Hugo jury

Hugo Jury (1938)

Hugo Jury (born July 13, 1887 in Mährisch Rothmühl , Zwittau district , Moravia , Austria-Hungary ; † May 8, 1945 in Zwettl ) was an Austrian doctor, National Socialist politician and SS-Obergruppenführer .

Youth and Studies

The jury was the son of Hugo Jury (1856–1931), senior teacher in Mährisch Rothmühl, and the Julie Jury (1862–1934, née Haberhauer). After graduating from high school , in 1905 he began studying medicine at the Karl Ferdinand University in Prague . During his studies in 1905 he became a member of the Ghibellinia fraternity in Prague. In 1908 he served as a one-year volunteer . On November 29, 1908, he was defeated during a so-called "trench battle", d. H. a dispute between German-national and Czech-national students on Prague's old town boulevard “ Am Graben ”, injured with several knife wounds .

On October 31, 1911 , he received his doctorate as Dr. med. On January 14, 1913, he married Karoline Roppert in Vienna.

Career in Austria

The so-called doctor house in Frankenfels, where Hugo Jury lived from 1913 to 1919.

After practicing at the Brüx hospital , the jury was temporarily a ship's doctor at Österreichischer Lloyd . After several sea voyages, he worked as a community doctor in Frankenfels from January 15, 1913 to January 15, 1919 . During the First World War he was briefly in 1915 as Landsturm Certifiable civilian doctor in the Imperial Army , but when it became indispensable in the rear relieved of this obligation. He was employed as chief physician at the prisoner-of-war officers' camp in Puchenstuben , Wienerbruck and Mitterbach , not far from Frankenfels.

On July 7th, 1918 he became an honorary citizen of Frankenfels for his work in the community and his donations to the poor in the village. From January 15, 1919 he was a specialist in tuberculosis in St. Pölten .

The jury was active in the Heimwehr from 1927 , from which he transferred to the NSDAP on February 15, 1931 ( membership number 410.338). In St. Pölten he was NSDAP local group leader and, after the municipal council election in 1932, chairman of his party in the municipal council. After the Austrian NSDAP was banned on June 19, 1933 during the period of Austrofascism , he continued to work for the NSDAP underground, for which he was imprisoned several times, including in the Wöllersdorf detention center . The NSDAP combat pamphlet The Brown Front , which appears twice a week, is said to have been produced in his Vienna apartment at times . He was also a member of the German National German Club .

After the July Agreement in 1936, he became deputy head of the illegal NSDAP and held this position until 1938. From February 1937, he led negotiations with the Austro-Fascist system as chairman of the Committee of Seven formed to pacify the National Socialist opposition . After the government reshuffle forced by Hitler in the Berchtesgaden Agreement , the Jury was appointed to the State Council by Schuschnigg on February 20, 1938 and became Arthur Seyss-Inquart 's deputy in the People's Political Department of the Fatherland Front .

On the night of March 11th to March 12th, 1938, during the "annexation" of Austria to the German Reich, he was appointed Minister for Social Administration in the short-lived federal government of Seyss-Inquart .

Career in the Third Reich

Hugo Jury exercised the same function in the state government of Austria in the Third Reich until May 20, 1938 . After the Reichstag election in 1938 , he became a member of the National Socialist Reichstag . On May 24, 1938 he became Gauleiter of the Reichsgau Niederdonau , his deputy was Karl Gerland on November 10, 1938 .

After the Anschluss, the jury was advised to join the SS . On March 12, 1938, he was accepted into the SS with the rank of SS-Sturmbannführer (SS No. 292.777), where he rose to SS-Obergruppenführer in June 1943 .

Hugo Jury was also given numerous other functions: in 1938 in the Reich Chamber of Labor and leader of the XVII regional office of the Red Cross , in March 1939 head of the party liaison office at the “Reich Protectorate” of Bohemia and Moravia , in September 1939 commissioner of the Reich Defense Commissioner for Niederdonau, in 1940 he became Reich Governor and Housing Commissioner , in 1942 he himself became Reich Defense Commissioner and authorized representative for labor (i.e. forced labor ) for the Reichsgau. On June 16, 1943 Heinrich Himmler appointed him Reich Commissioner for the consolidation of German nationality in his Gau.

