Franz Rademacher (diplomat)

Franz Rademacher (* 20th February 1906 in Neustrelitz ; † 17th March 1973 in Bonn ) was a German Nazi - Diplomat . As head of the “ Judenreferat ” of the Foreign Office, he was jointly responsible for planning and realizing the Holocaust .

Life

Rademacher as a participant in the conference on the final solution of the Jewish question on March 6, 1942 in the Reich Security Main Office

The son of a train driver studied law in Rostock and Munich and worked as a court assessor from 1932 . Between 1932 and 1934 he was a member of the SA and from March 1933 of the NSDAP .

In December 1937 he entered the diplomatic service and between 1938 and 1940 was chargé d' affaires at the German embassy in Uruguay . In March 1940 he moved to the Foreign Office , where he took over the leadership of the "Judenreferat" in the rank of Legation Councilor . The speaker in his lecture was Eberhard von Thadden . In his new office, Rademacher played a key role in drafting the Madagascar Plan, which provided for the deportation of all Jews living in the German Reich . Therefore, he was in constant contact with the Department of Adolf Eichmann in the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA).

His war crimes include the mass deportations and executions of Serbian Jews in Belgrade ordered in October 1941 . When Rademacher went to Belgrade to coordinate these measures against the Jews with the representatives of other authorities and the Reich Security Main Office, he gave the reason for the business trip when he settled the travel expenses: "Liquidation of Jews in Belgrade." He was also jointly responsible for the deportation of Belgian , Dutch and French Jews.

A lecture note dated December 4, 1941 for Ernst von Weizsäcker , written by Rademacher and signed by Martin Luther , states:

“The opportunity of this war must be used to finally settle the Jewish question in Europe. The most expedient solution for this would be to get all European states to introduce the German Jewish laws and agree that the Jews, regardless of their nationality, are subjected to the measures of the country of residence, while the property of the Jews should be made available for the final solution. "

On March 6, 1942, he took part in a meeting following the Wannsee Conference on the “ final solution to the Jewish question ”. In two letters to Undersecretaries Martin Luther, Friedrich Gaus and Ernst Woermann and State Secretary Ernst von Weizsäcker on March 7 and June 11, 1942, he informed them about "future measures against mixed race I and II degrees" and the "Question of the sterilization of the 70,000 mixed race". On March 20 of the same year he wrote an express letter to Adolf Eichmann, in which he gave the consent of the Foreign Office: “The Foreign Office has no concerns about the planned deportation of 6,000 Jews of French nationality or stateless Jews to the Auschwitz concentration camp ( Upper Silesia). "

Rademacher, who last had the rank of SS-Obersturmführer , was forced to resign as an employee of Undersecretary Martin Luther after his overthrow in April 1943. Until the end of the war he served as a naval officer .

After the end of the war

In 1945 - at the end of the war - Rademacher was initially able to go into hiding, but the Americans managed to arrest him as early as September 1947 . Originally, charges were to be brought against him in the Wilhelmstrasse trial , but Rademacher was removed from the list by extending the charges to members of other agencies based on Wilhelmstrasse. He was accidentally released a short time later. On March 17, 1952 Rademacher was to manslaughter in 1300 Jews from aiding and abetting Landgericht Nürnberg-Fürth sentenced to 3 years and 5 months in prison, from which he in July - taking into account his 29 months detention  was released early -.

In August 1952, a neo-Nazi organization managed to smuggle Rademacher into Syria with a Spanish passport in the name of "Tomé Roselle" . There he was recruited for the German foreign intelligence service by BND employee Hans Rechenberg in 1962 and arrested in 1963 on charges of espionage , but pardoned and released in October 1965 due to illness. After Rademacher returned to Germany in September 1966, he was sentenced on May 2, 1968 by the Bamberg Regional Court to a prison sentence of five years, which, however, had already been served. In January 1971, the Federal Court of Justice ordered a new trial, which could no longer be opened because Rademacher had meanwhile died in March 1973.

literature

• Maria Keipert (Red.): Biographical Handbook of the German Foreign Service 1871–1945. Published by the Foreign Office, Historical Service. Volume 3: Gerhard Keiper, Martin Kröger : L – R. Schöningh, Paderborn u. a. 2008, ISBN 978-3-506-71842-6 .
• Eckart Conze , Norbert Frei , Peter Hayes , Moshe Zimmermann : The Office and the Past. German diplomats in the Third Reich and in the Federal Republic. Karl Blessing Verlag, Munich 2010, ISBN 978-3-89667-430-2 .
• Andreas Eichmüller: No general amnesty. The criminal prosecution of Nazi crimes in the early Federal Republic. Oldenbourg, Munich 2012, ISBN 978-3-486-70412-9 .

Web links

• Franz Rademacher in the Rostock matriculation portal
• Literature about Franz Rademacher (diplomat) in the state bibliography MV
• Detailed description of his crimes, case number of the trials ( Memento of March 2, 2010 on WebCite ) on Axis Biographical Research
• Rademacher, Franz . In: Theresienstadt Lexicon.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Entry by Franz Rademacher in the Rostock matriculation portal .
2. ↑ Reinhard Bollmus: The office of Rosenberg and its opponents . Munich 1970, p. 292.
3. ↑ Eckart Conze , Norbert Frei , Peter Hayes , Moshe Zimmermann : The office and the past. German diplomats in the Third Reich and in the Federal Republic . Munich 2010, p. 15; see also Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung of October 24, 2010 and online The Foreign Office and the Holocaust . In: FAZ.net . October 23, 2010.
4. ↑ Eckart Conze , Norbert Frei , Peter Hayes , Moshe Zimmermann : The office and the past. German diplomats in the Third Reich and in the Federal Republic. Munich 2010, p. 186.
5. ↑ ^{a b c d} Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945 . Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, second, updated edition, Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 978-3-596-16048-8 , p. 476.
6. ↑ Franz Rademacher: Future measures against mixed race I and II degrees . (PDF; 56 kB) (No longer available online.) Federal Foreign Office , June 11, 1942, archived from the original on September 24, 2015 ; Retrieved April 27, 2010 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
7. ^ Franz Rademacher: Record . (PDF; 179 kB) (No longer available online.) Federal Foreign Office , March 7, 1942, archived from the original on April 2, 2015 ; Retrieved April 27, 2010 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
8. ^ Quotation from Ernst Klee : Das Personenlexikon zum Third Reich. Fischer Taschenbuch 2005, p. 476.
9. ↑ Dirk Pöppmann: Robert Kempner and Ernst von Weizsäcker in the Wilhelmstrasse trial . For the discussion about the participation of the German functional elite in the Nazi crimes. S. 173. In: Irmtrud Wojak, Susanne Meinl: In the labyrinth of guilt. Frankfurt am Main 2003, ISBN 3-593-37373-4 .
10. ↑ dpa: Three years and five months for Rademacher . In: FAZ . March 18, 1952. Via FAZ of November 12, 2010, p. 10.