Karl Brethauer

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Page 125 of the file on the task force Reichsleiter Rosenberg of the Office of Strategic Services (US Army)

Philipp Christian Karl Brethauer (born May 9, 1906 in Kassel ; † July 10, 1992 in Hann. Münden ) was a German specialist in German studies , local history researcher and main participant in the National Socialist cultural theft of the Jewish , Russian and Masonic archives and libraries in German-occupied Europe.

Study and Pre-War Period

Brethauer was the son of the State Secretary Friedrich Brethauer and his wife Wilhelmine Thomas. He passed the school leaving examination in 1925 at the Wilhelmsgymnasium Kassel and then studied German, history, Protestant theology and philosophy at the universities of Marburg , Berlin and Göttingen . His dissertation on Meister Eckhart was supervised by the speaker and later SS member Friedrich Neumann in Göttingen in 1930 . The Dr. phil. Brethauer received his doctorate , a study assistant at the Burgsitzschule Spangenberg , became a member of the Nazi teachers' association , the Sturmabteilung (SA) and the NSDAP . At that time Brethauer lived with his wife and their two children in Kaiserstr. 68, 3rd floor, in Kassel.

Activity in occupied France

Head of the Gau Main Office Brethauer was drafted into the Wehrmacht on September 1, 1940 and served as a soldier until March 3, 1941. On March 11, 1941, he was made available to the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) as a research assistant in Berlin, and in December 1941 as "Department Head for Special Use" and head of the ERR Main Working Group (HAG) West Unit with the ERR rank of a staff officer. His responsibilities included the management of the ERR official business evaluation department, the evaluation of the Jewish, Russian and Masonic libraries plundered by the ERR for the purpose of producing the central library of the NSDAP High School (ZBHS) and the selection of new French and Belgian publications for the ZBHS.

On November 9, 1941, Brethauer and Kurt von Behr arrived in Amsterdam for a week. They met with the leader of the main working group Netherlands, SS-Sturmbannführer Albert Schmidt-Stähler, and Gerhard Utikal to discuss the upcoming Dutch M-Action .

On July 15, 1942, at the end of his assignment in Berlin , Brethauer was personally proposed by Reichsleiter Alfred Rosenberg for a War Merit Cross, Second Class without swords, after which he was transferred to Paris . In Paris, Brethauer lived at 12, Rue Dumont d'Urville in the 16th arrondissement . He held his office in Paris until February 16, 1944 at the latest, as in a letter from the ERR Reichshauptstelleleiter Gerhard Utikal , who had been the head of the main working group in France, Brethauer for his “previous achievements” in the two above-mentioned offices thanks.

On January 19, 1943, Brethauer wrote from Paris that, as the head of the HAG West Unit, he was unable to prepare a standard annual report because he had only “worked in Paris for the last 4 months” and “because the documents (closed files) are in Berlin of the evaluation department. "Brethauer nevertheless determined the following statistics:

"In the area of ​​the main working group, a total of 1,196 deployment sites were processed, of which 447 delivered a positive result ... These figures also include the deployment sites where only works of art were confiscated ... The number of unsorted volumes should exceed one million ... Since work began again in the In June 1942, only material from the [sic] M-Aktion was processed and packed and the 500th box was made available for transport [to the Reich] in these days. "

Report on the Pétain government and collaboration in occupied France

In June 1944, shortly after D-Day , Brethauer prepared a report of 174 typed pages with the title France: Economy, Tradition and Supranational Powers, Collapse and Pétain Government, Collaboration . The report begins with a description of a speech by Louis-Ferdinand Celine in a restaurant in Paris. Brethauer claims to know Céline personally and not only defends Céline's anti-Semitic attitudes, but also opposed the allegations that Céline was a "pessimist and nihilist", which had led to a ban on Céline's books in the German Reich by the Reich Chamber of Literature , with the exception of the German publication of Céline's anti-Semitic pamphlet The Jewish Conspiracy in France in 1938. Brethauer's similar anti-Semitic and generally racist attitudes are illustrated here:

“According to the unanimous judgment of German and French experts, there are still enough healthy elements to regenerate the [French] people both racially and numerically. However, drastic measures and rigor and now and then reckless intervention will be necessary. But then you can still carry out the excretion of Jews, negroes and other colored people by blood, for example in southern France . "

At the time of this writing, most of the estimated 77,000 French Jews murdered in the Holocaust had already been deported .

