil War and Revolution in the Balkans. University of Alberta, Canadian Slavonic Papers 13, 1971. p. 109.
  21. ^ A b c Stevan K. Pavlowitch: Hitler's New Disorder: The Second World War in Yugoslavia. Columbia University Press, New York 2008. ISBN 978-1-85065-895-5 , p. 230.
  22. ^ Wilhelm Höttl: Commitment to the empire. Verlag Siegfried Bublies, Schnellbach 1997. ISBN 978-3-926584-41-0 , p. 183
personal data
SURNAME Neuhausen, Franz
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Fat Franz (nickname); Franz the Fat (nickname)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Regional group leader of the NSDAP / AO in Yugoslavia, German general representative for the economy in Serbia, military administration chief Serbia
DATE OF BIRTH December 13, 1887
PLACE OF BIRTH Merzig , Rhine Province , German Empire
DATE OF DEATH April 14, 1966
Place of death Munich