Gustav Schlotterer

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Gustav Schlotterer (born March 1, 1906 in Biberach an der Riss ; † May 16, 1989 in Düsseldorf ) was a German business editor with a doctorate, SS-Oberführer and one of the leading employees in the Reich Ministry of Economics and in the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories during the Second World War . From 1933 to 1935 he was NSDAP regional economic advisor for Hamburg . After the war of aggression against Russia in 1941, Schlotterer was a leader in the exploitation and expropriation of the economy in the countries occupied by the military and civil administrations. During the time of National Socialism he was regarded as an economic “reorganization specialist” within the framework of European Ostpolitik . Little is known about his activities in the post-war period .

Weimar Republic

Schlotterer, who had completed an apprenticeship at the Biberach commercial bank until 1924 after attending elementary and secondary school, was a founding member of the NSDAP local group Biberach / Riss . After the substitute high school diploma at the commercial college in Mannheim, he rejoined the NSDAP (membership number 74.207), which had been banned in the meantime . Schlotterer received his doctorate in economics from the University of Tübingen in 1930 ; his dissertation was on the Marxist law of accumulation . From 1931 he worked as a business editor for the NS newspaper Hamburger Tageblatt . He also worked as a regional economic advisor to the NSDAP.

National Socialism 1933–1939

After the " seizure of power " in January 1933, Schlotterer was appointed government director in Hamburg at the age of 27 and shortly afterwards he was appointed president of the Hamburg " economic authority ", which he headed until 1935. At the same time he was a full-time regional economic advisor to the Hamburg regional leadership of the NSDAP under Karl Kaufmann .

In Hamburg, a city in which most of the Jews were active in trade and commerce, the tax authorities viewed many Jews as potential capital smugglers from 1933 onwards. This was due to Schlotterer, who had instructed all foreign exchange offices to treat Jews willing to emigrate as suspected of capital flight . Section 37 a of the Foreign Exchange Management Act allowed foreign exchange offices to issue security orders over Jewish assets and to appoint trustees if capital flight is suspected. The Hamburg foreign exchange offices had made good use of it and issued 1,314 such security orders even after Schlotterer's departure. This included almost all areas of assets from real estate to companies to private bank balances. After 1945, the authority sent officials, some of whom had previously dealt with the " Aryanization " in the Third Reich, to the courts as experts in matters of reimbursement . This often led to unjust decisions on restitution matters for Jewish persons robbed in Hamburg during the Third Reich.

Schlotterer left Hamburg in 1935 and climbed the career ladder to the Ministerialrat in the Reich Ministry of Economics (RWM) in Berlin . His successor as Hamburg Gau economic consultant was Carlo Otte , who after a short time was first de facto disempowered by Otto Wolff and then replaced.

Schlotterer joined the SS in November 1937 (SS no. 289.213), his first rank was Oberscharführer. As a result he was continuously promoted, he reached his highest rank (SS-Oberführer) in 1944; at this time assigned to the staff of the SS upper section "Spree" in Berlin.

In his new role in the Reich Ministry of Economics, as before in Hamburg, at the turn of the year 1936/37, Schlotterer instructed all foreign exchange offices in the Reich to consider Jews wishing to emigrate as "suspected of capital flight" in accordance with Section 37a of the Foreign Exchange Management Act. This allowed the security order and the appointment of trustees over Jewish property as a further step towards expropriation.

Second World War

At the instigation of IG Farben , which was concerned about its holdings and patents in the USA, Schlotterer sent a "top secret" instruction to the head of the foreign currency department in the ministry on September 9, 1939, shortly after the attack on Poland Foreign countries would have to be protected at all costs. That meant disguising German holdings and affected, for example, IG Farben and its association with Standard Oil .