Brethauer wrote detailed reviews of the French collaborators Pierre Laval , Marcel Bucard , Marcel Déat , Joseph Darnand , Jacques Doriot and many others and also clearly presents the Nazi perspective on occupied France as a whole. His assignment in Paris, the new releases of French and Choosing Belgian writers for the ZBHS gave Brethauer the opportunity to immerse himself deeply in the collaborative culture of occupied France. Gerhard Heller , who at the same time acted as a special leader for literary politics in Paris, wrote: "The people of Reichsleiter Rosenberg ... interfered in everything." Although he is certainly one of the most detailed contemporary reports from the point of view of a Nazi official and contemporary witness about the occupied France applies, but without the euphemisms of such post-war works as that of Gerhard Heller, Brethauer's report has not yet been mentioned in any of the larger works on occupied France.

Activities in Berlin and Langenau as well as in Ratibor

On September 25, 1944, Brethauer was commissioned to make a business trip to the central library of the High School (ZBHS) in Annenheim and Tanzenberg to find out “whether and how the French library that was left in Paris could be rebuilt from the ZBHS 'holdings Belgium library is to be supplemented with current material ”. The term "France Library" refers to the looted Jewish, Russian and Masonic libraries in France. In his letter of October 7, 1944 from Berlin, he wrote further:

“The sent book boxes are in Schloss Tanzenberg, including those that I, as the head of the main working group France, had sent from Paris to the ZBHS from duplicates of the French library, especially from purchased new publications ... In addition, there are approximately in the magazine in Tanzenberg 150,000 volumes unsorted on shelves, which I looked through ... So I can report that the Paris France library, which comprised approx. 35,000 volumes, is already being put together again in the basic stock and will be created relatively completely ... The Belgium library could for the most part be brought into the Reich. She went to Nikolsburg in a wagon with art objects . "

The "remaining" collection of looted books in Paris was lost to the Germans during the Allied liberation of Paris on August 1, 1944, and Brethauer was commissioned to examine whether this "library" could be replaced by duplicates, which he confirmed here .

From 1941 to the end of 1942, Brethauer was a member of the "staff management" of the ERR and head of a "translation agency" in Ratibor ; Every essay translated from Russian or Ukrainian by someone else was personally checked by "department head" Brethauer. There he was "Deputy Staff Operations Leader" under a "Staff Operations Leader" Walter Rehbock, "Main Department 1: Business Distribution and Organization".

In October 1944, Brethauer was in Langenau Castle (now Czernica ) near Hirschberg (now Jelenia Góra ), where SS Hauptsturmführer and ERR employee Herbert Gerigk had set up a warehouse for looted musical instruments at the same time . According to one source, Brethauer was in Czechoslovakia at the end of the war and in Hann shortly after the end of the war . Münden with his family, who were bombed out in their apartment in Kassel at the end of 1943.

Accountability after 1945

Brethauer was taken prisoner by the Western Allies until 1949. A year later a trial against six former ERR colleagues of Brethauer, including Gerhard Utikal , Robert Scholz and Bruno Lohse , was opened before the military tribunal in Paris . ERR chief Alfred Rosenberg was sentenced to death at the Nuremberg trials on October 1, 1946 and executed on October 16, 1946. It is not clear whether Brethauer was not summoned because of a lack of evidence or whether he was summoned but not extradited by the Federal Republic for various reasons, since French confidentiality regulations prohibit access to the files. Brethauer was never called to account after the war. The US secret service knew of his ERR activity in France because his name was mentioned in a report from the OSS . Brethauer was interrogated on January 5, 1960 together with Gerd Wunder by the Federal Office for External Restitutions (BAR) because of French claims from looted archives.

It is hardly surprising that Karl Brethauer has hardly been mentioned in the previous ERR literature. As early as December 2nd, 1943, the files of the ERR office in Berlin ( Bismarckstrasse 1, Berlin-Charlottenburg) were completely destroyed by an RAF air raid . Many ERR files have not been preserved after the war, since most of them were destroyed or burned when the Allied troops arrived . A large part of the remains of the ERR files was located in Eastern European archives after the war, to which Western historians only had access from 1989. The 1995 book Abducted Archives and Libraries by Peter M. Manasse set itself the goal of addressing "the organization and people" of the ERR, but the names of only three of the senior ERR leaders are named in the book - themselves the head of the ERR Central Office Berlin Georg Ebert was here without a full first name as "G. Ebert ”. Manasse continued to complain about the “state of chaos, confusion and neglect” that prevailed in the Eastern European archives after the fall of 1989.

It was only through the research of the American historian Patricia Kennedy Grimsted in recent decades that an overview of the holdings of the ERR files in the West and East European archives was made possible. The actual research work is still ongoing. Research in the archives of the Ukrainian archives revealed 102 ERR documents in which Brethauer's name is mentioned. The content of these documents has not yet been developed.

Career after 1945

From 1949 to 1951 Brethauer worked in the private sector. From 1951 Brethauer was allowed to work as a senior teacher for German, religion and history at the Lyzeum Hann. Münden continue to exercise.

