Hans-Joachim Riecke

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Hans-Joachim Riecke

Hans-Joachim Ernst Riecke (born June 20, 1899 in Dresden , † August 11, 1986 in Hamburg ) was a German certified farmer, NSDAP member of the National Socialist Reichstag , Reich Commissioner von Schaumburg-Lippe in 1933 and Minister of State Lippes from 1933 to 1936 .

From 1934 Riecke worked in various offices in the field of agricultural and food policy , including in the Reichsbauernrat (voluntary), in the Reich Ministry for Food and Agriculture , in the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories (RMfdBO) and in the four-year plan . His highest rank was SS-Gruppenführer. After the war he worked in private industry. After the war he was not held accountable for his involvement in the massive deaths of Soviet prisoners of war and the civilian population in the occupied eastern territories.

Life

origin

Hans-Joachim Ernst Rieckes ancestors on his father's side were farmers. He attended high schools in Berlin , Schneeberg and Leipzig . He took part in the First World War from 1914 to 1918 and was wounded four times; he received the Iron Cross 1st and 2nd class. In 1917 he was made a lieutenant.

After the war he was a member of a volunteer corps and then until 1920 in the Eastern Border Guard . From 1922 to 1925 Riecke studied agriculture at the University of Leipzig , graduating with a degree in agriculture. In 1925 Riecke joined the NSDAP . From 1925 to 1933 Riecke worked in the Chamber of Agriculture of Münster / Westphalia, most recently as an agricultural councilor and department head.

In the Nazi state

In March 1933 Riecke was elected to the Prussian state parliament. On April 1, 1933, he was appointed Reich Commissioner for Schaumburg-Lippe , from May 22, 1933, he was Minister of State in Lippe, based in Detmold, and was subordinate to Gauleiter Alfred Meyer (Gauleiter) .

During this time, Riecke was, among other things, "in charge of many things" concerning the imprisoned "Jewish" editor of the social democratic Detmolder Volksblatt and well-known Nazi opponent Felix Fechenbach . On July 18, he had Felix Fechenbach brought himself for interrogation and "cursed" him. On July 12, Riecke had asked the Bavarian state police to be allowed to move Fechenbach to the Dachau concentration camp , which was under the leadership of Heinrich Himmler's Bavarian political police . During the transport to Bavaria by a small group of SA and SS men from Detmold, Fechenbach was murdered by them on August 7, 1933. The perpetrators claimed that he was " shot while trying to escape ". In the post-war trial against the murderers, Riecke could not be proven to be involved in the crime. However, it remained incomprehensible why Riecke hired the SS man Paul Wiese, who was involved in the act, as his personal driver only three months after the murder in October 1933 in an alleged act of personal care.

Riecke was elected by the NSDAP leadership as a member of the Reichstag from the 9th electoral term (1933) to the 11th electoral term (1938). In 1936 Riecke became a ministerial director in the Reich Ministry for Food and Agriculture , where he was promoted to State Secretary in 1943 .

Riecke took part in the campaign in the west as a battalion commander. From 1941 he worked in the four-year plan and in the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories (RMfdbO). In the program of the four-year plan, he worked as head of the main group food and agriculture in the Eastern Economic Staff , which in its economic policy guidelines of May 23, 1941, represented a hunger plan for the food-related exploitation of the eastern areas to be occupied:

“Many tens of millions of people will become redundant in these areas and will either die or have to emigrate to Siberia. Attempts to save the population there from starvation by drawing surpluses from the black earth zone can only be at the expense of supplying Europe. "

After Walther Darré , Herbert Backe and Werner Willikens , Riecke was considered the most powerful man in the Ministry of Food and, along with Backe, was primarily responsible for the starvation of millions of people in the occupied Soviet territories. According to his memoirs, he initiated the initiative to replace Darré with Backe as Reich Minister with a complaint to Göring about Darré's management style.

The National Socialist weekly newspaper Das Reich emphasized on November 11, 1944 that "the war added the task of developing the food industry in the eastern regions". In the same year, the Eastern Economic Staff suggested that Riecke be awarded the "Knight's Cross with Swords", because the food procured by his apparatus from the occupied territories of the USSR "kept the German people's supply at the previous level."

In the RMfdbO, headed by the Nazi chief ideologist Alfred Rosenberg , Riecke was head of department in main department III (economy) for department III.E. Food and Agriculture Responsible. This led to a conflict with Rosenberg because Riecke brought agriculture in the Russian occupied territory under his control with the “backing of Göring and the Wehrmacht” and his “more than ten thousand agricultural leaders”, who had taken over the farms and kolkhozes, were already “future ones Landowners "felt and" to the chagrin of Rosenberg, put up stubborn resistance to all efforts to dissolve the kolkhozes [...] ". In October 1944, Riecke was promoted to SS-Gruppenführer after he had been promoted to SA-Gruppenführer in 1942.

