Hartmann Lauterbacher

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Hartmann Lauterbacher

Hartmann Lauterbacher (born May 24, 1909 in Reutte ( Tyrol ); † April 12, 1988 in Seebruck am Chiemsee) was staff leader and deputy Reichsjugendführer of the Hitler Youth , NSDAP - Gauleiter des Gaus Süd-Hannover-Braunschweig , Oberpräsident of the Province of Hanover as well SS-Obergruppenführer . From 1950 he worked for the Gehlen Organization and later until 1963 for the Federal Intelligence Service .

Life

The son of an Austro-Hungarian veterinarian attended elementary school and the reform high school in Kufstein and then learned to be a chemist .

Career in HJ and NSDAP

Lauterbacher joined the National Socialists as a high school student. In 1923, at the age of 14, he founded the first local group of German Youth in Austria in Kufstein and organized a memorial service for Albert Leo Schlageter . In 1925 he took over the management of the DJ and in 1927 transferred it to the Hitler Youth (HJ). According to his own statements, he met Adolf Hitler for the first time on April 19, 1925 at the age of 16 in Rosenheim . According to another source, he was a guest at Hitler's birthday party on April 20, 1925. In 1927 Lauterbacher went to Braunschweig to study at the local drug academy . There he joined the NSDAP in the same year ( membership number 86.837) and built up the HJ of the Gaus Süd-Hannover-Braunschweig from 1929, since 1930 full-time as a HJ Gau leader. By 1932 he had founded 31 followers with 93 groups in the ten HJ districts in Lower Saxony. The number of Hitler Youth members in the Gau grew from 98 to 2,500 between March 1930 and the end of 1931, and in 1932 it was 4,000. Lauterbacher's talent for organization quickly made a career for himself. In 1932 he was HJ area leader Westphalia-Niederrhein, in 1933 Obergebietsführer West and in 1934 HJ staff leader and deputy to Reich youth leader Baldur von Schirach . In 1935 Joseph Goebbels was his best man. Lauterbacher had three children.

Lauterbacher undertook numerous trips abroad during this time, including a. to the Netherlands , Belgium , Romania , Hungary , Portugal and Spain . In Italy in 1934 he met functionaries of the fascist Opera Nazionale Balilla (ONB), the model of the Hitler Youth, and also got to know the academy of the ONB. Shortly afterwards, based on their example, the Academy for Youth Leadership was established in Braunschweig , where the HJ leaders were trained. In 1937 Lauterbacher was the head of the delegation when the entire Hitler Youth leadership traveled to the world exhibition in Paris. In the same year he visited Great Britain and toured the elite school in Eton and the military academy in Aldershot . The highlight of the trip was a meeting with Robert Baden-Powell , the founder of the Boy Scout Movement. After he returned from England, Lauterbacher was involved in founding the BDM plant “ Faith and Beauty ” for 17 to 21 year old girls.

In the following years Lauterbacher united numerous offices, titles and functions in his person. In 1936 he became a member of the Reichstag . In 1937 he was appointed to the Prussian Ministerial Council.

On November 9, 1940, he was transferred to the SS (SS no. 382.404) with the rank of brigade leader , was promoted to group leader in April 1941 and rose within the SS at the end of January 1944 to senior group leader. In May 1940 Lauterbacher was called up for a short military service in the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler , as was customary for party leaders at the time ; during this time he was in a car accident resulting in a permanent knee injury.

In August 1940 Lauterbacher left the Hitler Youth leadership and was initially deputy Gauleiter of South Hanover-Braunschweig , and in December 1940 he was promoted to Gauleiter and authorized to work. Lauterbacher's predecessor in the Gauleitung was Bernhard Rust , Reich Minister of Education since 1934 and thus only rarely present in Hanover. Lauterbacher was 31, making it the youngest Nazi Gauleiter. In the same year he received the title of Honorary Leader of the Academy for Youth Leadership in Braunschweig.

Lauterbacher became the Prussian Council of State in January 1941, and in April 1941 he was appointed Chief President of the Prussian Province of Hanover as the successor to SA Chief of Staff Viktor Lutze . In 1942 he was appointed Gau Reich Defense Commissioner.

