Hans Fischböck

Hans Fischböck

Hans Fischböck (born January 24, 1895 in Geras in the Horn district ; † June 3, 1967 in Wehrda near Marburg an der Lahn ) was an Austrian lawyer, trade minister, general commissioner in the Netherlands, Reich commissioner, state secretary and SS brigade leader in the service of the NS Regimes .

Life

Studies and World War I

After attending primary school and grammar school in Vienna , the judge's son studied law at the University of Vienna . The outbreak of World War I interrupted his academic training when he was drafted into a telegraph regiment on March 15, 1915. In this unit, he served on 5 March 1916 to November 1918, the South Tyrolean front during the first  Tyrolean Kaiserjäger - Brigade . He was released from military service as a lieutenant in the reserve.

Bank director

After returning he put in Vienna in 1919 his doctorate Dr. jur. from. Professionally, he first worked as a candidate in the practice of a lawyer. This was followed by a position as an authorized signatory at the Austrian Transport Bank . Here he rose to deputy director. After a few company changes, he became director of Österreichische Realitäten-Aktiengesellschaft (ÖRAG).

In 1930 he joined the German Men's Club (DHK) in Vienna. During this time he lived in a tenement house at 25 Glanzinggasse in Vienna. From 1936 to 1938 he worked as a director at Österreichische Versicherungs Aktien Gesellschaft .

Connection of Austria - state councilor, councilor, member of the Reichstag, minister and "Aryanization" of the retail trade

On February 12, 1938, Kurt Schuschnigg signed the Berchtesgaden Agreement under pressure (Hitler threatened the invasion of the Wehrmacht ) . In it he agreed, among other things, that some of the Nazi regime's stewards should take up important positions.

In the course of the implementation of the agreement, Fischböck was appointed to the State Council on February 18, 1938 - shortly before the " Anschluss of Austria " on March 13, 1938 - and was responsible for economic contacts with the German Reich . When Austria was "annexed" to the German Reich on March 11, 1938, he was appointed Minister for Trade and Transport on the initiative of Hermann Göring . From May 15, 1938, his ministerial portfolio expanded: he was appointed Minister of Economics and Labor and, in addition, Minister of Finance. On November 12, 1938, there was a meeting in Berlin, at which leading National Socialists a. a. dealt with the issue of the expropriation of Jews in retail.

At this conference, Fischböck Göring presented his concept for the " Aryanization " of retail shops to be practiced in Austria . According to this, the Jewish owners should have their business license withdrawn due to a legal regulation, so that in the balance sheet in Austria 12,000 to 14,000 shops are closed and the remaining " Aryanized " or handed over to a state trustee. Goering said he was delighted with this planned practice: “... the proposal is wonderful. Then in Vienna, one of the main Jewish cities, so to speak, by Christmas or the end of the year this whole story would really be cleared up ”.

The legal regulation, which Fischböck had applied for in September 1938, was published on November 23, 1938 in the Reichsgesetzblatt as “Ordinance for the Implementation of the Ordinance to Eliminate Jews from German Economic Life ”. The Nazi power apparatus and individual Nazi functionaries were given powerful means to deprive Jews of their rights. Widespread anti-Semitism in Austria favored the implementation.

In the following year Fischböck was able to expand his position in the Austrian financial sector. From May 1939 he was chairman of the board of the Creditanstalt-Bankverein Wien and head of the Vienna Chamber of Commerce . He was also on the advisory board of the Deutsche Reichsbank in Vienna and on the supervisory board of Steyr Daimler Puch AG.

After the “Reichstag election” in April 1938 , he was appointed a member of the Reichstag for Austria. He had a seat on the Vienna City Council from May 3, 1939 to 1945.

NSDAP, SS and general commissioner

On a temporary basis, he was appointed President of the Chamber of Commerce and the Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Vienna from November 10, 1939. At the beginning of 1940 he joined the NSDAP ( membership number 8,401,675). But he managed to postpone this entry date to May 1, 1938 with the new membership number 6,133,529. He joined the SS (SS-No. 367.799) on June 1, 1940. In addition, as a business leader, he was a member of the Friends of the Reichsführer SS .

