Josef Müller (politician, 1898)

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Müller in Koblenz in 1948

Josef Müller (born March 27, 1898 in Steinwiesen ( Upper Franconia ); † September 12, 1979 in Munich ; called Ochsensepp ) was a member of the Bavarian People's Party in the Weimar Republic and, after 1945, the first chairman of the CSU .

Life

Müller was the son of a farmer. Already in his school days, when he worked as a carter during the holidays , he earned the nickname "Ochsensepp". He attended the Ottonianum boys' seminar in Bamberg , had been doing military service with the mine throwers since 1916 , was deployed on the Western Front and was released as a deputy sergeant in 1919 . After the war he made up his Abitur at the New Gymnasium in Bamberg, studied law and economics in Munich , and obtained his doctorate in 1925. oec. publ. and had been a lawyer in Munich since 1927. Since his student days he was a member of the Catholic student associations K.St.V. Ottonia Munich and Isaria Freising in the KV .

In the 1960s Apparatebau Gauting GmbH belonged ten percent to its director Rudolf Höfling, and 90 percent to Müller and his daughter Christine-Marianne.

time of the nationalsocialism

In the years following the Nazi takeover in 1933, Müller was legal advisor to a larger group of Ariseurs , the Eidenschink consortium. Among other things, he helped this consortium to acquire parts of the property of the industrialist Ignatz Nacher , the director of Germany's second largest brewery Engelhardt in Berlin, which were far below their value. Nacher had been thrown into prison to "boil him soft". Other companies were the Feldafing calf feed factory, the Weihermann Burgkunstadt shoe factory and many others.

On the other hand, Josef Müller belonged to the Catholic resistance and, as a lawyer, defended Nazi opponents in court. As a resistance fighter he had contacts with Canaris , von Dohnanyi and Oster . Since 1939, most recently in the rank of captain, Müller headed the branch air of the defense department of the High Command of the Wehrmacht in the military district VII. On behalf of Easter he tried 1939/40 to bring about the Vatican a negotiated peace with England for the event that Hitler was overthrown . At the beginning of April 1940, what was practically the last attempt to get the Wehrmacht leadership to take action against Hitler failed. The report brought by Franz Halder to the Commander-in-Chief of the Army Brauchitsch was outraged by him and rejected as a call to treason . In early May 1940, shortly before the start of the German campaign in the west , Müller passed on information about the impending attack to his liaison officers in Rome.

Müller had to largely cease his activities after Heydrichs SD had started to investigate the treason case that he had become aware of. After a letter from the German diplomat Fritz Menshausen , Counselor at the German Embassy to the Holy See, to Cardinal Secretary of State Luigi Maglione , Prelate Ludwig Kaas was identified as the mastermind of a possible conspiracy that also included Müller and the Jesuit priest and papal confidante Robert Leiber . These extremely dangerous secret contacts of Josef Müller ran in Rome through Professor Leiber, who practically played the role of the private secretary of Pius XII. exercised. Conspiratorial discussions always took place in the professor's private rooms at the Gregoriana , Piazza della Pilotta 4. Müller and Leiber always went to work with great care. As soon as Müller arrived in Rome, he phoned, without naming his name, with: "I'm here", to which Leiber only gave the time of the meeting to answer. From Father Leiber contact led directly to the Pope and through him to the British Ambassador to the Holy See, Sir Francis d'Arcy Osborne .

In 1943 Müller was arrested by the Gestapo . He first came from the Berlin Gestapo prison to the Buchenwald concentration camp . On April 3, 1945, he was taken to Flossenbürg with other prisoners with whom he had stayed in the Buchenwald basement bunker: Ludwig Gehre , Franz-Maria Liedig , Alexander von Falkenhausen , Friedrich von Rabenau , Hermann Pünder , air officer Wassili Kokorin (the nephew Molotows ), Hugh M. Falconer (Squadron Leader Royal Air Force ), Payne Best and Dietrich Bonhoeffer .

