Josef Grohé

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Josef Grohé (around 1938)

Josef Grohé (born November 6, 1902 in Gemünden (Hunsrück) ; † December 27, 1987 in Cologne-Brück ) was Gauleiter of the Cologne-Aachen Gau of the NSDAP and, although without state functions, the actual ruler in this area.

Life

Josef Grohé grew up as the ninth of twelve children as the son of a small farmer and owner of a general store in Gemünden in the Simmern district (Hunsrück). He attended elementary school in his hometown. In addition to school, he helped in the family business and in agriculture. After attending school, he became a commercial clerk in the hardware industry in Cologne . Even as an adolescent he was active in anti-democratic and racist organizations - for example, in 1921 he joined the anti-Semitic Deutschvölkischer Schutz- und Trutzbund (DVSTB). In August 1921 he joined the NSDAP with some other members of the DVSTB. Grohé was co-founder of the NSDAP local group in Cologne, which was recognized by the Munich party leadership on February 3, 1922.

During the “ Ruhrkampf ” in 1923, Grohé was recruited by a Reichswehr officer for “active resistance” against the Allied occupying power and was involved in the demolition of a coal train destined for France between Bedburg and Elsdorf . He then had to flee to Munich , where he first met Hitler . Since his complicity was not revealed, he was soon able to return to Cologne.

After the ban on the NSDAP as a result of the Hitler putsch on November 9, 1923, Josef Grohé participated in the founding of a new national party in January 1924, which was converted into the re-admitted NSDAP on March 1, 1925. He received the membership number 13.340 and became Gau managing director of the NS-Gaues Rheinland-Süd under the then Gauleiter and later head of the German Labor Front Robert Ley . The Ley-Grohé team was notorious in the Rhineland for its provocations and aggressiveness. On March 13, 1927, an SA troop, singing anti-Semitic songs, passed the synagogue in Cologne's Roonstrasse . He was also editor-in-chief of the West German Observer, founded on May 10, 1925, until 1931 . The newspaper made a name for itself again and again with wild anti-Semitic inflammatory articles in the striker style. Therefore, he had to answer in court several times. In the spring of 1928 he was sentenced to several weeks' imprisonment.

In 1929 Grohé was elected to the Cologne city council and took over the leadership of the NSDAP. After the division of the Rhineland-South district in 1931, he became Gauleiter of Cologne-Aachen . For a short time, from 1932 to 1933, he was a member of the Prussian state parliament , then from November 1933 to the Reichstag . During the Nazi era he was the real ruler in Cologne and the surrounding area and was jointly responsible for the persecution of political opponents, the oppression of the churches and, above all, for the disenfranchisement of the Jews and at least one who knew about the Holocaust .

On January 30, 1941, he received the War Merit Cross (KVK) 1st class without swords, and on July 2, 1942, due to his activities to care for the civilian population of his district, the War Merit Cross (KVK) 1st class with swords.

Because of the dissatisfaction of the National Socialist leadership with the "flabby" General von Falkenhausen , Grohé was appointed Reichskommissar for the occupied territories in Belgium and northern France on July 19, 1944 in order to get more people and material for the war economy out of there. However, since Brussels was liberated by the Allies on September 3, 1944, he was hardly able to work in this office.

Although Grohé called for a fight against the advancing US troops in the spring of 1945, he left Cologne on March 5, 1945 in a motorboat from Cologne on the left bank of the Rhine and lived in various places in the as yet unoccupied Bergisches Land . Goebbels noted in his diary on April 4, 1945 about Grohé's removal : “Despite the most pompous announcements, Grohé did not defend his Gau. He left him before the civilian population was taken away and now wants to play himself as a great hero ... The population believed they could expect our Gauleiter to fight in their Gau and, if necessary, to fall in it. In no case was this the case. As a result, the party has pretty much played out in the West. "

Former gravesite of the Grohé couple in the Melaten cemetery

After the end of the war , he hid temporarily as a farm worker "Otto Gruber" in Holzhausen in Hesse and a year later in neighboring Stormbruch . On August 21, 1946 he was arrested by the British there. He was first interned in Belgium and extradited to Germany in 1949. He was sentenced to 4½ years imprisonment in Bielefeld on September 18, 1950, for being part of the NSDAP's leadership corps, which was detrimental to knowledge, which was deemed to have been served upon internment. The remainder of the prison term was suspended after the North Rhine-Westphalian Prime Minister Karl Arnold granted a petition for clemency, which was also followed by Cardinal Joseph Frings from Cologne .

