Gerhard Klopfer

Gerhard Klopfer on being appointed State Secretary in the uniform of a head of command of the NSDAP in 1942.

Klopfer as representative of the party chancellery in the minutes of the Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942

Gerhard Klopfer (born February 18, 1905 in Schreibersdorf , Lauban district , Province of Silesia , Prussia ; † January 29, 1987 in Ulm ) was a German lawyer. During the time of National Socialism he was ministerial director in the party chancellery of the NSDAP , state secretary in the Reich chancellery and SS group leader .

Klopfer was a participant in the Wannsee Conference in 1942. He was one of the most influential and well-informed party bureaucrats of the Nazi regime. As head of constitutional department III in the party chancellery of the NSDAP and Martin Bormann's deputy , he was responsible for “race and ethnicity issues”, economic policy, cooperation with the RSHA and fundamental issues of occupation policy.

Life

Klopfer was born in Schreibersdorf near Lauban as the son of a farmer. In 1923 he obtained his Abitur, after which he studied law and economics in Jena , Breslau and Berlin . He joined the Deutsches Hochschulring and made the acquaintance of Wilhelm Stuckart and Werner Best at an early age . Klopfer was awarded a PhD in 1927 in Jena with a labor law topic. jur. PhD . He entered the civil service as a trainee lawyer and worked briefly as a lawyer and district judge in Düsseldorf. From 1931 he was an assessor.

In April 1933 he joined the NSDAP ( membership number 1,706,842) and the SA . At the end of 1933 he was appointed advisor in the Prussian Ministry of Agriculture and in August 1934 a member of the government. From December 1934 he was responsible for personnel matters in the Secret State Police Office. From April 1935 he was seconded to the staff of the deputy leader of Rudolf Hess , where he rose from the senior government council to state secretary within just six years. Initially, he headed Department III A (work area of ​​the Reich Ministry of the Interior) until 1941 and was deputy to Walther Sommer , to whom Department III (state affairs) was subordinate; Klopfer followed in this position in the summer of 1941. At times he was Martin Bormann's personal advisor. In 1935 he joined the SS (SS No. 272.227) and held the post of head of the main office there. He was also a member of the National Socialist Academy for German Law , where he was a member of the Police Law Committee. In 1942 Klopfer was SS-Oberführer , until 1944 he rose to SS-Gruppenführer . On November 21, 1942, Hitler appointed him (together with Friedrich Wilhelm Kritzinger ) as State Secretary in the Reich Chancellery, where he was to secure Bormann's position of power as an envoy.

Participation in the preparation of the "final solution"

The party chancellery intervened in various legislative procedures in order to assert the interests of the party against the state administrative bureaucracy. In the persecution of the Jews, she always took a radical direction. Klopfer was personally involved in the drafting of implementing ordinances for the Nuremberg Laws , in particular the Reich Citizenship Law . In 1938, as a ministerial advisor, he was involved in the expropriation of Jewish companies (" Aryanization "). On the question of the “ Jewish half-breeds ”, the party chancellery reached an agreement with the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) in 1941, aiming to include as many “half-breeds” as possible in the deportations . On January 20, 1942, Klopfer was a participant in the Wannsee Conference, at which the so-called final solution to the Jewish question was discussed. In November 1942, as State Secretary, he took part in the further restriction of the rights of Jews living in " mixed marriages ".

End of war and post-war period

Shortly before the end of the war, Klopfer left Munich and went to the Führer's restricted area in Obersalzberg to join the Kesselring staff . He later went into hiding with his family in Zell am See , where they had moved from the Sonnenwinkel settlement in spring 1945 . On March 1, 1946, he was arrested and interned in Munich by the CIC with false papers in the name of Otto Kunz . Klopfer was interrogated several times by Robert Kempner and questioned as a witness in the Wilhelmstrasse trial . Klopfer claimed that he could not remember the exact content of the meeting at the Wannsee Conference. He always assumed that the Jews should only be "resettled". In 1935 he was posted to the party office against his will.

After his release from the detention knocker was in March 1949 by a Nuremberg main Spruchkammer as "less stressed" denazified . He received a fine and a three-year probationary period during which he was banned from any responsible professional activity. From 1952 he worked as an assistant in tax matters and from 1956 as a lawyer in Ulm.

A preliminary investigation initiated by Kempner and Franz Neumann because of Klopfer's participation in the Wannsee Conference by the Ulm Public Prosecutor was discontinued in 1962. In addition to his work as a lawyer, he worked on a farm belonging to him in the Schwäbisch Hall district with the cultivation and storage of spelled for what he believed to be the coming "fight against Bolshevism". He lived unobtrusively in Ulm until his death. After he died in 1987 as the last participant in the Wannsee Conference, his obituary with the text "after a fulfilled life for the benefit of all who were in his sphere of influence" aroused public outrage.

literature

• Markus Heckmann, Nazi perpetrator and citizen of the Federal Republic. The example of Dr. Gerhard Klopfer, ed. for the Documentation Center Oberer Kuhberg Ulm eV by Silvester Lechner and Nicola Wenge, Verlag Klemm & Oelschläger, Ulm 2010, ISBN 978-3-932577-72-7 . Review Vorwärts.de by Anton Maegerle .
• Markus Heckmann: Dr. Gerhard Klopfer - an 'honest and noble lawyer of the old school?' In: Gedenkstättenrundbrief (ed. Topographie des Terrors Foundation) No. 138 (August 2007), pp. 28–32.
• Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945 . Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Second updated edition, Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 978-3-596-16048-8 , p. 317.
• Gernot Römer, There are always two possibilities ... Fighters, fellow travelers and opponents of Hitler using the example of Swabia , Augsburg 2000. ISBN 3-89639-217-4 . In it: essay on Gerhard Klopfer (Ulm) "Then you slept at the meeting ..."
• Frank Raberg : Biographical Lexicon for Ulm and Neu-Ulm 1802-2009 . Süddeutsche Verlagsgesellschaft im Jan Thorbecke Verlag, Ostfildern 2010, ISBN 978-3-7995-8040-3 , p. 204 .
• Bodo Hechelhammer / Susanne Meinl : Secret object Pullach. From the NS model settlement to the BND headquarters , Ch. Links, Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-386153-792-2 .
• Peter Longerich (editor): files of the party chancellery of the NSDAP. Reconstruction of a lost inventory, Regesten, Volume 3, KG Saur, Munich 1992, ISBN 3-598-30276-2 .

Web links

Commons : Gerhard Klopfer  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Gerhard Klopfer in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c} Ernst Klee: Das Personenlexikon zum Third Reich , Fischer Taschenbuch 2005, p. 317.
2. ^ Peter Longerich (editor): files of the party chancellery of the NSDAP. Reconstruction of a lost inventory , Regesten, Volume 3, Munich 1992, p. 22
3. ^ Peter Longerich (editor): files of the party chancellery of the NSDAP. Reconstruction of a lost inventory , Regesten, Volume 3, Munich 1992, pp. 266, 22
4. ↑ Markus Heckmann: Dr. Gerhard Klopfer - an 'honest and noble lawyer of the old school?' In: Gedenkstättenrundbrief (ed. Topographie des Terrors Foundation) No. 138 (August 2007), p. 29.
5. ↑ ^{a b c} Bodo Hechelhammer / Susanne Meinl: Secret object Pullach. From the NS model estate to the BND headquarters , Berlin 2014, p. 124f.
6. ↑ Südwest-Presse (Ulm), February 2, 1987. p. 22. See also Galinski outraged by the advertisement (taz, February 5, 1987) and "A benefactor?" The time of February 12, 1987.