Gehre and Bonhoeffer were executed together with Wilhelm Canaris , Hans Oster , Karl Sack and Theodor Strünck on April 9, 1945 in the Flossenbürg concentration camp , Rabenau on April 14 or 15 there, several other combatants were executed in other places, Liedig and Müller survived.

Müller then came to the Dachau concentration camp . His secretary Anna Haaser learned that Müller was still alive. In April 1945, Müller belonged to a group of over a hundred and thirty “special prisoners and clan prisoners” from the Dachau concentration camp who were taken hostage to South Tyrol .

After 1945

Josef Müller (right) at the Rittersturz conference in 1948 , left: Hermann Lüdemann

After the war he founded the CSU in Bavaria with Adam Stegerwald from Lower Franconia . He spoke out in favor of founding a liberal and Christian party that, like the CDU in other German countries and in contrast to the Center Party and the Bavarian People's Party, should not only address Catholic Christians.

Müller was chairman of the Christian Social Union (CSU) from 1946 to 1949, a member of the Bavarian State Constituent Assembly , the State Council of the American Occupation Area and until 1962 a member of the Bavarian State Parliament , from 1947 to 1952 Bavarian Minister of Justice and from 1947 to 1950 Deputy Prime Minister in Bavaria.

It was Müller's merit as CSU chairman that in the confusing first phase he prevailed against the traditionalists who wanted to turn the CSU into a party in the spirit of the old Bavarian People's Party. However, Müller could not hold out long as chairman, because the wing battles in the new party were not yet over: In May 1949, he was clearly defeated by Prime Minister Hans Ehard in the election as CSU chairman . From 1952 to 1960 he was head of the Munich CSU.

Müller was previously Justice Minister in the Ehard cabinet until 1952 . In his capacity as Bavarian Minister of Justice, he campaigned in the reparation debate against the “civil law obligation to reparation” provided for in the draft of the Allied Compensation Act, according to which not only the state, but also the individual profiteers from “Aryanizations” as well as informers and others. a. could have been used to pay compensation. Müller himself had worked as a lawyer in "Aryanizations" in the Third Reich. As Minister of Justice, Müller was significantly involved in the Auerbach affair , in which the national conservative side tried to bring down the "State Commissioner for Racially, Religiously and Politically Persecuted People" because he was too self-consciously pointing out the crimes of the Germans in World War II. As early as 1949, Müller had assigned a public prosecutor specifically to collect incriminating material against Philipp Auerbach , who was in office from 1946 until his arrest in 1951. In 1951 a trial was brought against Auerbach. In the end, there was hardly anything left of the serious allegations. Nevertheless, Auerbach committed suicide the night after the verdict was pronounced because he could not bear to be convicted. A state parliament investigation committee rehabilitated Auerbach in 1954.

In 1951 Josef Müller was suspected of having received money from a Jewish reparation institution. He then admitted that in the first half of 1950 he had received 20,000 DM from the regional rabbi Aaron Ohrstein . Since he was unable to prove, among other things, the use of the money in the state parliament investigation committee that met in the summer of 1952 on the Auerbach affair , he had to give up his office as Minister of Justice.

When he lost the election to Hans-Jochen Vogel as Munich mayor candidate in 1960 , he withdrew from active politics.