Post-war period and Federal Republic

In May 1945 he was State Secretary in the executive government of Karl Dönitz in Flensburg. From there he was taken to the Allied POW camp No. 32 ( Camp Ashcan ) in Bad Mondorf , Luxembourg , and interned there for two years with other greats from the NSDAP and the Reichswehr. In April 1946 at the trial against Rosenberg in the Nuremberg trial of major war criminals , he testified as a defense witness in favor of the defendant. According to Rieckes statement, "Rosenberg personally wanted to win the Eastern peoples over for cooperation", but his well-intentioned measures were "sabotaged" by " Bormann and Himmler " in conjunction with Reich Commissioner Erich Koch . Riecke was classified as 'burdened' by the German side in the denazification process . In 1953 he contributed to the publication Balance of the Second World War with a contribution to the food situation.

From 1950 he worked for Alfred Toepfer in Hamburg in the grain trade, first in a managerial position at the ACT company, then in the 1960s in the highest positions of the Toepfer Foundations. Riecke was the managing director of the “Freiherr vom Stein Foundation”, today part of the Alfred Toepfer Foundation FVS , and in this function awarded the Freiherr vom Stein Prize, endowed with 25,000 DM, to the Bundeswehr generals von Baudissin , von Kielmansegg and de Maiziere . According to historians Götz Aly and Susanne Heim, Riecke's memories (1914–1951) , which were published as private prints, are a “monstrous collection of justifications”.

Fonts

  • Hans-Joachim Riecke: Rational Grassland Management: A Guide for the Practicing Farmer. On the basis of the more recent experiences under Westphalian conditions . Chamber of Agriculture for the Province of Westphalia, Münster 1930.
  • Hans-Joachim Riecke, Hanskarl von Manteuffel: The rural property traffic, especially the property traffic announcement of Jan. 26, 1937. With a foreword by R. Walther Darré. Reichsnährstand Verlags-GmbH, Berlin 1937.
  • Hans-Joachim Riecke: Food and Agriculture in War . In: Werner Picht : Balance of the Second World War. Findings and obligations for the future . Stalling, Oldenburg / Hamburg 1953, pp. 329–346.

