Franz Seldte

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Franz Seldte (1933)

Tobias Wilhelm Franz Seldte (born June 29, 1882 in Magdeburg ; † April 1, 1947 in Fürth ) was a German politician, entrepreneur and veteran of the First World War , who was the founder and federal leader of the right-wing military association Stahlhelm, which was politically influential in the Weimar Republic , Bund der Frontsoldaten emerged , joined the NSDAP in 1933 and was Reich Labor Minister from 1933 to 1945 .

Life

Origin and career

Franz Seldte was the eldest of three sons of the soda water manufacturer Wilhelm Seldte (1849–1895) and his wife Emma nee. Stutz (around 1855–1938) and grew up in a Protestant family. After elementary school he attended the Wilhelm Raabe Realgymnasium in Magdeburg. He then completed a commercial apprenticeship and then studied chemistry in Braunschweig and Greifswald . In Braunschweig he became a member of the Corps Teutonia-Hercynia Braunschweig .

In 1906 he did his military service as a one-year volunteer in Magdeburg with Infantry Regiment No. 66 and became a reserve officer in the Prussian army . In the spring of 1907 he married Hildegard Martin, who was one year younger than him and with whom he had three children. After study trips abroad, Franz Seldte took over the management of the Seldte & Co. essence factory in Magdeburg- Sudenburg in 1908, succeeding his father, who died at an early age . His brother Georg Seldte became an authorized signatory of the company, which after the death of his father was initially run by her mother together with the authorized signatory Ernst Schuhmann.

War participation

From August 1914 he took part in the First World War and was seriously wounded in the Battle of the Somme in 1916 as the leader of a machine gun company , as a result of which he lost his left arm. After his restoration, he joined the military department of the Foreign Office (MAA) under Colonel Hans von Haeften, which was founded the previous year at the instigation of General Erich von Falkenhayn . Seldte was used as a front- line reporter and led a front- line film and news group. This brought him into contact with Walter Nicolai , the head of Department IIIb of the Great General Staff, whose area of ​​responsibility included war reporting during this time. Awarded the Iron Cross II and I Class, he was promoted to Captain of the Reserve. From June to November 1918 he worked in the Foreign Office as head of the foreign office of the Image and Film Office (BuFA), which Haeften founded in January 1917 for the purposes of war propaganda and which is now headed by Major Alexander Grau . He wanted to use the “overwhelming power of the image and the film as a means of clarification and influence” for the war and German propaganda internally and externally, but was only moderately successful.

Foundation of the Stahlhelm

Mission statement of the Stahlhelm

As a counter-reaction to the November Revolution in Germany, Franz Seldte founded the monarchist-nationalist veterans association " Stahlhelm, Bund der Frontsoldaten " in Magdeburg on December 25, 1918, together with his brothers and various comrades in the regiment . At a preliminary meeting on November 13, 1918, Seldte summed up the group's concerns as “not to let this mess of revolution go on like this”. The aim was to give the demobilized soldiers returning to Magdeburg a home, to bring the spirit of the front home, to represent the interests of the soldiers and to take part in the fight against communism-Bolshevism .

Seldte, who was close to the National Liberals even before 1914 , was one of the prominent founding members of the local DVP association at the turn of the year 1918/1919 , which he left again in 1927, and was temporarily a member of the Magdeburg city council. With regard to the defeat in the war, he spread the assertion, determined by the stab in the back , that during the World War the propaganda of the enemies in Germany had hit open ears "so that in the end the home army stabbed the field army in the back".

In the summer of 1919, the Stahlhelm began with the establishment of local groups throughout Germany. On March 14, 1920 the first "Reichsfrontsoldatentag" took place in Magdeburg, during which Franz Seldte was elected the first federal leader of the steel helmet and replaced the previous chairman and co-founder, Magdeburg lawyer Gustav Bünger. After the failed Kapp Putsch (which Seldte refused, while there was also sympathy for the putschists among Stahlhelm supporters) and the dissolution of right-wing resident groups and voluntary corps , Seldte used the resulting influx of members to convert the Stahlhelm into a paramilitary organization. Two years later the federal government already had over 100,000 members. Until 1924, only those who participated in the World War were accepted.

Programmatically, the Stahlhelm was no longer aimed at the classic veteran of 1870/71 , but rather the politicized front-line soldiers of the World War, and its practical focus on the interests of the members set it apart from the old-style warrior associations, which were concerned with maintaining tradition and socializing , even if they had double memberships were common. Economic and political and, if necessary, military self-help was in the foreground of the association's statutes. Political goals were the revision of the Versailles Treaty , the elimination of Weimar parliamentarism and the re-establishment of an autocratic-authoritarian state with a "strong government".