"Action Lauterbacher"

In September 1941 the Gauleiter ordered the ghettoization of the Jews in Hanover . Around 1,200 Jews were driven from their homes and housed in 15 so-called “Jewish houses” under catastrophic living conditions . This "Operation Lauterbacher" was the preliminary stage to the deportation of the Hanoverian Jews to the extermination camps, which began in December 1941.

During the war, Lauterbacher distinguished himself as a fanatical National Socialist. On April 4, 1945, just a few days before Allied troops reached Hanover, he was making slogans to hold out on the radio and in the newspapers. Under the heading “Better to be dead than a slave” it said u. a .: "... whoever raises white flags and surrenders without a fight is death."

He himself preferred to flee. On April 8, 1945 he had his car loaded with 1.78 million cigarettes and disguised himself as a sales representative in the Harz Mountains to Hahnenklee. From there he fled further south. He is said to have experienced the end of the war in Bad Gastein near Salzburg. On June 12, the Neue Hannoversche Kurier reported that a British commando had arrested him in Carinthia .

post war period

After the war, the judiciary initiated a total of eight proceedings against Lauterbacher, including for crimes against humanity . However, he was not held accountable. In early July 1946, the Higher British Military Court in Hanover acquitted him of the charge of having ordered the murder of German and Allied prisoners in Hameln prison in early April 1945 . In August 1947, another trial against Lauterbacher began in the Dachau internment camp . This time it was about an order from September 1944, according to which Lauterbacher should have ordered the shooting of twelve American airmen who had been shot down over Goslar . In October 1947 this process also ended in an acquittal . The German judiciary, which had already opened proceedings in 1947 through the Hanover Public Prosecutor's Office , which were followed by further investigations in Munich and Hanover, contented itself with closing the investigation because of the statute of limitations ; the proceedings from 1947 were not discontinued until twelve years later after a “thorough examination”. In the Nuremberg trials , the former deputy Reich Youth Leader appeared as a witness for his former boss, Baldur von Schirach.

Lauterbacher, who had been interned in the Sandbostel camp near Bremervörde since the end of the war , was able to flee on February 25, 1948 under circumstances that have not yet been clarified. The Braunschweiger Zeitung reports on American secret service documents, according to which the anti-communist front , an organization of high Wehrmacht and SS officers, was supposed to be behind the action. Allegedly Lauterbacher already had connections with the US secret service CIC at this time . In Hungary he is said to have founded the NAESZ, an "international anti-Bolshevik organization" with the support of the Americans. He later went into hiding in Rome under the name "Bauer". Apparently on behalf of Allied secret services, he was in a circle of escape helpers who brought incriminated people along so-called rat lines , such as the so-called “Vatican Route”, from former fascist states to South America or the Middle East . In these and later years, Lauterbacher made use of the numerous international contacts he had made as a Hitler Youth functionary before the war. In April 1950 he was arrested by the Italians and taken to the Le Fraschette camp near Rome as an "annoying foreigner" , from where Lauterbacher was able to flee in December 1950 after a few months. Here, too, his good contacts to former National Socialist activists helped him. This time, with the help of South Tyrolean National Socialists, he managed to flee to Austria and Germany.

When the false report of an escape to Argentina was launched by the Gehlen organization in 1951, Lauterbach was already in their service. The Gehlen organization had it since 1950 under the registration number V-6300. It has been proven in at least one case that the cooperation between Lauterbacher and his South Tyrolean escape helpers extended into his time with the BND. The SS-Untersturmführer Otto Casagrande, one of the escape helpers, was listed with the registration number V-6301 as Lauterbacher's first employee from 1951 to 1953. Lauterbacher himself stayed longer with the Gehlen organization. He lived in different cities like Munich and West Berlin. Even after the establishment of the Federal Intelligence Service (BND) he worked for the BND until 1963, among other things as head of department. One of his tasks is said to have been to attempt to infiltrate the Free German Youth (FDJ) with the help of former Hitler Youth leaders . Around 1954, " obviously new papers in Schleswig-Holstein " are said to have been obtained for him .

