Josef Brandl (lawyer)

Josef Brandl (born April 30, 1901 in Osterhofen , † 1991 in Passau ) was a German administrative lawyer. During the German occupation of Poland 1939–1945 he headed the economic departments in the district of Krakow and in the district of Galicia in the General Government . In 1944 he was appointed acting head of civil administration in the district of Galicia . He escaped prosecution in the People's Republic of Poland by fleeing. Brandl lived in illegality as "Karl Müller" until the beginning of the 1950s, before he was managing director of the Karlsruhe Nuclear Research Center from 1961 to 1968 through the Blank Office , the Federal Ministry of Defense and the Federal Ministry for Atomic Affairs .

Life

Brandl studied law and philosophy at the University of Passau and the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich . In 1922 he was reciprocated in the Corps Bavaria Munich . As an inactive , he moved to the Julius Maximilians University of Würzburg , where he was awarded a Dr. iur. received his doctorate . He was then admitted to the bar at the Passau Regional Court until 1936 . He joined the National Socialist German Workers' Party on May 1, 1933. He had been a member of the NSKK since 1936.

In 1936 Brandl gave up his legal practice and went to the Reichsumsiedlungsgesellschaft (RUGes). There he managed the branches in Eschenbach in the Upper Palatinate and Amberg until 1938 . His area of ​​responsibility included the procurement of land for the Wehrmacht . Three quarters of a year after the annexation of Austria , in December 1938 he moved to the military economics department of the Reichsstatthalter in Vienna and worked as a scientific assistant under Otto Wächter , who headed the Vienna office and decisively promoted Brandl's further career.

Functions in the General Government

When Otto Wächter became governor of the Cracow district in the General Government after the Polish campaign at the end of 1939 , Brandl followed him to Cracow and became head of the economics department under Wächter. The German occupation of the General Government was characterized by the fact that the Jewish and large parts of the Polish population were killed. In this area, after no quick victory was to be expected in the East, an economic exploitation policy was pushed in parallel to the extermination campaigns ( annihilation through labor ), which was intended to compensate for the severe shortage of labor in the German economy. Brandl acted at the interface between the politics of extermination and exploitation and cooperated closely with the Central Trust Office East (HTO), which organizes the economic plunder of Poland . Brandl ran his official business in the Krakow district until February 1942, then in the course of the expansion of the General Government in Lemberg , Galicia district , where he was also acting head of office from February 1944 after the partisan attack on the previous incumbent Otto Bauer .

Brandl was not only fully informed about the persecution of Jews and the Holocaust , but according to Stefan Lehnstaedt from the German Historical Institute in Warsaw, he was "a central figure in the plundering of Jews and Poles". As an economist and “predator”, as the historian Bernd-A. Rusinek Brandl, Brandl negotiated repeatedly with the SS and Police Leader (SSPF) of Galicia, Fritz Katzmann , in order to exclude Jewish workers who were absolutely necessary for the war economy from the deportations . In September 1944 Otto Wächter became head of the German military administration in Italy . Brandl also followed him to Italy.

Illegality and a career after 1945

Brandl, who was captured in Italy at the end of the war, was to be extradited to Poland in 1946 because he was on a list of war criminals of the Polish government- in- exile in London . In November 1946 he was able to flee to Poland while being transported by rail. For the next few years he went into hiding with false papers under the name "Karl Müller". In 1946 he traded as “commercial manager”, from 1950 to 1954 as an independent businessman in Heilbronn , presumably in the scrap trade.

From 1954 he worked - now again as Josef Brandl - in Koblenz in the development of the Federal Armed Forces : first in the predecessor authority of the Ministry of Defense, the Blank Office , as "Government Director for Reuse", then for the following year and a half at the newly established Ministry of Defense . From there, in December 1956, he moved to the Federal Ministry for Atomic Affairs , as a ministerial advisor in the “Basic Issues of the Nuclear Industry” department. In 1961, at the instigation of Karl Winnacker , Brandl became the commercial director for the “ Multi- Purpose Research Reactor” (MZFR) project at the Karlsruhe Nuclear Research Center and remained so until 1968.

In the course of these seven years, Brandl had three managing directors at the Karlsruhe Nuclear Research Center: the former IG Farben chemists and managers Gerhard Ritter and Walther Schnurr and the lawyer Rudolf Greifeld . According to the historian Rusinek, all four were “dashing top-down decision-makers” there because of their leadership experience in World War II - despite their possibly different characters and different political attitudes. At least it cannot be proven that Ritter and Schnurr were also National Socialists in the ideological sense like Brandl and Greifeld.

Fonts

• Editor (with the collaboration of Manfred Blechschmidt): Regulations on the transport of radioactive substances . Loose-leaf collection. Nomos. Baden-Baden 1971 ff.

literature

• Bernd-A. Rusinek : The Greifeld Case , Karlsruhe - Science Management and the Nazi Past (= publications from the archive of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology; 5). KIT Scientific Publishing, Karlsruhe 2019, ISBN 978-3-7315-0844-1 ; there in particular the chapter Dr. jur. Josef Brandl , pp. 289-314.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Kösener Corpslisten 1996, 13/1484.
2. ↑ Dissertation: The procedure before the single judge in criminal proceedings .
3. ↑ Bernd-A. Rusinek: The Greifeld Case, Karlsruhe - Science Management and the Nazi Past (= publications from the archive of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology; 5). KIT Scientific Publishing, Karlsruhe 2019, p. 291.
4. ↑ Dieter Pohl : National Socialist Persecution of Jews in East Galicia, 1941–1944. Oldenbourg, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-486-56233-9 , p. 412; Bernd-A. Rusinek: The Greifeld Case, Karlsruhe - Science Management and the Nazi Past , p. 292.
5. ↑ Bernd-A. Rusinek: The Greifeld Case, Karlsruhe - Science Management and the Nazi Past , p. 292 f.
6. ↑ Bernd-A. Rusinek: The Greifeld Case, Karlsruhe - Science Management and the Nazi Past , p. 299 f. and 309.
7. ↑ Bernd-A. Rusinek: The Greifeld Case, Karlsruhe - Science Management and the Nazi Past , p. 299, Rusinek quotes here from a letter from Lehnstaedt to him on August 6, 2014.
8. ↑ Bernd-A. Rusinek: The Greifeld Case, Karlsruhe - Science Management and the Nazi Past , pp. 307–309.
9. ^ Markus Roth : Herrenmenschen. The German District Chiefs in Occupied Poland - Career Paths, Rule Practice and Post-History. Wallstein, Göttingen 2009, ISBN 978-3-8353-0477-2 (= contributions to the history of the 20th century , volume 9; also dissertation at the University of Jena 2008), p. 339 (note 69); Bernd-A. Rusinek: The Greifeld Case, Karlsruhe - Science Management and the Nazi Past , p. 311.
10. ↑ ^{a b} Bernd-A. Rusinek: The Greifeld Case, Karlsruhe - Science Management and the Nazi Past , p. 312.
11. ↑ Bernd-A. Rusinek: The Greifeld Case, Karlsruhe - Science Management and the Nazi Past , p. 289 f. and 314.
12. ↑ Bernd-A. Rusinek: The Greifeld Case, Karlsruhe - Science Management and the Nazi Past , p. 330; see. also the individual biographies of Rudolf Greifeld (pp. 33–244), Gerhard Ritter (pp. 255–274) and Walther Schnurr (pp. 275–288).