Nominally non-partisan and established with the aim of recognizing the new republican form of government as the organization of all those involved in the war and of combating radical political currents, the Stahlhelmbund actually stood in clear opposition to the political system of the Weimar Republic from the start . On January 16, 1922, the first celebration of the foundation of the Reich took place in the Kristall-Palast Magdeburg , which the association celebrated in Magdeburg in memory of the imperial proclamation of 1871 instead of the constitution day on August 11, the anniversary of the signing of the Weimar Constitution , until 1932. Despite a democratic membership constitution, according to which the leaders were elected by the members, and certain socially equitable elements of the ideology, which emphasized the soldierly ideal of equality and declared a limited attractiveness beyond the nationally oriented bourgeoisie, the association positioned itself increasingly anti-democratic and during the 1920s anti-republican. As a DVP member, Seldte, who was basically constitutional, had excellent connections with the Reichswehr and other anti-republican parties and organizations and hoped that he and his organization could take over the leadership of the national-conservative camp.

Internally, however, there were ongoing disputes with the deputy federal leader Theodor Duesterberg that the Empire was a senior officer in the Ministry of War and 1919 in Halle (Saale) for steel helmet had come. He was the constituency manager of the DNVP and in 1923 relocated his activities to the Halle local group of the Stahlhelm , which he expanded into the core of a völkisch-national wing of the organization and achieved a considerable increase in members for the federal government, especially in central Germany. Against concerns from the liberal-conservative Stahlhelmflügel under Seldte, he succeeded in introducing an anti-Semitic Aryan paragraph into the statutes, which excluded Jewish veterans from membership in the Stahlhelm . From 1924 Franz Seldte officiated as 1st federal leader of the Stahlhelm , Duesterberg as 2nd federal leader.

family business

The family business Seldte & Co. got into enormous financial difficulties during the period of inflation . After the intercession of Chancellor Gustav Stresemann (DVP), Franz Seldte received a six-figure loan in 1923. In the same year he founded the Seldte-Handelsgesellschaft to market his products, brought his company to the stock exchange and was able to develop it into one of the leading vinegar and essence manufacturers in Germany by 1927. For the production of liqueurs and fine brandies , he founded Sankt Mauritius GmbH, which bought and operated the “Deutscher Kaiser” restaurant in Magdeburg. Franz Seldte was personally able to improve his social position through his economic and political activities in the 1920s. He was a leading member of the German Gentlemen's Club , was a member of the German Officers' Union , was a commercial judge in Magdeburg and had good connections in the economy.

Publisher and author

In 1924, Franz Seldte founded the Stahlhelm-Verlag, a small publishing house in Magdeburg, for his association of the same name, called Frundsberg-Verlag from 1926 and based in Berlin from 1927, in which flight magazines and magazines as well as books by authors close to Stahlhelm appeared. Well-known authors from the national-conservative spectrum such as Ernst Jünger , Friedrich Hielscher and Franz Schauwecker published at this publishing house, which continued to exist unmolested during the Nazi era . Seldte also financed the national revolutionary magazine "Das Reich" published by Friedrich Hielscher from 1930 onwards.

Seldte himself appeared literarily with his war trilogy The Father of All Things , published 1929-31 . The war experiences of a protagonist named "Helmuth Stahl", who, as a lieutenant, developed a transportable protective shield for machine guns, lost his left forearm and, during the revolutionary upheavals of 1918, had the idea of ​​founding a movement to preserve the "spirit of the front", described therein, Seldte had compiled according to his own account from war letters, the command books of the machine gun company of the Altmark Infantry Regiment and his diary. The author served the interest of contemporary readers in his person with the novel narratives, which primarily serve self-styling and are linked to his own experiences. His literary products, which are autobiographical in the broader sense, are therefore to be assessed as a by-product of Seldte's political activities.

Radicalization of the Stahlhelm

Seldte takes the front of the company of honor at the Stahlhelm- und Treubundtag in Lübeck (1927).

