Fridolin Glass

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Fridolin Glass , also Glaß (born December 14, 1910 in Lemberg ; † February 21, 1943 in Dniprodzerzhynsk , Soviet Union ) was an Austrian SS leader and military leader of the 1934 July coup .

Life

Fridolin Glass was the son of a sergeant in the k. u. k. Army . After attending elementary school in Moravia , he passed the Matura at a grammar school in Vienna in 1929 . He then embarked on the career of a professional soldier in the Austrian armed forces . In January 1931 he became a member of the NSDAP ( membership number 440.452). In 1930 he founded a cell of Nazi-oriented soldiers in Vienna and in September 1932 became head of the newly founded (Nazi) German Soldiers' Union . He was dismissed from the army in June 1933 because of National Socialist activities. He gave up a law degree that he had begun . From Nazi members who had also left the armed forces , he set up the so-called military standard , which was politically subordinate to the Austrian SA leadership, but actually acted relatively independently. In changing personal constellations, Glass prepared plans for a coup against the Austrian federal government . In doing so, he succeeded again and again in booting his allies by appropriating and developing their putsch plans.

On March 28, 1934, without the knowledge of Hermann Reschnys , the Austrian SA leader who had fled to Munich, he transferred the military standard under the designation SS-Standarte 89 to the General SS and headed it from April 1934 (SS No. 155.767). With this step he had not only wrested a powerful force from the SA for their own putsch plans, but also bypassed SS Brigadefuhrer Alfred Rodenbücher , who was in charge of the Austrian SS section from Munich. Reschny unceremoniously accused Glass of mutiny and had him arrested on the occasion of a stay in Munich. Glass was released a day later through an intervention by Theo Habicht , the National Socialist leader in Austria. Now Glass looked for new allies again and found them in the former leading functionaries of the Styrian Homeland Security Hanns Albin Rauter , Konstantin Kammerhofer and August Meyszner , with whom he concluded a secret alliance in the spring of 1934. The plans for a coup in Austria began to take on more and more concrete shape. While Otto Wächter was to take over the political leadership, Glass was given the military leadership of this company.

In the course of the July coup, Glass acted as the technical and organizational manager for the occupation of the Federal Chancellery on Ballhausplatz, which was carried out by around 150 members of SS Standard 89. Glass did not attend it personally, however. He is said to have been pulled down from the trucks loaded with the coup soldiers by criminal police at the last moment. However, he was initially able to evade arrest and advance to the Federal Chancellery, where he was arrested. But Glass was shortly thereafter Bernhardsthal into Czechoslovakia and from there into the German Reich escape. The political refugee from Austria Glass was given the false name Karl Merkmann for camouflage reasons and worked full-time for the SS.

After the “Anschluss” of Austria in March 1938, he became a councilor in Vienna under his real name and became a Gau propaganda speaker and district leader for the party. He was in Vienna in Aryanization involved because it owns the profitable company United Chemical factories Kreidl, Heller & Co was. The circumstances under which Glass had acquired the company were like a criminal case. Shortly after the Nazi seizure of power in Austria, Glass and some armed SS men broke into the factory, where they had forced the handover of the cash, securities, business books and other valuables at their pistols. The main shareholder of the company, Dr. Ignaz Kreidl, who owned 75 percent of the company's shares, had Glass arrested at the end of April 1938 and taken into police custody. The co-owner, Karl Rutter, was declared a Jew without further ado and thus eliminated. Glass paid for the enormous costs of the Aryanized operation of 2,170,000 Reichsmarks at the time, in part with the company's previously stolen assets. The remainder was deposited by the Viennese film producer Heinrich Haas , who acted as sponsor and silent partner of Glass.

Since these advantages damaged the public reputation of the NSDAP and SS, Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler Glass was drafted into the Air Force after the beginning of the Second World War . During the attack on Poland he was a platoon leader of Propaganda Company 4 on September 11, 1939 in Mszczonów, Poland, involved in a war crime against three to four Polish civilians. Glass was u. a. Arrested by the Wehrmacht for the shooting of the local mayor and brought before a court martial , the disciplinary proceedings were later abandoned and Glass was praised for his behavior on the part of the SS. On December 20, 1939, he was informed in writing that his seat on the city council had been revoked retroactively from October 31, 1939 because of his permanent residence outside Vienna. Glass stated in his written answer that he would accept the withdrawal of the city council post due to the broken relationship with Gauleiter Josef Bürckel , but that he still resided in Vienna.

In 1940 Glass was on a secret mission, presumably on behalf of the security service of the Reichsführer SS (SD) in Bulgaria. Details about the purpose of this stay can apparently no longer be determined today. From June 1942 he was a member of the Waffen SS and was used as a war correspondent in the German-Soviet war . With the rank of Untersturmführer of the Waffen SS, he died on February 21, 1943 during fighting in Dniprodzerzhynsk when a Soviet anti-aircraft missile penetrated his tank. On the occasion of his death, a pompous commemoration was held in Vienna in early March 1943 . He was posthumously appointed SS-Oberführer at the end of March 1943 .

literature

  • Wolfgang Graf: Austrian SS generals. Himmler's reliable vassals. Hermagoras-Verlag, Klagenfurt et al. 2012, ISBN 978-3-7086-0578-4 .
  • Andrea Hurton and Hans Schafranek : Viennese SS members in the "Aryanization" intoxication. Nazi cliques, cliques and interest groups compete for “Jewish” wealth. In: Research on National Socialism and its aftermath in Austria. Festschrift for Brigitte Bailer. Edited by the Documentation Archive of Austrian Resistance. Vienna 2012, ISBN 978-3-901142-61-1 , pp. 43–66.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Wolfgang Graf: Austrian SS Generals. Himmler's reliable vassals , Klagenfurt / Ljubljana / Vienna 2012, p. 70.
  2. ↑ a b c d e Cf. also the curriculum vitae of Glass with Andrea Hurton and Hans Schafranek: Viennese SS members in “Arization” intoxication , pp. 61–63.
  3. ^ Wolfgang Graf: Austrian SS Generals. Himmler's reliable vassals , Klagenfurt / Ljubljana / Vienna 2012, p. 71ff.
  4. ^ Wolfgang Graf: Austrian SS Generals. Himmler's reliable vassals , Klagenfurt / Ljubljana / Vienna 2012, p. 76.
  5. ^ A b Wolfgang Graf: Austrian SS Generals. Himmler's reliable vassals , Klagenfurt / Ljubljana / Vienna 2012, p. 188
  6. ^ A b c Maren Seliger: Sham parliamentarism in the Führer state. "Community representation" in Austrofascism and National Socialism. Functions and political profiles Vienna councilors and councilors 1934–1945 in comparison. Lit, Vienna / Münster 2010, ISBN 978-3-643-50233-9 , pp. 442f.
  7. ↑ Andrea Hurton and Hans Schafranek: Viennese SS members in "Aryanization" intoxication , p. 49.
  8. ^ Wolfgang Graf: Austrian SS Generals. Himmler's reliable vassals , Klagenfurt / Ljubljana / Vienna 2012, pp. 188ff. and Andrea Hurton and Hans Schafranek: Viennese SS members in "Aryanization" intoxication , p. 63.
personal data
SURNAME Glass, Fridolin
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Glaß, Fridolin (alternative name); Karl Merkmann (cover name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian SS leader
DATE OF BIRTH December 14, 1910
PLACE OF BIRTH Lviv
DATE OF DEATH February 21, 1943
Place of death Dniprodzerzhynsk , Soviet Union