Hermann Gauch

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Hermann Gauch (born May 6, 1899 in Einöllen ; † November 7, 1978 in Kaiserslautern ) was a German doctor and Nazi racial theorist. Gauch wrote several books in which he championed the völkisch racial theory and in the 1930s acted temporarily as adjutant of the Reichsführer SS , Heinrich Himmler , for "race and cultural issues". Today he is best known for the story Father Traces , in which his son Sigfrid Gauch reflects on the difficult relationship between himself and his politically burdened father.

Live and act

Gauch was the son of a Palatinate farmer. In his youth he attended high schools in Kaiserslautern and Augsburg. From 1917 Gauch took part in the First World War. After being captured by American troops during the Battle of Soissons in 1918 , he was held in a prisoner-of-war camp in France from which he escaped in 1919. He then managed to make his way to Germany.

In 1920 Gauch began studying medicine . In 1922 he joined the NSDAP (membership number 9.538). In 1922 he also became a member of the Munich SA unit led by Rudolf Hess , with which he participated in the Hitler putsch on November 9, 1923 . He was a member of the SA until 1925.

In January 1924, Gauch took part in the preparations for the commando operation organized by Edgar Julius Jung to assassinate the Palatinate separatist leader Franz Josef Heinz . The farmer Heinz, protected by the French occupation troops then in the Palatinate , had proclaimed an autonomous Palatinate Republic at the end of 1923 , which was generally assumed to be recognized as an independent state by the former German war opponents in the near future. In order to avert the danger of the Palatinate splitting off from the German Empire, a defensive movement made up of “patriotic” Palatinate and Bavarians had formed. The group supported by the Bavarian state government within the defensive movement, to which Edgar Jung belonged, finally decided to kill Heinz by an assassination attempt. For this purpose, Jung and some fellow travelers, coming from the east, crossed the Rhine on the evening of January 9, 1924 , went to Speyer and attacked Heinz-Orbis and some confidants in the dining room of a hotel during dinner. Heinz-Orbis and two of his companions were killed. Two members of the group of assassins were shot dead by Heinz's guards after they had escaped from the hotel.

After finishing his studies, Gauch found a job with the merchant marine . He later switched to the Navy , where he was employed as a naval staff doctor from 1929 to 1933 .

From around 1932 Gauch began to excel as a racial theorist. His ideas of a self-sufficient Nordic-German military farming community were closely related to the ideas of Walter Darré, who was later appointed by Hitler as Reichsbauernführer and Minister of Agriculture . Essential features of Gauch's writings are, in particular, the sharp anti-Semitism and the racist disdain for all peoples or ethnic groups that he regards as non-Nordic, which he ascribes to the animal kingdom as the "real" people, in contrast to the Nordic people. After Gauch even rejected the Italians as a non-Nordic race, some of his writings were finally banned in Germany out of consideration for the German-Italian alliance . The influence of the books written by Gauch or the racist ideas he propagated can be seen from the fact that during the Eichmann trial in 1961 , the main prosecutor Gideon Hausner explicitly highlighted Gauch as one of those desk criminals who made the Holocaust possible with their ideas .

At first Gauch did not rejoin the NSDAP, which was newly founded in 1925. In 1934 he became a member of the party again ( membership number 3,474,227). At the same time he also became a member of the SS (SS no. 222.175). The SS chief Heinrich Himmler appointed him in the spring of 1934 to be his adjutant for cultural and racial issues. Since the collaboration between Himmler and Gauch was disharmonious, Gauch left the SS in 1935. An application to re-join the organization in 1937 was rejected by Himmler. In a letter from 1937, Gauch described himself as a member of the Security Service (SD), the SS intelligence service. Details about Gauch's work in the SS are very rare, as none of the usual SS personnel files have been preserved for him. The SS seniority lists show that at the time of his resignation in 1935 he had at least achieved the rank of SS-Untersturmführer .

From 1934 he was a lecturer at the Agricultural University in Berlin . Later he was at the Reichshandwerker- und Reichsnährstand Reichsamtsleiter for Customs and History with a focus on folklore, blood group research and language physiology.

Shortly before the start of the Second World War , Gauch joined the Air Force in August 1939 , where he was employed as a senior medical officer. He later switched to the army . In April 1941 he took part in the Yugoslavia campaign. Later he was employed as a doctor in an air intelligence regiment to take over the management of a hospital during the last phase of the war.

After the war, Gauch set up as a general practitioner in Kaiserslautern. In terms of his ideology, he remained faithful to the Nazi ideology in general and his racial theories in particular. Politically, he was active in the neo-Nazi German Reich Party , where he headed the cultural department ( training letters ). He also turned against the numbers of Jews murdered in the concentration camps represented by Holocaust research , which he described as exaggerated or exaggerated.

Gauch died in 1978. Shortly after his death, his son Sigfrid published the book Vaterspuren ; in it he describes his father's life, his own youth and the difficult relationship between the two. The book is considered to be the first work in the “ father books ” genre , in which the children of those responsible for Nazi crimes deal with their parents.

Fonts

  • New principles of race research , Leipzig 1933.
  • "The Germanic Faith", Leipzig 1933.
  • The Germanic Odal or Allod constitution , Goslar 1934.
  • The garden in German cultural life. In: Odal. Monthly for Blood and Bode n, Volume 3, 1934, Issue 5, pp. 340–351.
  • "Calendar and Customs", Beuern (Hessen) 1939.
  • "The Origin of Our Language and Writing", Heusenstamm 1970.
  • "The characters of the heroic saga as historical personalities", Heusenstamm 1971.

literature

Writings by Sigfrid Gauch about his father :

  • Father tracks
  • Lost property. The sources for the novel Vaterspuren , 2010.

Secondary literature :

  • Gerhard graves / Matthias Spindler : The Palatinate liberators. People's anger and state violence in the armed struggle against Palatine separatism 1923–24 , 2005.
  • Ernst Klee : The cultural lexicon for the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-10-039326-5 .
  • Julian Reidy: Forget what parents are. Rereading and relaunching the alleged fatherly literature in terms of literary history , Göttingen 2012.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Life data according to Ernst Klee: The cultural lexicon for the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 157.
  2. ↑ Cornelia Blasberg: “Hitler's willing executors and their unwilling biographers. Father Books of the 1970s ”, in: Markus Heilmann / Tobias Wägerbauer (eds.): Under the Spell of Signs. The fear of responsibility in literature and literary studies , 1998, p. 15.
  3. ^ SS personnel lists
  4. ^ Ernst Klee: The culture lexicon for the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 157.
personal data
SURNAME Gauch, Hermann
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German doctor, adjutant Heinrich Himmler and Nazi race researcher
DATE OF BIRTH May 6, 1899
PLACE OF BIRTH Oiling
DATE OF DEATH November 7, 1978
Place of death Kaiserslautern