The anti-republican activity of the Stahlhelm was countered by the military association " Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold ", which was also founded in Magdeburg in 1924 to defend the Weimar Republic , and which quickly developed into the political mass organization with the largest number of members during the Weimar period and surpassed the Stahlhelm . In the meantime, the steel helmet appeared more and more militant and intervened increasingly actively in daily political events. At a board meeting of the Stahlhelm-Landesverband Berlin on October 7, 1926, Seldte issued the slogan “Into the State”, with which the active interference of the association in politics was brought to the point programmatically. Subsequently, the Stahlhelmleitung negotiated unsuccessfully with various members of the right-wing parties DNVP and DVP about a merger. In 1927, the German national Theodor Duesterberg was elected national leader with equal rights alongside the national liberal association founder Seldte, and the Stahlhelm took part in the campaign that decided the power struggle at the top of the DNVP in favor of the extreme group led by the pan-German publisher Alfred Hugenberg . From 1928 onwards, compulsory military service was mandatory for physically fit members . In September of the same year the “ Fürstenwalder Hatred Message ” from Brandenburg's Stahlhelmführer Elhard von Morozowicz , who was jointly responsible for the federal leadership and who favored Italian fascism as a model for the restructuring of the “system” fought by the Stahlhelm , led to an open break with republic and democracy. In the wake of Franz Seldte, who had already taken this step in December 1927 as a reaction to the pragmatic foreign policy course of party leader Gustav Stresemann, all Stahlhelm members of the German People's Party resigned from the DVP after the Fürstenwald scandal and a warning from Stresemann. Of the 78 Reichstag members of the DNVP faction after the elections of 1928 (including LB and SL ), 21 belonged to the Stahlhelm .

Franz Seldte (right) with Alfred Hugenberg (left) and the Berlin Stahlhelm leader Franz von Stephani (center) at a rally for the referendum against the Young Plan in the Berlin Sportpalast , winter 1929

In the phase between 1925 and 1930, an increasingly explicit philo-fascist rhetoric emerged within the Stahlhelm . After initially only isolated, very controversial voices within the association - such as the Stahlhelm-Kampfblatt Die Standarte published for a time by Helmut Franke, Ernst Jünger and Franz Schauwecker - the Italian fascist movement was described as the ideal and model for the steel helmet , and around 1929/30 they also acknowledged themselves Representatives of the management level of the federal government openly to recognize in the fascist regime of Italy a model for the desired political reorganization of Germany. The position of Federal Leader Seldte in the internal dispute over Die Standarte was ambivalent. On the one hand, he sold the paper in autumn 1928 and the federal leadership distanced itself from semi-official contacts between its members (including Morozowicz, who headed the Jungstahlhelm from March 1930 ) with Rome, and on the other hand, Hans Ludwig (1894–1943) was a very close confidante Seldtes explicitly known about fascism at a meeting of the federal executive committee in 1926 and defended the standard as the link between the steel helmet and the younger generation. Around 1930 the membership of the Stahlhelm was around 500,000.

In order to be able to cope with the demands of the political struggle also institutionally, the internal management structure of the “Stahlhelm-Bund” was tightened and task-related responsibilities were reorganized. This included the fact that in 1929 Walter Nicolai von Duesterberg was commissioned to create its own intelligence service within the federal government , which was also practiced in other political fighting organizations of the time (e.g. Consul , SA and NSDAP, Red Front Fighters Association , etc.). From 1930 to 1933, the management of the so-called "National Registration Service" of the Stahlhelm was with Ernst Günther von Eine (1894–1978). After Duesterberg's disempowerment in 1933, Seldte stopped paying Nicolai's fees, so that the change in the balance of power in the association had immediate consequences for the news department.

Pioneer of National Socialism

Seldte and Duesterberg take on 11 October 1931, Hugenberg and the Hohenzollern Prince Eitel Friedrich and Oskar in Bad Harzburg the march past of the SA from

One result of the alliance between the steel helmet and the extreme right was the referendum against the Young Plan , which the association organized in 1929. In October 1930, Franz Seldte proposed the referendum to dissolve the Prussian state parliament , in which the SPD ruled, since the state parliament no longer correctly reflected the popular mood after the previous Reichstag elections . After the referendum failed, Seldte was one of the founders of the " Harzburg Front " in October 1931, together with Alfred Hugenberg and Adolf Hitler . Combined with massive marches by their members, Stahlhelm , DNVP and NSDAP temporarily joined forces in the fight against the government and the parliamentary system , which helped the National Socialists in particular to gain broader acceptance in the bourgeois national spectrum. There were numerous conversions. But the competition between the NSDAP and Stahlhelm remained formative in the period up to 1933, despite similar goals; Double membership was prohibited on both sides. At large rallies - for example in Magdeburg on Ascension Day 1932 in the run-up to the Reich presidential election , in which Duesterberg ran for the steel helmet against Hitler - the "transformation of the republic in accordance with the spirit and legacy of frontline soldiers" was propagated.

After the Stahlhelm's own political ambitions had suffered severe setbacks in the 1930 Reichstag elections and, above all, the 1932 presidential election, Seldte intended to integrate and dominate the National Socialists within a government supported by the Stahlhelm , and for this purpose formed an electoral alliance with Hugenberg and Franz von Papen . The Stahlhelmführer Seldte and Duesterberg jointly supported Papen's plan to shut down parliament and on November 18, 1932, formally asked Reich President Paul von Hindenburg, on behalf of the soldiers at the front and “the majority of Germans willing and ready to work”, “the authoritarian form of the independent from the parties At that time, the Stahlhelm leadership still rejected "Hitler as Chancellor in any form" because, as a "party leader", he did not correspond to the ideas of a government that was not affiliated to the party, as represented by the Stahlhelm . Seldte probably changed this attitude under the influence of persuasion by Papen, who, together with Hugenberg, seemed to ensure the "taming" of the National Socialists even with Hitler as Reich Chancellor.