literature

  • Götz Aly , Susanne Heim: thought leaders of annihilation. Auschwitz and the German plans for a new European order . Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt a. M. 1993, ISBN 3-596-11268-0 (especially pp. 370-386, short biography p. 386).
  • Wigbert Benz : Hans-Joachim Riecke, NS State Secretary. From the hunger planner before to the “world feeder” after 1945 . wvb, Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-86573-793-9 . (Review also related to the murder of the social democrat Felix Fechenbach on Vorwärts.de.)
  • Ernst Kienast (Ed.): Handbook for the Prussian Landtag , edition for the 5th electoral period, Berlin 1933, p. 374.
  • Joachim Lilla , Martin Döring, Andreas Schulz: extras in uniform. The members of the Reichstag 1933–1945. A biographical manual. Including the ethnic and National Socialist members of the Reichstag from May 1924. Droste, Düsseldorf 2004, ISBN 3-7700-5254-4 , pp. 512-513.
  • Rolf-Dieter Müller : Hitler's Eastern War and German Settlement Policy. The cooperation between the armed forces, business and the SS . Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt a. M. 1991, ISBN 3-596-10573-0 , pp. 83, 99, 102, 205, 222.
  • Economy and Expansion. Basic features of the Nazi economic policy . Selected writings by Hans-Erich Volkmann . On behalf of the Military History Research Office, ed. by Bernhard Chiari (= contributions to military history, vol. 58). Oldenbourg, Munich 2003, ISBN 3-486-56714-4 .
  • Andreas Zellhuber: "Our administration is heading for a catastrophe ..." - the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories and German occupation in the Soviet Union 1941–1945 . Vögel, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-89650-213-1 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c 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, ISBN 3-8965-0213-1 , p. 88. Zellhuber relies on Rieckes short biography from Götz Aly, Susanne Heim: Vordenker der Vernichtung. Auschwitz and the German plans for a new European order . Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt a. M. 1993, ISBN 3-596-11268-0 , p. 386. He also consulted Rieckes' memoirs (1914–1951) , which are stored in the Federal Archives in typewritten form with handwritten notes . Formerly listed as Small Acquisitions 784 , this text, written in 1962, is now part of the Hans-Joachim Riecke estate ( BArch N 1774/1 ( Memento of the original from March 5, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this note. ). @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / startext.net-build.de
  2. ↑ a b c Ernst Klee : Das Personenlexikon zum Third Reich: Who was what before and after 1945. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 496.
  3. ↑ a b The German Reichstag, electoral period after January 30, 1933 Berlin 1938, pp. 362–363.
  4. ↑ a b Philipp T. Haase: From someone who "thought things like that were impossible": Hans-Joachim Riecke and the murder of Felix Fechenbach . Ed .: Officials of the National Socialist Reich Ministries. March 19, 2018, ISSN  2569-6440 ( ns-reichsministerien.de ).
  5. ^ Hermann Schueler: Shot on the run - Felix Fechenbach 1884-1933 . A biography. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1981, ISBN 3-462-01487-0 , p. 14.
  6. ^ Hermann Schueler: Shot on the run - Felix Fechenbach 1884-1933 . A biography. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1981, ISBN 3-462-01487-0 , p. 244.
  7. ^ Robert MW Kempner : The Third Reich in cross-examination . From the unpublished interrogation protocols of the Prosecutor Robert M. W. Kempner, Munich / Esslingen. With an introduction by Horst Möller , Herbig Verlag, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-7766-2441-8 , p. 210.
  8. ^ Robert MW Kempner : The Third Reich in cross-examination . From the unpublished interrogation protocols of the Prosecutor Robert M. W. Kempner, Munich / Esslingen. With an introduction by Horst Möller , Herbig Verlag, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-7766-2441-8 , p. 210.
  9. ^ The Trial of the Main War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal , Nuremberg, November 14, 1945 - October 1, 1946 (hereinafter referred to as IMG), Vol. 11, Nuremberg 1949, p. 654.
  10. ↑ IMG, Vol. 36, pp. 135–157, Doc. 126-EC, Economic Policy Guidelines for Economic Organization East, Agriculture Group , 23 May 1941, here p. 145.
  11. ^ Andreas Dornheim : Race, Space and Autarky. Expert opinion on the role of the Reich Ministry for Food and Agriculture in the Nazi era. Developed for the Federal Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Consumer Protection . Bamberg, March 31, 2011, p. 66.
  12. ^ Andreas Dornheim: Race, Space and Autarky. Expert opinion on the role of the Reich Ministry for Food and Agriculture in the Nazi era. Developed for the Federal Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Consumer Protection . Bamberg, March 31, 2011, p. 34.
  13. ↑ Quoted from: Götz Aly, Susanne Heim: Vordenker der Vernichtung , p. 386.
  14. ↑ Götz Aly, Susanne Heim: Vordenker der Vernichtung , p. 386.
  15. ^ Rolf-Dieter Müller : Hitler's Eastern War and German Settlement Policy. The cooperation between the armed forces, business and the SS . Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt a. M. 1991, p. 99.
  16. ↑ IMG, Vol. 11, p. 655; Ernst Klee: Das Personenlexikon zum Third Reich , p. 496.
  17. ↑ IMG, Vol. 11, pp. 645-655; on Riecke's request by Rosenberg's defender Thoma cf. IMG, Vol. 8, p. 563 and Vol. 11, pp. 436, 574. Online: Riecke's witness statement on April 17, 1946 (= IMG, Vol. 11, pp. 645-655) .
  18. ↑ IMG, Vol. 11, p. 649.
  19. ↑ Georg Kreis , Gerd Krumeich , Henri Menudier, Hans Mommsen , Arnold Sywottek (eds.): Alfred Toepfer. Founder and businessman. Building blocks of a biography. Critical inventory . Christians, Hamburg 2000, p. 24.
  20. ↑ Balance of the Second World War: Findings and obligations for the future . Gerhard Stalling Verlag, Hamburg 1953.
  21. ^ Georg Kreis, Gerd Krumeich, Henri Ménudier, Hans Mommsen and Arnold Sywottek: Introduction (PDF; 125 kB) . In: Georg Kreis et al .: Alfred Toepfer. Founder and businessman. Building blocks of a biography - critical inventory . Christians Verlag, Hamburg 2000, ISBN 3-7672-1373-7 , p. 24.
  22. ↑ Hit by a stone . In: Der Spiegel . No. 40 , 1964, pp. 38 ( online - 30 September 1964 ).
  23. ↑ Götz Aly, Susanne Heim: Vordenker der Vernichtung , p. 386.
  24. ↑ Anton Maegerle on October 6, 2014 http://www.vorwaerts.de/rezension/ns-hungerplaner-top-manager
personal data
SURNAME Riecke, Hans-Joachim
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Riecke, Hans-Joachim Martin
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German agricultural politician (NSDAP), MdR, MdL, SS-Oberführer
DATE OF BIRTH June 20, 1899
PLACE OF BIRTH Dresden
DATE OF DEATH August 11, 1986
Place of death Hamburg