Friedrich Rehse

Friedrich Josef Maria Rehse (born March 23, 1870 in Münster , † January 14, 1952 in Munich ) was a German photographer and art publisher. He was best known as the original investor of the so-called Rehse Collection , a central source of information on the history of the NSDAP .

Live and act

Rehse began at the beginning of the First World War - as he said "inspired by the shots in Sarajevo " - to create a collection of contemporary documents, which he initially called the "Archive of Contemporary History and Journalism Munich". It later became known generally as the Rehse Collection . The collection comprised posters, flags, newspaper clippings, brochures and other kinds of objects. In the first few years of its existence, materials on contemporary history, in particular on the history of political parties, were collected. At the beginning of the 1920s, Rehse began to collect materials on the history of the NSDAP, which was becoming increasingly noticeable in Munich at the time, whose history soon made up a core part of the collection.

Rehse had been in personal contact with Adolf Hitler since 1921 , on whose behalf the NSDAP acquired the collection in 1929 for 80,000 RM . The collection, which Rehse was now in charge of as an employee of the NSDAP, was henceforth subordinate to the Reich Treasurer of the NSDAP with changing names (1929: Archive and Museum for Contemporary History, 1932: Collection FJM Rehse for Contemporary History and Journalism, 1938: FJ Rehse Archive and Museum for Contemporary History) . From 1938 the collection was housed in the Munich Residence.

The collection, which has been described as a “mixture of contemporary history archive and cabinet of curiosities”, was expanded into the war years and some of it was made accessible to the public as part of museum exhibitions.

At the end of World War II , the Rehse Collection fell into the hands of the Americans, who confiscated it and brought it to the United States . Much of the collection was later turned over to the Federal Archives , but some remained in the Library of Congress in the United States. Another part of the collection is in the documentation archive of the Austrian resistance in Vienna.

literature

• Wolfgang Benz , Hermann Graml , Hermann Weiß (eds.): Encyclopedia of National Socialism , Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1997 ISBN 3-608-91805-1 .
• Edi Steiner: Friedrich Josef Maria Rehse. A picture of life in the service of contemporary history. For Rehse's 70th birthday on March 23, 1940 , 1940. (Brochure)

Web links

• Literature by and about Friedrich Rehse in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ During the war, for example, the collection received material confiscated from the occupied western territories by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg . Compare Jan Björn Potthast: The Jewish Central Museum of the SS in Prague , p. 181.