In Hitler's cabinet

From mid-January 1933, Franz Seldte campaigned unreservedly for the appointment of Adolf Hitler as Reich Chancellor. As a result, on January 30, he was surprisingly appointed Reich Labor Minister of the new government (instead of Duesterberg, who had already appeared for the ministerial oath) . Politically, he pursued under the new power relations continue to create an authoritarian regime, dissolution of parliament and the abolition of elections no later than March 1933. However, he tried ahead of the March elections initially together with Hugenberg and unrealistic misunderstanding of the situation, the extent on the helmet based To develop the “ Black-White-Red Combat Front ” into a political force competing with the NSDAP failed completely.

Election poster 1933: Hugenberg , Papen and Seldte

In the elections of March 5, the on pulling Reich nomination of DNVP elected Franz Seldte first time in the Reichstag one whose elders he belonged. As a so-called guest student (guest deputy) of the parliamentary group of the German National People's Party he agreed on March 23, 1933 Hitler's Enabling Act . A few days later, subliminal rivalries between the national-conservative circles affiliated with Duesterberg in the Stahlhelm and Nazi organizations escalated selectively in the Braunschweiger Stahlhelm-Aktion , in which Seldte was perceived as a member of the new regime. In a putsch-like action, he then prevailed as sole leader of the Stahlhelm at the end of April 1933 , dismissed the federal leader Duesterberg, who had been equal up to that point, and pushed all regional leaders who did not follow him from the organization's federal council. He had their Berlin “Federal Office” occupied by a raiding party. As the sole Stahlhelmführer Seldte then declared in a speech that was broadcast on the radio , among other things , that he and all Stahlhelm members would submit "as a closed military unit to the Führer Adolf Hitler". At the same time, the politician who had been independent from the DVP joined the NSDAP on April 27, 1933 and has been a member of its parliamentary group since then. The NSDAP welcomed Seldte's move as a symbolic act with which “the success of Hitler's leadership” was recognized, while the DNVP demanded the resignation of his seat in the Reichstag. With this "self-alignment" ( Rüdiger Hachtmann ) the complete integration of the Stahlhelm-Bund into the NS-structures became already apparent. The 18- to 35-year-old members were integrated into the SA as so-called "Wehrstahlhelm" , and the youth organizations of the Stahlhelm were incorporated into the Hitler Youth . In the course of an organizational restructuring of the SA at the end of 1933, older Stahlhelm members were also largely transferred to the so-called "SA Reserve I". Seldte himself became a member of the SA in July 1933 and was appointed SA-Obergruppenführer in August 1933 .

As early as September 1933, Seldte issued guidelines for social housing , which limited all benefits to “racially valuable and genetically healthy families” who had to be “ Aryan descent ”, meaning that, in addition to people of Jewish origin , “inferior settlers , particularly those suffering from hereditary mental and physical ailments “Were excluded. Two years before the Nuremberg Race Laws, Seldte effectively implemented the Nazis' racial and ethnic ideology in social legislation.

In the leadership of the Nazi state

From March 1933 to July 1934, Seldte, in his role as Minister of Labor, was also Reich Commissioner for Voluntary Labor Service , which he brought under the party's sphere of influence in cooperation between the SA and the labor administration . From January to September 1934 Seldte was head of the economic office at the Supreme SA leadership .

Wachenfeld House in the summer of 1934
Franz Seldte (2nd from right) as Minister with Vidkun Quisling (center) at a reception in Berlin in February 1942

In March 1934 Hitler appointed him leader of the "National Socialist German Front Fighter Association (Stahlhelm)", a successor organization that he wound up on Hitler's orders the following year. In the winter of 1934/35 he tried in vain to tie the parts of the organization that had not yet been fully taken over into the SA more closely to the Reichswehr , which met with little interest from the military and became obsolete with the reintroduction of general conscription in March 1935. In the early summer of 1935, Seldte then asked Hitler to be relieved of all positions; Hitler refused this in a conversation on August 12, 1935 in Haus Wachenfeld . The final incorporation of the up to one million members of the former Stahlhelm Organization into the SA took place on November 7, 1935. Seldte remained - without political influence, but responsible for important organizational tasks within the Nazi state - until 1945 a member of the Reich government and the Reichstag and also held the position of Prussian State Council and Prussian Labor Minister. In 1937 Hitler awarded him the Golden Party Badge . From 1938 on, Seldte no longer had any personal access to Adolf Hitler.