After the attack on the Netherlands, Arthur Seyß-Inquart was appointed Reich Commissioner for the Netherlands on May 29, 1940 . He chose his friend Fischböck for the duties of the General Commissioner for Economics and Finance because they knew each other well from their time in Vienna and had worked together. In this position, Fischböck had the supervision and control of the ministries of finance, transport, economy, social affairs and the post office. Furthermore, he had to control the so-called hostile property in the Netherlands.

Subjugation of Dutch industry and Aryanizations

Fischböck and Seyss-Inquart

In the second half of 1940 Fischböck was commissioned to adapt the Dutch economy to the German economy. To this end, the Dutch economy, like that in the German Empire, should be divided into economic groups. Fischböck chose the General Director of the Rotterdam Bankers Association, Henri Louis Woltersom , for this project . However, the representatives of the Dutch economy rejected this regrouping based on the German model. The Ministry of Finance was headed by Meinoud Rost van Tonningen , who belonged to the NSB and worked closely with the Nazi regime. On the German side, Fischböck was appointed Ministerialrat Helmuth Wohlthat to control the Dutch banks , and later from April 1941 Alfred Bühler was assigned.

Furthermore, Fischböck was supposed to build on the experiences he had gained with the "Aryanization" of Jewish shops in Vienna. In the Netherlands, he wanted to continue and improve this concept, especially with regard to the transfer of ownership to “Aryan” officials. From October 22, 1940, all Jewish economic institutions had to be registered. The expropriation of these assets began in March 1941. To carry out this project, Fischböck made use of a number of organizations such as the auditing office, the "Asset Management and Pension Agency", the household inventory registration office, the "General Dutch Real Estate Management", the "Dutch stock corporation for the processing of companies" and the “Raubbank” Lippmann, Rosenthal & Co , Sarphatistraat.

Forced labor and financing of war costs

Fischböck also worked for the transfer of Dutch forced laborers . For this purpose, in January 1942 he held talks with representatives of the armaments industry about the obligation to work for Dutch people in Germany. The former banker Fischböck came out on February 9, 1942 with a financing plan according to which the Netherlands should contribute to the war costs of the German Reich. These payments to the German Reich, constructed as fictitious occupation costs, were to occur from July 1, 1941 and amount to 50 million Reichsmarks per month . Of this sum, the Netherlands had to pay 10 million in gold. Rost van Tonningen processed the payments to the Reichsbank deposits .

The financial submission of the Netherlands to the German Reich began with the plan that had taken place on October 24, 1940 during a meeting with the Reich Economics Minister Walther Funk . According to a proposal by Fischböck, on April 1, 1941, the currency border between the Netherlands and the German Reich fell, which means that all exports from the Netherlands to the German Reich were compensated at an extremely low gulden rate . As a result, the president of the Dutch central bank, Leonardus Trip , resigned.

Reich Commissioner for Pricing

At the beginning of 1942 Fischböck could only devote himself to the affairs in the Netherlands to a limited extent, since on January 15, 1942, he replaced the previous Reich Commissioner for Pricing , Josef Wagner , in his office. Fischböck now tried to simplify the formation of prices for armaments by setting prices. In August 1944, he was appointed deputy general representative for armaments, Hans Kehrl .

On February 27, 1945, Fischböck sent Reich Minister Albert Speer a balance sheet on the formation of monetary capital and a memorandum on the Reich debt. Accordingly, he put the monetary capital growth from 1937 to the end of 1944 at 304.6 billion Reichsmarks (RM). As of September 30, 1994, he named the sum of 323.6 billion RM for the Reich debt. For the course of the war and the subsequent demobilization, he estimated the accumulation of debt at around 450 billion RM, the corresponding monetary capital formation at 400 billion RM.

