Franz Swede

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Franz Swede

Franz Reinhold Schwede , from 1934 Schwede-Coburg (born March 5, 1888 in Drawonen in the Memel district , East Prussia ; † October 19, 1960 in Coburg ) was a German National Socialist politician and became the third German National Socialist Mayor in Coburg on August 28, 1930 Reich and, as the first member of the NSDAP party, mayor of an independent city. From 1934 to 1945 he was Gauleiter of the NSDAP in Pomerania .

Life

Franz Schwede trained as a machinist and joined the Imperial Navy as a machinist in 1906 . At the end of the First World War he was a technical deck officer and was taken as a crew member of the small cruiser Dresden after the Imperial High Seas Fleet was scuttled in Scapa Flow and was taken prisoner by the English . In 1920 he joined the Reichswehr , but was dismissed in 1921 after the maximum number of 100,000 men had been set. Afterwards he was technical manager of a sawmill in Sankt Andreasberg for about a year before he was hired as a machine foreman at the Coburg municipal works in March 1922 .

Coburg (1922-1934)

On October 24, 1922 he became a co-founder of the NSDAP local group in Coburg, which he chaired with around 800 members at the end of December 1923. Before that, Swede was active as a guest in the Deutschvölkischer Schutz- und Trutzbund . After the city council election in December 1924, the Nazi freedom movement as the successor organization to the banned NSDAP received 14.3% of the vote and was represented for the first time in the Coburg city parliament with three city council seats; Swede became a city ​​councilor . In 1928, the Coburg NSDAP party newspaper Der Weckruf , from which the Coburg national newspaper emerged in 1930 , began a smear campaign against Abraham Friedmann , the general director of the Coburg meat products company Großmann AG. Friedmann defended himself against the attacks on his person by threatening Schwede's employer, the Städtische Werken, to stop the coke and electricity purchases. Since Swede had refused a declaration of discontinuance, he was dismissed at the request of the Coburg Municipal Works after a city council resolution with 14 to 10 votes in early 1929. The city administration did not respond to the immediate rehabilitation of Sweden, which was demanded by the indignant NSDAP. The NSDAP then initiated a referendum to dissolve the city council, which it won on May 5, 1929 with 67% of the vote. The city council election held on June 23, after an election campaign, with Adolf Hitler as the speaker with 43.1% votes and 13 of 25 city councilors for the first time , resulted in an absolute majority for the NSDAP in a German city. With a similar procedure of the referendum took place in 1931 in Neustadt an der Aisch the "seizure of power" of the NSDAP in the city council. On the eve of the vote there, Swede appeared as a speaker.

At the opening session of the newly elected city council, it was decided to reinstate Sweden with civil servant status at the municipal works. In the following year, on August 28, 1930, Schwede was elected third mayor on the fifth attempt . He was the first mayor in Germany to be appointed by the NSDAP. In early 1931 he was elected second mayor. On October 16, 1931, he was appointed First Mayor and in 1933 Lord Mayor of Coburg. In March 1933, the terror under the leadership of Swede against Jews and opponents of the NSDAP had a climax in Coburg. By the end of April, 152 people had been arrested and severely ill-treated in " protective custody " in the presence of a Swede. A highlight of the personality cult around Swede in Coburg was the consecration of the new Coburg town hall bell with the inscription I call you to Adolf Hitler, my name is Franz Schwede-Glocke . Swede was as substitutes since October 1930 deputy of the NSDAP in the Bavarian state parliament has become and as of November 1933 member of the Reichstag . (For information on the phase of life in Coburg, see also Coburg during the Nazi era )

Pomerania (1934–1945)

He set the political career on 1 July 1934, the Office of the provincial government of Lower Bavaria / Upper Palatinate in Regensburg and on 20 July 1934 with the appointment of Adolf Hitler as Gauleiter of the Gau of Pomerania as the successor Wilhelm Karpensteins and the Provincial President of the Prussian province of Pomerania continues . In addition, Swede was given the name addition Coburg and in 1939 the honorary citizenship of Coburg due to his services . In his honor, the Vogelsang Castle , which was converted into a training camp, was named Franz-Schwede-Coburg-Official Camp . In 1937 he was promoted to SA group leader and in 1938 to SA upper group leader. In the same year he became Federal Leader of the Reich Scatter Union of former professional soldiers and in 1939 Reich Defense Commissioner of Military District II .

From his time in Coburg he was followed by Arno Fischer as regional building officer, Kuno Popp as head of Gau propaganda and head of the Pomeranian regional office of the Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, Alfred Seidler as district treasurer, Johannes Künzel as district chairman of the German Labor Front, Emil Mazuw as staff leader of the SS section XIII and Werner Faber as Lord Mayor of Szczecin to Pomerania.

In his role as Gauleiter and Reich Defense Commissioner for Pomerania, Schwede-Coburg ordered the evacuation of the sanatoriums and nursing homes in Treptow, Ueckermünde, Lauenburg, Meseritz-Obrawalde and Stralsund in autumn 1939 - independently, independently and prior to the measures taken by the T4 central service had the greater part of the patients shot by the SS-Kommando Eimann in West Prussia or murdered by the Sonderkommando Lange with gas vans .