He held his position as Reich Labor Minister until May 1945. Seldte had a weak position within the Nazi leadership and was harassed by rivals who gradually withdrew key competencies from the Reich Labor Ministry, including Robert Ley as leader of the German Labor Front (DAF) and from October 1942 Reich Housing Commissioner and Hermann Göring as authorized representative for the four-year plan . At the same time, the Ministry was constantly enlarged between 1933 and 1945 and was assigned additional tasks. At the beginning of the Second World War it had 16 departments; at the same time, the boundaries between the responsibilities of the authority and the party and special administrations, such as the Reich Labor Service, became blurred . In terms of personnel policy, Seldte relied largely on specialist civil servants and behaved defensively towards interventions by the NSDAP party headquarters by refusing to take over proven National Socialists without sufficient professional competence. The number of NSDAP members in his civil service did not increase sharply until 1937, when the Civil Service Act made Nazi conviction and party membership an important criterion for recruitment and promotion. Important ministerial officials under Seldte were his predecessor Friedrich Syrup , Werner Mansfeld , Johannes Krohn and Karl Durst (1892-1949).

The Ministry was a central pillar in the preparation and organization of the German war economy and played a key role in the forcible recruitment of over 13.5 million men, women and children from the areas occupied during World War II for forced labor in Germany . One of the tasks of the ministry was to “discipline” the population: in 1938, unemployed Jewish citizens (whose unemployment was mostly a result of the Nuremberg Laws and other discriminatory measures) were forced into barely paid work. In the pension insurance, the contributions were increased, the payments reduced and not paid to Jewish Germans in occupied Theresienstadt and in Litzmannstadt (Lodz) - like to all Jewish deportees. The authority was also directly involved in the persecution and murder of European Jews : Until 1943, the officials of the Reich Labor Ministry in the Jewish ghettos in the occupied area registered and determined who were to be considered “fit for work” and “unfit for work” and thus decided who was allowed to survive for the time being. In March 1942, all labor deployment matters were transferred to the newly appointed general manager for labor deployment, Fritz Sauckel , which was tantamount to disempowering Seldte. At the end of 1944 Seldte became the z. V.-Leader of the Supreme SA Leadership (OSAF) ​​appointed in Munich.

The End

After the Nazi regime was crushed in 1945 and in view of the crimes committed by its key representatives, Franz Seldte was arrested on charges of his own war crimes . Until August 1945 he was interned together with other NSDAP officials and high members of the Wehrmacht in POW camp No. 32 Camp Ashcan in Bad Mondorf , Luxembourg . He was supposed to be charged during the Nuremberg trials , but died before charges were brought in 1947 in the hospital of the “Internment and Labor Camp Nuremberg” in Fürth. The property was a former secondary school in the southern part of Fürth, which was used as a hospital by the US Army from November 1946 to the end of April 1947. The attending physician stated that the cause of death was uremia in the death certificate . Seldte was buried in the Catholic cemetery in Rottach-Egern am Tegernsee.

rating

Volker Berghahn pointed out that in the spring of 1933 Seldte was under strong pressure from outside and hesitated for a long time with Duesterberg's disempowerment, to which the only alternative would have been the immediate ban and the dissolution of the Stahlhelm . The depiction that was widespread after the Second World War, which drew Franz Seldte as the “traitor of the steel helmet” and assigned him the sole responsibility for the failure of the federal government, was essentially based on the self-justification literature of other former Stahlhelm leaders (especially Duesterberg's Der Stahlhelm und Hitler , Wolfenbüttel / Hanover 1949), who tried to distance themselves from the “Third Reich”, which the vast majority of Stahlhelm supporters had actually longed for and welcomed. The entire federal leadership of the Stahlhelm had unanimously approved Hitler's chancellorship in January 1933.

In his appreciation of former steel helmet functionaries who stood against Hitler during the Nazi era and in some cases joined the resistance against National Socialism , Ekkehard Klausa again followed Duesterberg's self-portrayal more closely, which he considers to be reliable in the details and, for example, assumes that Duesterberg is had already opposed Hitler's chancellorship at the beginning of 1933 (p. 225) and accepted Jewish front soldiers in steel helmets (p. 219). He makes it clear that the participants in the national-conservative resistance, which culminated in the assassination attempt on July 20, 1944 , were often shaped biographically by the uncompromising struggle of the Stahlhelm against the Weimar Republic and came from the militaristic, anti-democratic, anti-Marxist and anti-Semitic milieu that led to the rise of National Socialism during the Weimar period. Klausa also states that "at the beginning of Hitler's rule, ideologically hardly a sheet of paper fit between" Stahlhelm and NSDAP (p. 219) and Seldte was under pressure in the spring of 1933 and rejected an active rebellion of the Stahlhelm against its conformity as hopeless (p . 225). According to Klausa, Seldte offered temporary refuge in the Reich Labor Ministry to Werner Schrader, who later became a resistance fighter who was conspicuous as a Nazi opponent because of the Braunschweig action (p. 228).