Schlotterer worked from 1940 in the position of a ministerial director as head of the Eastern Department in the Reich Ministry of Economics. In 1941/42, his RWM department was subordinate to the “General Department Treuhandverwaltung”, headed by Hermann Reinbothe , in which the state assets of the Soviet Union and the individual Soviet republics that had fallen under the German occupation were administered as “economic special assets”. This administrative embedding reflected the development in the “ Economic Management Staff East ” (WiFüStabOst), from which the so-called Green Map was drawn up. As the head of the “Preparation and Order” department, newly created in the Reich Ministry of Economics in the fall of 1940, Schlotterer conveyed a vision of the future of a (large) European economic area to representatives of the German economy, which should be placed under German leadership.

At a press conference of the ministry on July 24, 1940, Schlotterer explained the goals set by Walther Funk of an " economic reorganization of Europe ", about which Funk gave a speech the next day:

“As much as possible of vital products must be produced in Germany and in the economic region of Europe, which is dominated by Germany. ... Our goal is to provide commercial transport to direct and to trade more and more in Germany. All goods must go through the German market. This gives us precise control. In addition, the economies of our trading partners must be intertwined with German interests on a private basis in such a way that these states, even if they want to, can no longer escape these ties and dependencies. (…) In detail we have to go into the following ventures: In the southeast with grain, in Norway and Yugoslavia with metals, in Romania with oil (…). "

His plan was that, in addition to the interlinking of capital, the foreign economies should be included in the German market regulations and self-administration based on the German model should be sought, whereby " a healthy mix between German interests and the various national and regional interests " should be taken into account. The book authors Ludolf Herbst and Thomas Weihe commented: “ Already in these considerations a dichotomy is clearly noticeable. When Schlotterer warned against creating the impression that 'one wanted to rape the economy of the occupied territories' and pleaded for compliance with 'necessary psychological requirements' in future negotiations, he explicitly referred only to the Netherlands and Belgium ”.

Indeed, in 1940 Schlotterer organized the Schlotterer Committee, named after him, in which 24 top representatives of export-oriented large-scale German industry exchanged ideas with industrialists and bank representatives from the Benelux countries. They agreed that intra-European trade should be freed from tariff and currency differences and that the Ruhr area should be merged with northern France and the Benelux countries to form a “natural economic area”. The basis for this was to be a privately organized production cartel under state supervision, which Schlotterer referred to as an "economic pan-Europe".

The historian Götz Aly characterized Schlotterer's leading role in the Reich Ministry of Economics in Department III in such a way that his officials exploited Europe with " hardly imaginable rigorism " .

From 1941 he worked both in the program of the four-year plan and in the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories (RMfdbO). In addition, he was a member of the executive committee of the Südosteuropagesellschaft , a member of the supervisory board of the " Zentralhandelsgesellschaft Ost für agricultural sales and requirements mbH" (ZO) and a member of the board of directors of Ostlandfaser GmbH (subsidiary of Ost-Faser-Gesellschaft mbH ). In the four-year plan he was head of the main group commercial economy in the "Economic Staff East" until 1944; in the RMfdbO he was head of the chief economics group; and at the same time acted as a liaison to the four-year plan authority. In these positions, Schlotterer shared responsibility for the planned implementation of an economic “ reorganization of Europe ” as well as for the coordination between the goals pursued with it and the “war necessities”. In doing so, he relied on internal economic methods, on the cooperation between the economic people, ... groups, companies and economic organizations.

His chief group Economic Cooperation (III.Wi) in the RMfdbO was divided at the end of 1941 into the business areas "Commercial Economy", "Forestry and Wood Management", "Labor Policy and Social Administration", "Pricing and Price Monitoring" and "Transport", which were designated as a special group the transport department remained subordinate to the Reich Ministry of Transport both technically and budgetarily .

In 1944, Schlotterer and Otto Ohlendorf published the magazine Deutsche Außenwirtschaft . Among other things, it reported on the deportation of Hungarian Jews under the heading of trade disrupted after the restructuring of the Hungarian economy . Also in 1944, the Nazi publicist Albert Oeckl reported to him in his function as IG Farben -mann from the Vaivara concentration camp on the status of Nazi oil extraction in the Baltic States (" Baltöl ").

post war period

After the end of the war, Schlotterer was questioned in Case 11 of the Nuremberg Trials , the so-called Wilhelmstrasse Trial . In the post-war period he worked as a manager in the steel industry in Düsseldorf.