Hugo Jury was an advocate of Nazi racial hygiene from the start . In addition to promoting families, he also supported the persecution of Jews , Sinti and Roma , anti-social and mentally or physically ill people . The German Society for Racial Hygiene has set up bases in each district .

The jury was particularly interested in “Germanizing” its home region of Moravia , some administrative districts of Moravia were now part of the Lower Danube Reichsgau (e.g. Neubistritz , Znaim , Nikolsburg ). In economic terms, the jury wanted to develop Niederdonau into a model district . Through the operation of the Wiener Neustädter Flugzeugwerke founded by Hermann Göring , in which 20,000 people worked at times, unemployment was reduced and the economy was initially stimulated. In order to meet the high demand for energy from industry, the Niederdonau Gauwerke created a uniform electricity network and advanced the expansion of oil production .

In parallel to the expansion of industry, agriculture was modernized and technologized. Many farms were indebted in 1938 and in some cases threatened with foreclosures. Under the pressure of the NSDAP, the creditors had to relieve the farmers of small debts, large debts were rescheduled for up to 51 years on request. This also made the farmers dependent on the Nazi system of rule and made them vulnerable to blackmail: new debts and sales were subject to approval and operational controls could be ordered. The funds released by the debt relief were used by the farmers to buy agricultural machines. However, the rapid development of industry also withdrew workers from agriculture.

In 1941, under the impression of military victories, economic plans for the post-war period were forged. The Niederdonau should play a special role in the context of the continental economy . With the Dr. Hugo Jury Plan , an extensive catalog of measures was created that should permeate all areas of life and business and redesign the Lower Danube in the National Socialist sense. In 1942, however, due to the course of the war, all post-war planning was discontinued on the orders of the Führer.

When the labor shortage in agriculture, later also in industry, assumed threatening proportions due to the beginning of the war, children and foreign civilian workers, later increasingly forced laborers, were used to maintain the economy. In 1941, 88,500 foreign workers were already registered in the Lower Danube -Vienna State Labor Office ; in 1943 the proportion of forced laborers in some industrial companies was over 70% of the workforce. Finally, concentration camp prisoners were also used to compensate for the labor shortage, especially in the armaments industry. For this purpose, satellite camps of the Mauthausen concentration camp were set up in Melk , Wiener Neustadt , Wiener Neudorf , Hinterbrühl , Hirtenberg , Schwechat, Amstetten, St. Valentin and St. Äegyd .

Towards the end of the war, when Vienna threatened to fall into the hands of the Red Army , the NSDAP Gauleitung and the Reichsstatthalterei moved to the west and arrived in Krems on April 3rd. On the night of 8 to 9 May 1945 Hugo committed jury in Zwettl suicide .

The role of juries in the massacre at Stein prison was never finally clarified. In any case, it has been proven that one of the main perpetrators, the SA standard leader and district staff leader of the Volkssturm for the Krems district, Leo Pilz , who was later sentenced to death for this , was made available to the Gauleiter jury from March 1945. He later stated before the People's Court that on April 6, 1945, the jury had ordered the alleged prisoner uprising to be put down. The former attorney general Johann Karl Stich testified in court that the jury had ordered the shooting of the 44 prisoners on April 15, 1945. This could just as well be a protective claim by Stich, but the court assumed that a jury was responsible for the trial against Stich.

On December 7, 1948, a people's court proceedings against the absent accused jury took place in accordance with Section 24 of the People's Court Proceedings and Property Decline Act 1947 because of his illegal NSDAP membership and participation in the NSDAP seizure of power in Austria, in which a decision was made on property collapse.

According to a statement by Gottfried von Eine , the jury is said to have had an affair with Elisabeth Schwarzkopf .

literature

• Helge Dvorak: Biographical Lexicon of the German Burschenschaft. Volume I: Politicians. Volume 3: I-L. Winter, Heidelberg 1999, ISBN 3-8253-0865-0 , pp. 44-45.
• Wolfgang Graf: Austrian SS generals. Himmler's reliable vassals. Hermagoras-Verlag, Klagenfurt / Ljubljana / Vienna 2012, ISBN 978-3-7086-0578-4 .
• Jury Hugo. In: Austrian Biographical Lexicon 1815–1950 (ÖBL). Volume 3, Publishing House of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna 1965, p. 157 f. (Direct links on p. 157 , p. 158 ).
• Hugo Jury , Internationales Biographisches Archiv 32/1947 from July 28, 1947, in the Munzinger Archive ( beginning of article freely accessible)
• Christian Wiesler: Erwin Herbert Rainalter, the writer and Dr. Hugo Jury, the doctor. Diploma thesis, University of Vienna, 2009.
• Bernhard Gamsjäger , Ernst Langthaler : The Frankenfelser book. Frankenfels 1997.