The political role of Franz Seldte in his time as minister during the Nazi regime was long characterized as insignificant and his position as weak and without influence. In historical research on the Nazi state, Seldte was seen as a man with little expertise and minimal ambition. Only recently has the interest in the ministerial bureaucracy's joint responsibility for the execution of Nazi crimes increased, significantly promoted by the work of a six-person commission of historians to review the history of the Reich Ministry of Labor, which was set up in 2014 by Federal Labor Minister Ursula von der Leyen ( CDU ) and her successor Andrea Nahles ( SPD ) presented her results in June 2017 . Accordingly, the ministry headed by Seldte was an efficient agency that stabilized the Nazi regime, supplied it with workers and kept the war going at all costs until its last days.

Designations

During the Nazi era , numerous squares, streets and public facilities in Germany were named after Franz Seldte, including Franz-Seldte-Straße in his native Magdeburg. In Forst (Lausitz) the stadium at the water tower was named Franz-Seldte-Kampfbahn after the seizure of power .

Publications

  • "M.-G.-K." (Machine Gun Company). Volume 1 of the three-part war book series “The Father of All Things”, 1929
  • “Continuous fire.” Volume 2 of the war trilogy “The Father of All Things”, 1930
  • "In front of and behind the scenes." Volume 3 of the trilogy, 1931
  • "Der Stahlhelm", Memories and Pictures (2 volumes), 1932/1933
  • "Front Experience", 1933
  • “The Summer Battle.” Play, 1934
  • “Social Policy in the Third Reich. 1933–1938 ”, 1939