His work The New Principles of German Trade Policy (1936), which appeared in the "Series of publications of the Office for Professional Education and Management" of the German Labor Front , was placed on the list of literature to be segregated in the Soviet occupation zone .

See also

Fonts

  • Eugen von Mickwitz (ed.): Foreign trade under compulsion. (With special consideration of the four-year plan) {and the annexation of Austria to the Reich}. Ed. based on material from the Hamburg World Economic Archive . Kuhr-Golz, Hamburg 1935 (short title); 2nd ext. Edition 1936; 4. completely redesigned. and extended edition 1938 (long title). With a contribution from GS
  • Gustav Schlotterer: English blockade, German foreign trade in: Paul Schmidt Hg., " Berlin - Rome - Tokyo . Monthly for the deepening of the cultural relations of the peoples of the world-political triangle". Volume 1, No. 7, November 15, 1939, Steiniger, Berlin 1939
  • ders .: The new principles of German trade policy. Edited by the German Labor Front , Office for Work Management and Vocational Education. Teaching material center of the Office for Work Management and Vocational Education of the DAF, Berlin [1936]
  • Ernst Schrewe: Fascism and National Socialism. Introduction G. Schlotterer. Hanseatic Publishing House, Hamburg 1934
  • G. Schlotterer & W. Ter Nedden: Development and rebuilding of the economy in the occupied eastern areas. In: "Eastern Conference of German Scientists March 24-27, Conference Documents Volume 1: Occupied Eastern Territories" in the Reich Labor Ministry, Berlin 1942 (in the archive of the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich)