Web links

• Hugo Jury in the database of members of the Reichstag
• Entry for Hugo Jury in the database of the state's memory of the history of Lower Austria ( Museum Niederösterreich )

Individual evidence

1. ^ ^{A b} Wolfgang Graf: Austrian SS Generals. Himmler's reliable vassals , Klagenfurt / Ljubljana / Vienna 2012, p. 137.
2. ↑ ^{a b c d} Hugo Jury in the database of the members of the Reichstag
3. ↑ ^{a b c} Jury, Hugo. In: Austrian Biographical Lexicon 1815–1950 (ÖBL). Volume 3, Publishing House of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna 1965, p. 157 f. (Direct links on p. 157 , p. 158 ).
4. ^ Bernhard Gamsjäger and Ernst Langthaler (eds.): The Frankenfelser book . Frankenfels 1997, page 378.
5. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g h} Klaus-Dieter Mulley: Gauleiter and Reichsstatthalter: Dr. Hugo jury . In: Niederösterreichisches Landesarchiv (Hrsg.): Lower Austria in the 20th century: Politics . tape 1 . Böhlau Verlag, Vienna 2008, ISBN 978-3-205-78197-4 , p. 79 ff . ( limited preview in Google Book search).
6. ^ Bernhard Gamsjäger and Ernst Langthaler (eds.): The Frankenfelser book . Frankenfels 1997, p. 264.
7. ↑ ^{a b c d} Gertrude Enderle-Burcel , Johannes Kraus: Christian - Ständisch - Authoritarian: Mandatars in the Ständestaat 1934–1938 . Ed .: DÖW and Austrian Society for Historical Source Studies. Vienna 1991, ISBN 3-901142-00-2 , p. 116 f .
8. ^ Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945 . Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Second updated edition, Frankfurt am Main 2005, p. 293.
9. ^ Otto Helmut Urban : Cabinet Seyß-Inquart: The last Austrian federal government of the 1st Republic. ORF , accessed on October 1, 2017 . 
10. ^ Wolfgang Graf: Austrian SS Generals. Himmler's reliable vassals , Klagenfurt / Ljubljana / Vienna 2012, p. 138.
11. ^ Regional Court Vienna (ed.): Judgment of the Regional Court Vienna as a people's court against Leo Pilz et al from August 30, 1946 . August 30, 1946, p. 44 ( judgment online on the DÖW website (PDF; 366 kB)).
12. ^ Regional Court Vienna (ed.): Judgment of the Regional Court Vienna as a people's court against Leo Pilz et al from August 30, 1946 . August 30, 1946, p. 39 ( judgment online on the DÖW website (PDF; 366 kB)).
13. ^ Regional Court Vienna (ed.): Judgment of the Regional Court Vienna as a people's court against Leo Pilz et al from August 30, 1946 . August 30, 1946, p. 55 ( judgment online on the DÖW website (PDF; 366 kB)).
14. ↑ Dr. Stich has ordered forty-four executions . In: Arbeiter-Zeitung . No. 123 . Vorwärts-Verlag, Vienna May 29, 1948, p. 4 ( online on the AZ website).
15. ^ Matthias Keuschnigg: Johann Karl stitch . In: Library Association in the Regional Court for Criminal Matters Vienna (Hrsg.): The history of the gray house and the Austrian criminal jurisdiction . BMJ , Vienna June 2012, p. 56–58 ( online on the BMJ website (PDF; 13.2 MB)).
16. ↑ Hellmut Butterweck : National Socialists before the People's Court Vienna: Austria's struggle for justice 1945-1955 in contemporary public perception . StudienVerlag, Innsbruck 2016, ISBN 978-3-7065-5833-4 ( limited preview in Google book search).
17. ↑ Reinhard Tenhumberg: LG Vienna Vg 11 Vr 3207/48. In: www.tenhumbergreinhard.de. Retrieved September 30, 2017 . 
18. ↑ Michael H. Kater (see DNB ) in the English daily newspaper The Guardian August 24, 2006 Triumph of the wilful.