literature

Web links

Commons : Franz Seldte  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Seldte, Franz. In: Reichstag manual. VIII. Election period, 1933. Published by the Office of the Reichstag, Berlin 1933, p. 265 (digitized version) .
  2. ↑ Manfred Wille : Seldte, Franz. In: Magdeburger Biographisches Lexikon (online) .
  3. ↑ German casualty lists from the First World War: Edition 1079 of August 3, 1916 (Prussia 597), p. 13749 (Infantry Regiment No. 66, 1st Machine Gun Company: Ltn. R. Franz Seldte - Magdeburg - seriously wounded ) .
  4. ↑ a b c d Klaus A. Lankheit: Seldte, Franz. In: Hermann Weiß (Hrsg.): Biographisches Lexikon zum Third Reich. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1998, p. 426 f. (Complete quote from Vollmer, Immaginäre Schlachtfelder ( material volume , PDF; 877 kB), p. 413).
  5. ^ A b c Salvador Oberhaus: German propaganda in the Orient during the First World War (PDF; 500 kB). Dissertation, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf 2002, p. 29 f.
  6. ^ Walter Frey: Colonel W. Nicolei, Chief of the German Military Intelligence Service III B in the General Staff (1913-1918). In: Jürgen W. Schmidt (ed.): Secret services, military and politics in Germany (= secret service history. Vol. 2). Ludwigsfelder Verlagshaus, Ludwigsfelde 2008, ISBN 978-3-933022-55-4 , p. 156 ff.
  7. ↑ writing the Bufa chief Alexander Gray and the head of the military department of the Foreign Office OSL Hans von Haeften of 4 July 1917, the War Department, quoted from: Hans-Michael Bock , Michael Töteberg : The Ufa-book. Art and crises. Stars and Directors. The international history of Germany's largest film company. Verlag Zweausendeins, Frankfurt am Main 1992, p. 34.
  8. ^ A b Hans-Joachim Bieber: Bourgeoisie in the Revolution. Citizens' councils and citizen strikes in Germany 1918–1920 (= Hamburg Contributions to Social and Contemporary History , Volume 28). Christians, Hamburg 1992, ISBN 3-7672-1148-3 , p. 174.
  9. ↑ a b c d Manfred Wille: Magdeburg's departure into modernity. Magdeburg local politics from the end of the First World War to the beginning of the Nazi dictatorship (= Publications of the City Planning Office , Volume 39 / II). State capital Magdeburg, Magdeburg 1995, p. 15.
  10. ↑ a b c d e f g inventory BArch R 72 (“Stahlhelm, Bund der Frontsoldaten e.V. 1918–1939”), bibliographical information (created 2007–2011), accessed via the EHRI portal.
  11. ↑ a b c Detlef Belau: The steel helmet - Bund der Frontsoldaten. In: ders .: Naumburg an der Saale 1918 to 1945. Notes on the city's history. Online publication, as of June 6, 2010, accessed on August 8, 2020.
  12. ↑ Andreas Wirsching : From World War to Civil War? Political extremism in Germany and France 1918–1933 / 39. Berlin and Paris in comparison. Oldenbourg Verlag, Munich 1999, p. 311.
  13. ↑ a b c Steffen Raßloff : Flight into the national national community. The Erfurt bourgeoisie between the Empire and the Nazi dictatorship (= publications of the Historical Commission for Thuringia, Small Series , Volume 8). Böhlau, Köln / Weimar 2003, ISBN 3-412-11802-8 , p. 253.
  14. ↑ a b c d Testimony from Theodor Gruß (Federal Treasurer of the Stahlhelm from 1919 until its dissolution in 1935) as a witness in the Nuremberg trial of the main war criminals on August 13, 1946.
  15. ↑ a b c d Burkhard Asmuss ( DHM ): The "Stahlhelm, Bund der Frontsoldaten" . In: Living Museum Online , as of September 14, 2014.
  16. ↑ a b c d Marcus Weidner : Seldte, Franz. In: ders .: The street naming practice in Westphalia and Lippe during National Socialism. Database of street names 1933–1945. Münster 2013 ff. Internet portal "Westphalian History" of the LWL, as of April 11, 2019.
  17. ↑ a b c Honor and Defense. In: Der Spiegel 42/1967 (October 9, 1967), pp. 80–84 (discussion on Volker R. Berghahn: Der Stahlhelm - Bund der Frontsoldaten , Düsseldorf 1966). Note: Berghahn deals with the “Aryan Paragraph” passed in 1924, which forced Jewish Stahlhelm members to leave, on p. 65 f. Individual local groups of the Stahlhelm still accepted Jewish members in 1926, as a report in the organ of the RjF shows from that year ( Der Schild No. 21, May 22, 1926).
  18. ↑ Historical commission at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences : Seldte, Franz. Profile of the online edition of the files of the Reich Chancellery. Weimar Republic , accessed on August 8, 2020.
  19. ^ Thomas Garde: The industrial history of Sudenburg. Company sheet : Seldte & Co. Esssenzfabrik. Processing status: February 21, 2020, accessed in August 2020.
  20. ↑ Thomas F. Schneider, Hans Wagener (Ed.): From Richthofen to Remarque - German-language prose for World War I. Amsterdam / New York NY 2003, ISBN 90-420-0955-1 , Amsterdam contributions to recent German studies, vol. 63, p. 273.
  21. ^ Jörg Friedrich Vollmer: Imaginary battlefields. War literature in the Weimar Republic. A sociological study of literature. Dissertation, FU Berlin 2003, p. 80 for note 291.
  22. ^ Jörg Friedrich Vollmer: Imaginary battlefields. War literature in the Weimar Republic. A sociological study of literature. Dissertation, FU Berlin 2003, pp. 39–42, 70.
  23. ↑ Manfred Zander: When the Republic is in danger. In: Volksstimme , April 22, 2019, accessed on August 8, 2020.
  24. ^ Maximilian Terhalle : Otto Schmidt (1888–1971). Opponent of Hitler and Intimus Hugenberg. Dissertation, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn 2006, p. 159 u. Note 767.