He then worked in the toy industry in Cologne. According to the British secret service, in 1953 he had contacts with the former NS State Secretary Werner Naumann , who wanted to infiltrate the North Rhine-Westphalian FDP with the Naumann district .

Grohé recently lived in Cologne-Brück for many years and, as a former civil servant, received his full pension from the Federal Republic of Germany.

Grohé was one of the committed National Socialists who helped build the party and remained loyal to the regime until immediately before the collapse. He remained a supporter of the Nazi ideology until the end of his life and showed no remorse.

His grave was on the Melaten cemetery in Cologne (hall 11 in F) .

literature

  • Birte Klarzyk: From the NSDAP Gauleiter to the West German honest man: the Josef Grohé case. in: Jost Dülffer , Margit Szöllösi-Janze (eds.): Cast shadows on the "brown Cologne". The Nazi era and afterwards (= publications of the Cologne History Association, Vol. 49) SH-Verlag, Cologne 2010, ISBN 3-89498-202-0 , pp. 307–326.
  • Joachim Lilla , Martin Döring, Andreas Schulz: extras in uniform. The members of the Reichstag 1933–1945. A biographical manual. Including the ethnic and National Socialist members of the Reichstag from May 1924. Droste, Düsseldorf 2004, ISBN 3-7700-5254-4 .
  • Horst Matzerath : Cologne in the time of National Socialism 1933-1945 (= History of the City of Cologne, Volume 12). Greven Verlag, Cologne 2009, ISBN 978-3-7743-0429-1 .
  • Daniel Meis: Josef Grohé (1902-1987) - a political life? wvb, Berlin 2020, ISBN 978-3-96138-217-0 .
  • Helge Jonas Pösche: Josef Grohé - a Gauleiter as a hero of the family. In: Geschichte in Köln, Vol. 58, 2011, pp. 123–156.
  • Horst Wallraff: Josef Grohé (1902–1987), Gauleiter of the NSDAP . Portal Rhenish History of the Rhineland Regional Association (with pictures) from May 6, 2011; accessed on November 10, 2019.
  • Rolf Zerlett: Josef Grohé. In: Rheinische Lebensbilder 17 (1997), pp. 247–276.

Web links

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

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Horst Wallraff: Josef Grohé (1902-1987), Gauleiter of the NSDAP . Online article by Horst Wallraff from May 6, 2011 in the Rheinische Geschichte portal of the LVR. See literature.
  2. ^ The diaries of Joseph Goebbels, ed. Elke Fröhlich , part II, vol. 15, Munich 1995, p. 672.
  3. ↑ "When he saw us, he knew immediately": Hilde Fischer led the Americans to the hiding place of the Nazi leader . Express , March 20, 2015.
  4. ^ 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. 202 with reference to the source BA N 1080/273.
  5. ^ Josef Abt, Johann Ralf Beines, Celia Körber-Leupold: Melaten - Cologne graves and history . Greven, Cologne 1997, ISBN 3-7743-0305-3 , p. 183.
  6. ↑ express.de from December 2, 2018: Hitler admirers until death Infamous grave cleared from Cologne's Melaten cemetery , accessed on December 4, 2018.
  7. ↑ Biographical information on Joachim Henning on the homepage of the regional working group of memorials and memorial initiatives for the Nazi era in Rhineland-Palatinate
personal data
SURNAME Grohé, Josef
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician (NSDAP), MdR, Gauleiter
DATE OF BIRTH November 6, 1902
PLACE OF BIRTH Gemünden (Hunsrück)
DATE OF DEATH December 27, 1987
Place of death Cologne-Brück