Imprisonment and Death (1945–1960)

At the end of the Second World War, Swede prevented a timely and orderly escape of the civilian population in Pomerania from the oncoming Red Army , but set himself down in good time with a ship from Saßnitz on May 4 in the direction of Schleswig-Holstein , where he left on May 13, 1945 came into English captivity and was interned until 1947. After a first conviction by a judging chamber for belonging to the Nazi leader corps to nine years in prison on November 25, 1948 in Bielefeld , he was sentenced on April 7, 1951 in Coburg for 52-fold bodily harm in unity with attempted coercion in office during the Terror sentenced to a maximum of ten years in prison in 1933. On January 24, 1956, the remainder of the sentence was suspended, and in 1960 Franz Schwede died in Coburg at the age of 72.

literature

  • Joachim Albrecht: The avant-garde of the “Third Reich”. The Coburg NSDAP during the Weimar Republic 1922–1933 , Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2005, ISBN 3-631-53751-4 ( review ).
  • Hubert Habel: The unstoppable rise of the machinist Franz Schwede . In: Initiative Stadtmuseum Coburg e. V .: Ahead at the wrong time. Coburg and the rise of National Socialism in Germany , Coburg 2004, ISBN 3-9808006-3-6 .
  • Kyra T. Inachin: The Gau Pomerania. A Prussian province as a Nazi Gau . In: Jürgen John, Horst Möller, Thomas Schaarschmidt (eds.): The NS-Gaue. Regional middle authorities in the centralized “leader state”. Oldenbourg, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-486-58086-0 , pp. 280-293.
  • Joachim Lilla , Martin Döring, Andreas Schulz: extras in uniform: the members of the Reichstag 1933–1945. A biographical manual. Including the Volkish and National Socialist members of the Reichstag from May 1924 . Droste, Düsseldorf 2004, ISBN 3-7700-5254-4 .
  • Jan Mittenzwei: Schwede-Coburg, Franz (1888–1960) . In: Dirk Alvermann , Nils Jörn (Hrsg.): Biographisches Lexikon für Pommern . Volume 2 (= publications of the Historical Commission for Pomerania. Series V, Volume 48.2). Böhlau Verlag, Cologne Weimar Vienna 2015, ISBN 978-3-412-22541-4 , pp. 257-265.
  • Armin Nolzen :  Schwede-Coburg, Franz. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 24, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-428-11205-0 , p. 36 f. ( Digitized version ).
  • Erich Stockhorst: 5000 people. Who was what in the 3rd Reich . Arndt, Kiel 2000, ISBN 3-88741-116-1 (unchanged reprint of the first edition from 1967).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Carl-Christian H. Dressel: Notes on the judiciary in Coburg from the establishment of the Coburg Regional Court to denazification , in: Yearbook of the Coburger Landesstiftung 1997 , Coburg 1997, p. 73.
  2. ^ Wolfgang Mück: Nazi stronghold in Middle Franconia: The völkisch awakening in Neustadt an der Aisch 1922–1933. Verlag Philipp Schmidt, 2016 (= Streiflichter from home history. Special volume 4); ISBN 978-3-87707-990-4 , p. 102 f. and 266.
  3. ↑ Hubert Habel: The unstoppable rise of the machinist Franz Schwede . In: Initiative Stadtmuseum Coburg e. V .: Ahead at the wrong time. Coburg and the rise of National Socialism in Germany , Coburg 2004, ISBN 3-9808006-3-6 . P. 49.
  4. ↑ Uwe Lohalm: Völkischer Radikalismus: The history of the Deutschvölkischer Schutz- und Trutz-Bund. 1919-1923 . Leibniz-Verlag, Hamburg 1970, p. 310. ISBN 3-87473-000-X .
  5. ^ Coburger Zeitung, December 8, 1924
  6. ^ Coburger Zeitung, June 24, 1929
  7. ^ Joachim Albrecht: The avant-garde of the "Third Reich". The Coburg NSDAP during the Weimar Republic 1922–1933 , p. 116.
  8. ^ Wolfgang Mück: Nazi stronghold in Middle Franconia: The völkisch awakening in Neustadt an der Aisch 1922–1933. Verlag Philipp Schmidt, 2016 (= Streiflichter from home history. Special volume 4); ISBN 978-3-87707-990-4 , p. 102 f.
  9. ↑ Harald Sandner: Coburg in the 20th century. The chronicle of the city of Coburg and the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha from January 1, 1900 to December 31, 1999 - from the "good old days" to the dawn of the 21st century. Against forgetting . Verlagsanstalt Neue Presse, Coburg 2002, ISBN 3-00-006732-9 , p. 117.
  10. ↑ Kyran T. Inachin: The Pomeranian Gau - a Prussian province as a Nazi Gau. In: The NS-Gaue: regional middle-level instances in the centralized "Führer state" . Series of quarterly issues for contemporary history: special issue , ed. by Jürgen John, Horst Möller, Thomas Schaarschmidt, Oldenbourg, Munich 2007, ISBN 3-486-58086-8 , p. 280 .
  11. ^ Ernst Klee : "Euthanasia" in the Nazi state. The "Destruction of life unworthy of life" , Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1983, ISBN 3-10-039303-1 , pp. 95-98.
  12. ^ Stefan Nöth: Anti-Semitism. In: ahead at the wrong time. Coburg and the Rise of National Socialism in Germany , p. 82.
personal data
SURNAME Swede, Franz
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Swede-Coburg, Franz
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician (NSDAP), MdR
DATE OF BIRTH March 5, 1888
PLACE OF BIRTH Drawhnen , East Prussia
DATE OF DEATH October 19, 1960
Place of death Coburg