Lauterbacher's family lived in Salem (Schleswig-Holstein). He is said to have worked for his brother's Labora company in Munich , a distributor of industrial products abroad. When more intensive research was done, Lauterbacher went underground again. In 1960 Der Spiegel reported that Lauterbacher owned Labora and had developed into an expert in Middle East business. Among other things, he sells advertising space to European companies that will be set up along the Suez Canal. According to an earlier presentation by the magazine, Lauterbacher worked as a contact for the Federal Intelligence Service (BND) in the 1950s . On behalf of BND chief Reinhard Gehlen , he is said to have recruited former SS leaders who worked for Arab secret services in the Middle East. The CIA raised concerns about Lauterbacher. In an American report it is said that Lauterbacher works for an Eastern secret service, is homosexual and therefore open to blackmail. In 1965 the BND ended the collaboration.

In 1965 Lauterbacher advised the government in Ghana , later he worked for various Arab and African countries. He is said to have worked for an advertising agency in Dortmund until the mid-1970s. Between 1977 and 1979 the former Gauleiter was the official advisor to the Sultan of Oman , Qabus ibn Said , on youth issues. He then lived in Morocco and took up residence in Austria in 1981.

In 1984 Lauterbacher published his biography under the title Experienced and co-designed , a typical example of the justification literature of the middle-level Nazi charges. His biography shows that he never managed to break away from his role in National Socialism after the war. He defended the crimes against the Jews. In 1947 he declared: "I take the point of view that Judaism has declared war on us (...)." His life after 1945 was characterized by cliques and opaque secret service connections with changing loyalties. He spent the last years of his life very withdrawn in Germany; only his death certificate proves that he died in Seebruck am Chiemsee.

It was not until 2014 that the Federal Intelligence Service admitted that Lauterbacher was employed as a full-time employee under the code name "Leonhard". Upon request, the personnel file was also released for inspection by Spiegel in 2014 .

Publications

  • Hartmann Lauterbacher: Experienced and helped shape. Key witness of an era 1923–1945. To new shores after the end of the war. KWSchütz-Verlag , Preußisch-Oldendorf 1984, ISBN 3-87725-109-9 . ( Autobiography )
  • Heinrich-Sohnrey-Competition of the Gauheimatwerk Süd-Hannover-Braunschweig. Gauheimatwerk Süd-Hannover-Braunschweig, Hannover 1942.

literature

  • Wolfgang Graf: Austrian SS generals. Himmler's reliable vassals. Hermagoras-Verlag, Klagenfurt / Ljubljana / Vienna 2012, ISBN 978-3-7086-0578-4 .
  • Werner Klose : Generation in lockstep: The Hitler Youth. Stalling, Oldenburg / Hamburg / Munich 1982, ISBN 3-7979-1365-6 .
  • Gerhard Rempel: Hitler's Children. The Hitler Youth and the SS. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill 1990, ISBN 0-8078-4299-0 , pp. 41-44; 122-123.
  • Wolfgang Leonhardt : "Hanoverian stories" - reports from different parts of the city. Norderstedt 2009/2010, p. 77 ff. (With a detailed description of Lauterbacher's role in the persecution of the Jews)
  • Thomas Casagrande : South Tyroleans in the Waffen SS. Exemplary attitude, fanatical conviction. Raetia, Bozen 2015, ISBN 978-88-7283-539-5 , pp. 156–166, here p. 163.
  • Reinhard Bein : Hitler's Brunswick staff. DöringDruck, Braunschweig 2017, ISBN 978-3-925268-56-4 , pp. 148–157