Awards

Fonts

  • Until the last consequence. A life for peace and freedom ; Munich: Süddeutscher Verlag, 1975; ISBN 3-7991-5813-8

literature

  • Franz Menges :  Müller, Joseph. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 18, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1997, ISBN 3-428-00199-0 , pp. 430-432 ( digitized version ).
  • Karl-Hans Kern : The Secrets of Dr. Josef Müller. Conjectures about the murders of Flossenbürg (1945) and Pöcking (1960). Frieling Verlag: Berlin 2000. ISBN 3-8280-1230-2
  • For the 100th birthday. Josef Müller. The first chairman of the CSU. Politics for a New Age . Published by the Hanns Seidel Foundation, Munich 1998
  • K. Köhler: The Wednesday group at the Ochsensepp . In: Bavaria 1945 - Democratic new beginning. Interviews with eyewitnesses. , edited by Michael Schröder. Süddeutscher Verlag, Munich 1985, ISBN 3-7991-6274-7 .
  • F. Menges in Staatslexikon III (1987) under Josef Müller
  • Friedrich Hermann Hettler: Josef Müller - man of resistance and first CSU chairman . Miscellanea Bavarica Monacensia Volume 155, Neue Schriftenreihe des Stadtarchiv München 1991, also dissertation 1991, ISBN 3-87821-280-1
  • W. Stump in Siegfried Koß, Wolfgang Löhr (Hrsg.): Biographisches Lexikon des KV. 2nd part (= Revocatio historiae. Volume 3). SH-Verlag, Schernfeld 1993, ISBN 3-923621-98-1 , p. 94 f.
  • K.-U. Gelberg: Josef Müller (1898–1979). In: Contemporary history in life pictures. From the German Catholicism of the 19th and 20th centuries. Volume 8. Ed. by Jürgen Aretz , Rudolf Morsey and Anton Rauscher . Mainz 1997, pp. 155-172.

Web links

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

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Gladiotors in the network . In: Der Spiegel . No. 25 , 1966 ( online - June 13, 1966 ).
  2. ↑ Johannes Ludwig : Boycott, expropriation, murder. The "de-Jewification" of the German economy . Facta Oblita Hamburg 1988, extended new edition Piper, Munich 1992, ISBN 3-492-11580-2 . P. 95.
  3. ↑ First shoot in the herb . In: Der Spiegel . No. 27 , 1952 ( online - Jan. 16, 1952 ).
  4. ↑ Peter's grave: site of a conspiracy against Hitler? , Vatican Radio , February 21, 2012
  5. ↑ We'll end on the gallows report in Der Spiegel 20/1969 of May 12, 1969
  6. ↑ Peter Koblank: The Liberation of Special Prisoners and Kinship Prisoners in South Tyrol , online edition Mythos Elser 2006
  7. ↑ Goschler, Constantin: Debt and Debt , The Politics of Reparation for Victims of National Socialism since 1945, page 90f., Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2005.
  8. ↑ Karin Sommer:. The Auerbach affair. A Bavarian Dreyfus scandal? ( Memento of December 4, 2014 in the Internet Archive ), summary of a broadcast by Bayerischer Rundfunk, November 3, 1990.
  9. ↑ Wolfgang Kraushaar : The Auerbach Affair. In: Julius H. Schoeps : Life in the Land of the Perpetrators Jews in Postwar Germany (1945–1952) Jüdische Verlagsanstalt Berlin, pp. 208–218, here: p. 213.
  10. ↑ Hannes Ludyga, Philipp Auerbach , Berlin Science Publishers, 2005, ISBN 3-8305-1096-9 , pp 130-131, with sources.
  11. ^ Franz Menges: Müller, Joseph. In: Neue Deutsche Biographie 1997, p. 432.
  12. ↑ Clay in Potter's hand . In: Der Spiegel . No. 27 1952 ( online - July 2, 1952 ).
  13. ↑ Learn sheep's head . In: Der Spiegel . No. 48 , 1970 ( online - Nov. 23, 1970 ).
  14. ↑ Ralf Zerback : "CSU: Such dirty stories". DIE ZEIT , June 20, 2002, accessed on November 15, 2009 .
personal data
SURNAME Müller, Josef
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Ox Sepp
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician (CSU), MdL
DATE OF BIRTH March 27, 1898
PLACE OF BIRTH Steinwiesen (Upper Franconia)
DATE OF DEATH September 12, 1979
Place of death Munich