literature

  • Andreas Zellhuber: "Our administration is heading for a catastrophe ...": the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories and the German occupation in the Soviet Union 1941 - 1945 . Munich: Birds, 2006 ISBN 3-89650-213-1 .
  • Christiane Uhlig, Petra Barthelmess, Mario König , Peter Pfaffenroth, Bettina Witness: camouflage, transfer, transit. Switzerland as a hub of covert German operations 1938–1952 , Zurich 2001 (CIE-9), pp. 58–59, 61, 78, 85 (p. Organized unwanted transfers, especially to the USA, via Switzerland; he is therefore also mentioned in Commission Indépendante d'Experts Suisse - Seconde Guerre Mondiale (CIE) 2001).
  • Mario König : Interhandel. The Swiss holding company IG Farben and its metamorphoses. A property and interests affair 1910–1999 . With a legal afterword by Frank Vischer . Zurich 2001 (publications by the UEK / Publications de la CIE, 2).
  • Frank Brunecker, Christian Rak: Dr. Gustav Schlotterer - Criminal or Resist? . In: Wolfgang Praske: perpetrators helpers free riders. Volume 4. Nazi victims from Upper Swabia . Kugelberg Verlag, Gerstetten 2015, ISBN 978-3-945893-005 , pp. 225-239.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ often also: "von Schlotterer".
  2. ↑ a b Gustav Schlotterer - Officials of National Socialist Reich Ministries . In: Officials of National Socialist Reich Ministries . March 15, 2018 ( ns-reichsministerien.de [accessed March 30, 2018]).
  3. ↑ Gustav Schlotterer: About the historical conditions of Marx's law of accumulation . P. Funk, Berlin 1932. Inaugural dissertation at the University of Tübingen.
  4. ↑ a b c Ernst Klee : The personal dictionary on the Third Reich: Who was what before and after 1945. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 541.
  5. ↑ a b c d Götz Aly / Susanne Heim: Pioneers of Destruction. FiTb, Frankfurt / M. 1993, p. 340, ISBN 3-596-11268-0 . (Source: Eichholtz : History of the German War Economy 1939–1945 . Vol. 1, Berlin 1984.)
  6. ↑ Bajohr: "Aryanization" in Hamburg. 1997, p. 190 f.
  7. ↑ a b Andreas Zellhuber: "Our administration is driving a catastrophe ...". The Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories and German occupation in the Soviet Union 1941–1945 . Vögel, Munich 2006, p. 88, ISBN 3-8965-0213-1 . (Source: Aly / Heim: Vordenker, p. 340.)
  8. ↑ Frank Bajohr: "Aryanisation" in Hamburg: the economic exclusion of Jews and the confiscation of Their property in Nazi Germany . Berghahn Books, New York 2001, pp. 143-147. ISBN 1-57181-484-1 . (Originally under the title “Aryanization” in Hamburg: the displacement of Jewish entrepreneurs 1933 - 1945 as a dissertation at Hamburg University, published by Christians, Hamburg 1997. ISBN 3-7672-1302-8 .)
  9. ^ Jürgen Lillteicher : Robbery, law and restitution: the restitution of Jewish property in the early Federal Republic . Wallstein, Göttingen 2007, pp. 295-296. ISBN 3-8353-0134-9 . (At the same time dissertation at the University of Freiburg.)
  10. ↑ Nuremberg Trial, Doc. NI-300. See also Mira Wilkins: The history of foreign investment in the United States 1914 - 1945 p. 461 f.
  11. ↑ Andreas Zellhuber: "Our administration is driving a catastrophe ...". The Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories and German occupation in the Soviet Union 1941–1945 . Munich 2006, p. 126.
  12. ↑ a b c Ludolf Herbst, Thomas Weihe (ed.): The Commerzbank and the Jews 1933-1945 . Munich 2004, p. 181, ISBN 3-406-51873-7 .
  13. ↑ Götz Aly : Social Policy and the Extermination of the Jews: Is There an Economy of the Final Solution? (= Contributions to National Socialist health and social policy; 5). Rotbuch-Verlag, Berlin 1987, p. 36.
  14. ↑ Thomas Sandkühler: Europe and National Socialism. Ideology, monetary policy, mass violence. In: Zeithistorische Forschungen / Studies in Contemporary History 9 (2012), pp. 428–441, especially p. 433 ( online , accessed on April 3, 2020)
  15. ↑ Götz Aly : Hitler's People's State. Robbery, Race War and National Socialism, 2nd edition, Frankfurt 2005, p. 17, ISBN 3-10-000420-5 .
  16. ↑ Source: Gunther Mai: The Allied Control Council in Germany 1945 - 1948. Allied unity - German division? Oldenbourg, Munich 1999 ISBN 3486561235 , p. 33, available online.
  17. ↑ Andreas Zellhuber: "Our administration is driving a catastrophe ...". The Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories and German occupation in the Soviet Union 1941–1945 . Munich 2006, p. 122. (Source: provisional outline plan from December 1, 1941, BA , R 6/226, p. 25.)
  18. ↑ Götz Aly / Susanne Heim: thought leader of annihilation. FiTb, Frankfurt / M. 1993, p. 359.
  19. ^ German foreign trade - express service for official and private trade news . Edited by the Reich Ministry of Economics. Berlin, Volume 1 (September 1944) and Volume 2 (March 1945). ZDB ID 506904-x
  20. ↑ In IMT , signatures Doc.No. NI 11 374 and 11 375 "Deposition of Gustav Schlotterer (RWM) concerning his career, the economic New Order for Europe, and IG Farben's position in the German economy." Schlotterer's curriculum vitae dated September 20, 1947, after which he was originally primarily involved in the Latin American economy.
  21. ^ German administration for popular education in the Soviet occupation zone: List of the literature to be sorted out , second supplement, Deutscher Zentralverlag, Berlin 1948, transcript letter S, pp. 245–290 .
  22. ↑ The title got longer and longer as the ambitions grew. A publishing house was set up specifically for the publication, called "Verlag der Verlag <Außenhandel unter Zwang>" Hamburg 24, Papenhuder Str. 49/51. Also in engl. Version ibid.
personal data
SURNAME Schlotterer, Gustav
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German editor, National Socialist, Ministerialrat, SS-Oberführer
DATE OF BIRTH March 1, 1906
PLACE OF BIRTH Biberach
DATE OF DEATH May 16, 1989
Place of death Dusseldorf