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Werner Klose: Generation in lockstep: The Hitler Youth. P. 11.
  2. ↑ Hartmann Lauterbacher: Experienced and helped shape, key witness of an era 1923–1945, to new shores after the end of the war. Preussisch-Oldendorf 1984, p. 30 f.
  3. ^ Paul Bruppacher: Adolf Hitler and the history of the NSDAP - a chronicle. Norderstedt 2009, p. 140.
  4. ↑ luftschutzbunker-hannover.de (PDF; 79 kB) accessed March 13, 2010.
  5. ↑ vernetztes-gedaechtnis.d , accessed March 13, 2010.
  6. ^ Annika Singelmann: The academy for youth leadership and the city of Braunschweig. 2008, p. 21.
  7. ↑ a b c d e f g h i Stefanie Waske: Braunschweigs Gauleiter and the BND. Series in the Braunschweiger Zeitung from January 26, 2009 to February 23, 2009; newsclick.de
  8. ↑ Gisela Miller Kipp (Ed.) "You too belong to the Führer" The history of the Association of German Girls (BDM) in sources and documents . Weinheim / Munich 2001, p. 371.
  9. ↑ Alessio Ponzio: A Totalitarian Project of Italian Fascism. The training of the next generation of leaders in the ONB and the GIL compared to the Hitler Youth. In: Sources and research from Italian archives and libraries. 88/2008, pp. 489, 503.
  10. ^ Roland Ray: Approaching France in the service of Hitler? - Otto Abetz and the German policy on France 1939–1942. Munich 2000, p. 223.
  11. ↑ Süddeutsche Zeitung. March 9, 2010; Basler newspaper. March 9, 2010.
  12. ^ Wolfgang Graf: Austrian SS Generals. Himmler's reliable vassals. Klagenfurt / Ljubljana / Vienna 2012, p. 142.
  13. ↑ Erich Stockhorst: 5000 heads - who was what in the 3rd Reich. Kiel 1998, p. 264.
  14. ↑ What happened to Lauterbacher? In: Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung. August 8, 2003; Klaus Mlynek, Waldemar R. Röhrbein (eds.) A. a .: City Lexicon Hanover . From the beginning to the present. Schlütersche, Hannover 2009, ISBN 978-3-89993-662-9 , p. 17, action Lauterbacher
  15. ↑ Wolfgang Leonhardt: "Hannoversche Stories" - reports from different parts of the city. Norderstedt 2009/2010, p. 77 ff.
  16. ↑ quoted from: Wolfgang Leonhardt: "Hannoversche Histories" - reports from different parts of the city. Norderstedt 2009/2010, p. 80.
  17. ↑ Wolfgang Steinweg: The town hall in Hanover, from the imperial era to the present. Schlütersche, Hannover 1998, p. 160.
  18. ↑ What happened to Lauterbacher? Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung, August 8, 2003.
  19. ↑ a b c Hermann Weiß (Ed.): Personenlexikon 1933–1945. Vienna 2003, p. 290 ff.
  20. ^ Thomas Casagrande: South Tyroleans in the Waffen SS. Bolzano 2015, p. 160.
  21. ^ Thomas Casagrande: South Tyroleans in the Waffen SS . Bolzano 2015, p. 163.
  22. ↑ kfw: Nazi at the BND. In: Der Spiegel . No. 51 of December 15, 2014, p. 18, citing the Lauterbach personnel file made available to Spiegel by the BND.
  23. ↑ kfw: Nazi at the BND. In: Der Spiegel. No. 51 of December 15, 2014, p. 18, citing the Lauterbach personnel file made available to Spiegel by the BND.
  24. ↑ Hartmann Lauterbacher . In: Der Spiegel . No. 47 , 1960, pp. 95 ( online ).
  25. ↑ Pullach internally . In: Der Spiegel . No. 23 , 1971, p. 100, 108 f . ( online ).
  26. ↑ in detail on Lauterbacher's connections to the BND: Stefanie Waske: More liaison than control - the control of the BND by parliament and government 1955–1978. Wiesbaden 2009, p. 113 ff.
  27. ^ Wolfgang Graf: Austrian SS Generals. Himmler's reliable vassals. Klagenfurt / Ljubljana / Vienna 2012, p. 143.
  28. ↑ quoted from: Anke Quast: Jewish communities in Lower Saxony since 1945 - the example of Hanover. P. 325.
  29. ↑ Nazi at the BND. In: Der Spiegel. 51/2014, p. 18.
personal data
SURNAME Lauterbacher, Hartmann
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian politician (NSDAP), MdR, Obergebietsführer of the Hitler Youth, NSDAP Gauleiter
DATE OF BIRTH May 24, 1909
PLACE OF BIRTH Reutte
DATE OF DEATH April 12, 1988
Place of death Seebruck