  25. ^ Rafael Binkowski: The development of the parties in Herrenberg 1918–1933. Dissertation, Historical Institute of the University of Stuttgart, 2007, p. 439.
  26. ^ Rafael Binkowski: The development of the parties in Herrenberg 1918–1933. Dissertation, Historical Institute of the University of Stuttgart , 2007, p. 350.
  27. ^ Maximilian Terhalle: Otto Schmidt (1888–1971). Opponent of Hitler and Intimus Hugenberg. Dissertation, Bonn 2006, p. 172 m. Note 831.
  28. ↑ Maurizio Bach , Stefan Breuer : Fascism as a movement and regime. Italy and Germany in comparison. Springer, Wiesbaden 2010, ISBN 978-3-531-17369-6 , pp. 168-182.
  29. ↑ Maurizio Bach, Stefan Breuer: Fascism as a movement and regime. Italy and Germany in comparison. Springer, Wiesbaden 2010, p. 177 f. Like Stefan Breuer, Ina Schmidt (ed.): Ernst Jünger - Friedrich Hielscher. Letters, 1927–1985. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 2005, ISBN 3-608-93617-3 , p. 327, p. 523 and Note 36 (editor's comment).
  30. ↑ Michael Epkenhans , Gerhard P. Gross , Markus Pöhlmann , Christian Stachelbeck (eds.): Secret Service and Propaganda in the First World War. The records of Colonel Walter Nicolai 1914 to 1918. De Gruyter, Berlin / Boston 2019, ISBN 978-3-11-060501-3 , p. ?? (Introduction by the editor, subchapter "Political Reorientation", last paragraph)
  31. ↑ Michael Epkenhans et al. (Ed.): Secret service and propaganda in the First World War. The notes of Colonel Walter Nicolai 1914 to 1918. Berlin 2019, p. ??, note 226.
  32. ^ Björn Hofmeister: Between Monarchy and Dictatorship. Radical Nationalism and Social Mobilization of the Pan-German League, 1914-1939. Dissertation, Georgetown University , Washington 2012, p. 378.
  33. ↑ a b c d Daily report April 27, 1933: Seldte joined the NSADP. In: Press Chronicle 1933. German Press Museum in the Ullsteinhaus , accessed in August 2020.
  34. ↑ Manfred Wille: Magdeburg's departure into modernity. Magdeburg local politics from the end of the First World War to the beginning of the Nazi dictatorship (= Publications of the City Planning Office , Volume 39 / II). State capital Magdeburg, Magdeburg 1995, p. 101.
  35. ↑ Historical commission at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences (ed.): The von Papen cabinet, Volume 2, documents: No. 221: The Stahlhelmführer Seldte and Duesterberg to the Reich President. November 18, 1932. Online edition of the Reich Chancellery files. Weimar Republic (accessed September 25, 2016).
  36. ↑ Maurizio Bach, Stefan Breuer: Fascism as a movement and regime. Italy and Germany in comparison. Springer, Wiesbaden 2010, p. 181 u. Note 88.
  37. ^ Heinrich Brüning : Memoirs 1918–1934. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1970, p. 467.
  38. ↑ Ekkehard Klausa : You came from the "steel helmet". Early comrades in arms of Hitler who joined the resistance early on. In: BIOS , Vol. 28 (2015), Issue 1/2 (January 12, 2017), pp. 218–230, here: p. 219.
  39. ^ Maximilian Terhalle: Otto Schmidt (1888–1971). Opponents of Hitler and Intimus Hugenberg (PDF; 3.4 MB). Dissertation, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn 2006, pp. 356–359.
  40. ↑ Ekkehard Klausa: You came from the "steel helmet". In: BIOS 28 (2015), issue 1/2, p. 224 f.
  41. ^ Hermann Ziegler: Contemporary witness report from Nienburg / Weser on the platform We knew nothing about it from Heiko Mönch ( NLpB ), accessed on August 9, 2020.
  42. ↑ a b c d e f Markus Dettmer: The horror of efficiency. In: Der Spiegel , June 26, 2017, accessed on August 11, 2020.
  43. ^ Jörg Friedrich Vollmer: Imaginary battlefields. War literature in the Weimar Republic. A sociological study of literature. Dissertation, FU Berlin 2003, p. 71.
  44. ↑ Volker R. Berghahn: The end of the "steel helmet". In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte , 13th year (1965), issue 4, pp. 446–451 (PDF; 458 kB).
  45. ↑ Ekkehard Klausa: You came from the "steel helmet". Early comrades in arms of Hitler who joined the resistance early on. In: BIOS , Vol. 28 (2015), Issue 1/2 (January 12, 2017), p. 224 (with reference to Volker Berghahn, Der Stahlhelm , Düsseldorf 1966, p. 286).
  46. ^ Durst, Karl Friedrich in the German biography ; Curriculum vitae on the website of the Independent Commission of Historians on the History of the Reich Labor Ministry, 1933–1945 (accessed in August 2020).
  47. ↑ for special use according to the statement of Max Jüttner (OSAF) ​​as a witness in the Nuremberg trial of the main war criminals on August 13, 1946.
  48. ↑ Fürth City Archives. Death register entry at the Fürth registry office on April 4, 1947, No. 420/1947
  49. ↑ Volker R. Berghahn: The end of the "steel helmet". In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte , 13th year (1965), issue 4, p. 446 f.).
  50. ↑ Ekkehard Klausa: You came from the "steel helmet". Early comrades in arms of Hitler who joined the resistance early on. In: BIOS , vol. 28 (2015), issue 1/2 (January 12, 2017), pp. 218-230.
personal data
SURNAME Seldte, Franz
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Seldte, Tobias Wilhelm Franz (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician (DVP, NSDAP), leader of the Stahlhelm, MdR, Minister of Labor
DATE OF BIRTH June 29, 1882
PLACE OF BIRTH Magdeburg
DATE OF DEATH April 1, 1947
Place of death Fuerth