Gau Mainfranken

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Gaue of the German Reich 1944

The Gau Mainfranken was an administrative unit of the NSDAP . Until 1935 it was called Gau Unterfranken .

History and structure

On June 27, 1927 the "Gau Unterfranken" was founded. Gauleiter was officially since 1928 the dentist Otto Hellmuth , who had previously been the editor of Gau newspapers ("National Voice") and who tried to stand out from the Nuremberg Gauleiter Julius Streicher . In 1933 he entered the National Socialist Reichstag as a member of parliament . In 1933 Ritter von Epp was appointed Reich Governor in the Free State of Bavaria , to whom the six Bavarian districts were subordinate at the state level. In addition to Hellmuth's previous ranks and titles as Gauleiter, SA -Standartenführer and NSKK -Obergruppenführer, on July 1, 1934, that of the district president in the administrative districts of Lower Franconia and Aschaffenburg, or (after the administrative district was renamed on July 1, 1937) Mainfranken, was added . With a good 840,000 inhabitants, the Gau was one of the smallest, the Gau leadership was located in Würzburg in the former building of the Hotel Kronprinz in Theaterstrasse 24, renamed Adolf-Hitler-Strasse, which was acquired by the National Socialists in 1934 and converted into a Gauhaus by the architect and later city councilor Fritz Saalfrank . In addition, many other district offices were based in Würzburg. A Gau leader school , the Gau training castle " Florian Geyer ", existed in Gelchsheim Castle .

Hellmuth wanted to turn “his” Gau into a model district and give the population a kind of Main Franconian identity. He saw Main Franconia as "Bauerngau" and the Main Franconian "tribe" in the tradition of the farmers who fought for their freedom in 1525. In addition to Florian Geyer (around 1490–1525), the farmer's leader from 1525, poets such as Wolfram von Eschenbach (1170/75 - after 1220) and the artist Balthasar Neumann (1687–1753) were models. Hellmuth created a Main Franconian Art Prize (later renamed the Max Reger Prize ); the nickname “Mainfranken” appeared in many names from then on ( Mainfränkisches Museum , party newspaper 1934–1945 Mainfränkische Zeitung ). The 1939 Gau exhibition “Mainfranken as it strives and creates” was supposed to be a comprehensive exhibition.

Already three weeks before the first large boycott campaign against Jews on April 1, Hellmuth forced the temporary closure of Jewish shops, offices and practices in Würzburg on March 11, 1933. The district economic consultant Kurt Hasslinger planned to promote the " Aryanization " of Jewish companies, especially his successor from 1937/38 Dr. Hans Vogel intervened heavily in the forced sales, especially in the cattle trade in the Bad Kissingen / Hammelburg area . The November pogroms of 1938 destroy numerous synagogues and shops. In November 1941 the deportations of the Jewish population to the East began.

The Gauleiter was disappointed in 1939 when, due to the "Ordinance on the Appointment of Reich Defense Commissioners" of September 1, 1939, the new office of Reich Defense Commissioner was not transferred to him because the Gau did not correspond to any of the 18 military districts . It was only with the “Ordinance on the Reich Defense Commissioners and the Unification of Economic Administration” of November 16, 1942, that the party districts became Reich Defense Districts and thus each Gauleiter was made Reich Defense Commissioner. In addition, he was district housing commissioner from 1940. On April 6, 1942, he became the agent of the General Plenipotentiary for Labor Deployment, and on September 25, 1944, he became the leader of the Volkssturm in the Main Franconian district.

In the Dr. Hellmuth Plan a settlement of the high elevations of the Rhön and Spessart was planned with a specially selected group of people, which ultimately failed except for the plant of the Rhönhof in 1937. The Würzburg doctor and head of the Racial Political Office in the Gau Ludwig Schmidt took racial biology surveys of the population. From October 3 to 6, 1940, a total of 777 patients were transferred from the Werneck Castle Sanatorium by order of the Gauleiter . Half of this came to the Lohr am Main sanatorium and nursing home , the other half via various intermediate institutions to the killing centers for the "euthanasia" murder of the mentally ill and disabled in Sonnenstein Castle near Pirna and Hartheim Castle near Linz , where they were gassed .

Hellmuth fled with his family and the Gauleitung on April 2, 1945, first to Untermerzbach near Ebern and then via Haßfurt on April 9, 1945 to Eggolsheim near Forchheim in Franconian Switzerland. On April 14, 1945, the NSDAP officially dissolved in Mainfranken.

Gauleiter was

Were deputies

literature

  • The emasculation in Mainfranken in the years 1934–1936 , 1937
  • Astrid Freyeisen: stubborn to the last - Gauleiter Dr. Otto Hellmuth and the end of National Socialism in Lower Franconia . In: Mainfränkisches Jahrbuch für Geschichte und Kunst. Vol. 57, 2005, ISSN 0076-2725, pp. 280-328.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ wuerzburgwiki with details of the ten-year celebration in 1937
  2. ↑ Address Book
  3. ↑ image of the Gauhaus
  4. ^ Peter Weidisch: Würzburg in the Third Reich . In: History of the City of Würzburg. Volume III. Edited by Ulrich Wagner, Theiss, Stuttgart 2007, pp. 196–289.
  5. ↑ Axel Decroll: The Treasury as Persecutor: The Tax Discrimination of Jews in Bavaria 1933–1941 / 42 (Studies on Contemporary History, Volume 78), Oldenbourg, Munich 2009, p. 56 u. 85ff ISBN 978-3-486-58865-1