Escape to Argentina and return

After the capitulation of the German Reich, Fischböck lived in Munich under a false name . The Catholic priest Krunoslav Draganović got him a passport of the Red Cross under the name Jakob Schramm . With the help of the ODESSA organization , he was able to escape  via Genoa to Argentina , where he arrived in Buenos Aires in February 1951, using one of the rat lines . Fischböck got a job at the company of the former Waffen-SS officer Karl Nicolussi-Leck . Later he lived as an Argentine citizen under his real name in the Federal Republic of Germany. After Ernst Klee , he worked as a consultant for a steel company in Essen from 1960 .

In Austria, an investigation was initiated against him for high treason , but this did not lead to a conviction. His property was confiscated in Austria on March 15, 1951. In 1957 his crimes came under an Austrian amnesty . The Austrian authorities refused to apply for an Austrian passport in 1954. Fischböck never had to answer in court.

Ranks and NS functions

• November 1918 Lieutenant of the Reserve (Austro-Hungarian Army)
• 1938 member of the Reichstag
• 1938 Minister
• April 20, 1938 NSKK brigad leader
• May 25, 1940 General Commissioner in the Netherlands
• January 1, 1940 SS man (later reset to May 1, 1938)
• June 1, 1940 SS-Oberführer
• June 1, 1940 honorary SS leader at the personal staff of the Reichsführer SS
• September 1940 member of the board of trustees of the Central European Business Conference
• March 27, 1941 member of the supervisory board of Continental Oel AG
• November 9, 1941 SS brigade leader
• January 15, 1942 State Secretary
• January 15, 1942 Reich Commissioner

Awards

• Honorary sword of the Reichsführer SS
• SS skull ring

literature

• Wolfgang Graf: Austrian SS generals. Himmler's reliable vassals. Hermagoras-Verlag, Klagenfurt / Ljubljana / Vienna 2012, ISBN 978-3-7086-0578-4 .
• Herbert Rosenkranz: Reichskristallnacht . November 9, 1938 in Austria . Europa Verlag, Vienna / Frankfurt / Zurich 1968.
• Götz Aly , Susanne Heim : thought leaders of annihilation . Frankfurt / Main 1993.
• Gerhard Hirschfeld: Foreign rule and collaboration - The Netherlands under German occupation 1949–1945 . Stuttgart 1984.
• Wolfgang Schumann , Ludwig Nestler (ed.): The fascist occupation policy in Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands (1940-1945) . Berlin 1990.
• Götz Aly: Hitler's People's State . Frankfurt / Main 2005.
• Harald Wixforth: The expansion of Dresdner Bank in Europe . Volume 3. In: Klaus-Dietmar Henke (Ed.): The Dresdner Bank in the Third Reich . Munich 2006.
• Dietrich Eichholtz , Wolfgang Schumann: Anatomy of the war . Berlin 1969.
• Uki Goñi: ODESSA - The true story - Help for Nazi war criminals to escape . Berlin 2006.

Web links

• Literature by and about Hans Fischböck in the catalog of the German National Library
• Newspaper article about Hans Fischböck in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .
• Hans Fischböck in the database of members of the Reichstag
• Shorthand transcript (PDF; 193 kB) Conference of November 12, 1938 chaired by Göring.
• Hans Fischböck: Autobiography (PDF; 5.9 MB)
• Provenance research ... (PDF; 82 kB) p. 11–12: Aryanization process for businesses
• Fischböck returned to Germany in 1957
• Biographical sketch of Fischböck (Dutch)
• Entry on the Ministry of Commerce in the Austria Forum  (in the AEIOU Austria Lexicon )
• Suspension of the investigation against Fischböck in Austria

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Birth register of the Roman Catholic parish of Geras No. 6/1895 ( online ).
2. ^ Wolfgang Graf: Austrian SS Generals. Himmler's reliable vassals. Klagenfurt / Ljubljana / Vienna 2012, p. 202.
3. ^ ^{A b} Wolfgang Graf: Austrian SS Generals. Himmler's reliable vassals. Klagenfurt / Ljubljana / Vienna 2012, p. 203
4. ↑ ^{a b} Ernst Klee: The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. Second updated edition. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2005, p. 151.
5. ^ Wolfgang Graf: Austrian SS Generals. Himmler's reliable vassals. Klagenfurt / Ljubljana / Vienna 2012, pp. 208f.