Josef Bühler

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Buhler, 1942.

Josef Bühler (born February 16, 1904 in Waldsee , Oberamt Waldsee , Kingdom of Württemberg ; † August 21, 1948 in Krakow , Poland ) was a German lawyer . During the National Socialist era , Bühler was State Secretary in the government of the General Government in Krakow . Since June 1940 he was the permanent deputy of the Governor General Hans Frank and jointly responsible for crimes against the Polish population and the Holocaust in Poland .

Life

Bühler grew up with eleven siblings in Bad Waldsee as the son of a baker in a Catholic family. After graduating from grammar school in 1922, Bühler studied law at the universities of Munich , Kiel , Erlangen and Berlin . He completed his studies in 1932 with a doctorate as Dr. jur. from.

From 1930 to 1932 he worked for Hans Frank's law firm in Munich , but only joined the NSDAP on April 1, 1933 , ostensibly for tactical reasons, after the National Socialists “ seized power ” . From 1932, Bühler initially worked as a district court advisor in the Bavarian Ministry of Justice and from October 1934 in the Reich Ministry of Justice . In 1935 he became a senior public prosecutor at the Munich Higher Regional Court . Since 1938 at the latest he was head of the ministerial office of Hans Frank, the Reich Minister without portfolio . In early December 1939, Bühler rose to become Ministerial Director.

From November 1939 he was head of the office of Governor General Frank in Krakow, and from March 1940 his state secretary. As early as November 24, 1939, Bühler provided Kajetan Mühlmann, the special commissioner for the collection and protection of art and cultural treasures, with the necessary means to steal art . From June 1940 he was appointed, initially provisionally, Frank's deputy. On May 16, 1940 and May 20, Bühler took part in two conferences in preparation for the extraordinary pacification operation, with which the resistance of the Polish intelligentsia was to be eliminated. On August 22, 1940, Bühler signed an instruction to rename street names in the Generalgouvernement. In a special circular dated January 12, 1942, Bühler instructed the district governors not to make use of the right to pardon those Jews who had been sentenced to death for escaping the ghetto.

Bühler between Freisler and Luther : Minutes of the meeting of the Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942

Bühler urged Reinhard Heydrich at the Wannsee Conference to begin with the final solution to the Jewish question in the General Government because he saw no transport problems here. This emerges clearly from the minutes of January 20, 1942, in which it says: “State Secretary Dr. Bühler stated that the General Government would welcome it if the final solution to this question was started in the General Government ”. In 1942, Bühler took part in the Zamość campaign near Lublin for the deportation of Poles for German settlements and for forced labor to Germany.

Bühler fled Cracow on January 18, 1945 and was arrested by the Americans on May 30, 1945 and interned in the Nuremberg witness prison. On April 23, 1946, he was interrogated as a witness for the defendant Hans Frank by his defense lawyer Alfred Seidl before the International Military Court in Nuremberg . Bühler and Frank tried to blame SS leader Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger , who had committed suicide in American captivity on May 10, 1945 , for the crimes in Poland, and otherwise to blame Heinrich Himmler for everything .

After hearing witnesses, he was transferred to Poland in May 1946 , in accordance with the Moscow Declaration that National Socialist criminals were to be returned to the scene of their crimes . There Josef Buhler was born on 10 July 1948 by the Supreme National Tribunal in Cracow sentenced to death , and on August 21 executed .

literature

  • International Military Tribunal Nuremberg (ed.): The trial of the main war criminals before the International Military Tribunal (November 14, 1945 to October 1, 1946). Official text in German.
  • Dr. Josef Buhler, State Secretary and Deputy Governor-General. Supreme National Tribunal of Poland (17TH JUNE-10TH JULY, 1948) , Law-Reports of Trials of War Criminals, Selected and prepared by The United Nations War Crimes Commission , Vol. 14, HMSO, London 1948. ( PDF )
  • Bogdan Musiał : German civil administration and persecution of Jews in the Generalgouvernement . Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 1999 ISBN 3-447-04208-7 ; 2nd rev. 2004, ISBN 3-447-05063-2 .
  • Towiah Friedman : The highest Nazi officials in the General Government in Poland in the war years 1939-1945. Institute of Documentation in Israel for the Investigation of Nazi War Crimes, Haifa 2002.
  • Hans Grimm: Dr. Josef Bühler. Impulse generator at the Wannsee Conference . In: Wolfgang Praske: Perpetrators, helpers, free riders, Volume 4: Nazi victims from Upper Swabia . Kugelberg, Gerstetten 2015, ISBN 978-3-945893-00-5 , pp. 70-83.
  • Hans-Christian Jasch, Christoph Kreutzmüller Eds .: The participants. The men at the Wannsee Conference. Metropol, Berlin 2017 (detailed on Bühler)

Web links

Commons : Josef Bühler  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f Ernst Klee : The personal dictionary for the Third Reich . Who was what before and after 1945 . Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Second updated edition, Frankfurt am Main 2005, p. 81.
  2. ↑ a b c d Bogdan Musial: German civil administration and the persecution of Jews in the Generalgouvernement . Wiesbaden 1999, p. 382.
  3. ↑ This and the following points refer to the judgment in Poland.
  4. ^ Catalog entry of the DNB
personal data
SURNAME Bühler, Josef
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German State Secretary and war criminal
DATE OF BIRTH February 16, 1904
PLACE OF BIRTH Waldsee , Oberamt Waldsee , Kingdom of Württemberg
DATE OF DEATH August 21, 1948
Place of death Krakow , People's Republic of Poland