From 1960 to 1989 he was a volunteer local home carer for the city of Hann. Münden. His publications from the 1950s - including over 500 articles in the newspaper Mündener Nachrichten / HNA Mündener Allgemeine - were all motivated by local research. Due to his activity as a local researcher , Brethauer was an honorary member of the local history and history association Sydekum zu Münden . In 2012 the members of the association decided not to mention his honorary membership in publications. At the same time they declared his work on local and historical topics as a valuable contribution to local history in Hann. Münden.

From 1964 to 1968 Brethauer was a member of the city council of Hann for the Independent Voting Association . Münden. He was a member of the school committee and the museum commission and chaired the advertising advisory board. In February 1982 he was awarded the honor ring of the city of Hann in recognition of his voluntary work. Münden and posthumously withdrawn on March 15, 2012.

In 2007, a detailed five-page biography was published about Brethauer in the book Mündener Personalities from Six Centuries , which describes his work in World War II in just one sentence:

"He spent the years of World War II on various fronts, most recently in Czechoslovakia."

Karl Brethauer was able to live undisturbed all the years after the Second World War without his previous Nazi activities ever having been published.

Posthumously

The ring of honor awarded by the city of Hann in February 1982. Münden was unanimously withdrawn by the city council on March 15, 2012 because of the posthumous Nazi activities that had become apparent.

Trivia

The author of the inadequate Brethauer biography (see above) was the former local home and cityscape curator Heinz Hartung, a colleague of Brethauer in the local history research environment in Hann. Münden. Hartung was of Jewish origin and racially persecuted during the Nazi era . His mother Frieda was deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto on January 12, 1944 , but survived. At the same time that Hartung's mother was imprisoned in the Theresienstadt ghetto, his future colleague Karl Brethauer wrote Nazi inflammatory pamphlets in support of the extermination of Jews in France. Heinz Hartung died in 2010 in Hann. Münden.

Fonts

  • The language of Meister Eckhart in the book of divine consolation. Dissertation, Dieterich'schen Universitäts-Buchdruckerei, Göttingen 1931.
  • France: economy, tradition and supranational powers, collapse and Pétain government, collaboration. Unpublished. Federal Archives Berlin-Lichterfelde, BArch NS 15/361
  • Dr. Eisenbart: It was different from its reputation. Sebastian Lux, Murnau, Munich, Innsbruck, Basel 1955.
  • Ernst Koch: the poet of Prince Rosa Stramin. Trautvetter u. Fischer, Marburg and Witzenhausen 1960.
  • Münden: Collected articles in four booklets. Weserbuchhandlung / Fiedler, Hann. Münden 1984–1986.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ April 1, 1933. BArch, Coll. BDC, NSLB-Kartei; Brethauer, Karl
  2. ^ On July 1, 1933 as an SA man. BArch, Coll. BDC, NSLB card index; Brethauer, Karl
  3. ↑ May 11, 1937 as head of the district headquarters, Kassel local group. NSDAP membership number 4.196.061, BArch, Coll. BDC, NSDAP membership card, Brethauer, Karl
  4. ↑ Federal Archives (formerly Berlin Document Center) Führer index.
  5. ^ SS-Sturmbannführer Albert Schmidt-Stähler, born on August 7, 1901, NSDAP membership no. 923 649.
  6. ↑ Bundesarchiv Berlin-Lichtenberg, NS 30/15: Monthly report November 1941
  7. ^ Roberts Commission Protection of Historical Monuments, Card File on Art-Looting Suspects in France and Germany
  8. ↑ BArch NS 30/20, pages 119-120
  9. ↑ BArch NS 30/56
  10. ↑ The inserted timetable ends with “June 6, 1944: start of the invasion between Le Havre z. Cherbourg "
  11. ↑ BArch NS 15/361
  12. ↑ United States Holocaust History Museum Article on the Holocaust in France
  13. ^ Gerhard Heller: In an occupied country. Lübbe Verlag, Bergisch Gladbach, 1985. Pages 54-55.
  14. ↑ See Manfred Flügge : Paris is difficult. German CVs in France. Das Arsenal, Berlin 1992, ISBN 3-921810-20-5 (therein: The censor as protector or The contradictions of “Ltn. Heller” pp. 175–198) for comments on Heller.
  15. ↑ comparison u. a. Alan Riding: And the show went on. Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris . Alfred A. Knopf, New York 2010; Julian T. Jackson: Dark Years . 1940-1944. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2001; Robert O. Paxton: La France de Vichy 1940-1944 . Editions du Seuil, Paris 1999; Henry Rousso: Pétain et la fin de la collaboration. Sigmaringen 1944–1945. Éditions Complexe, Brussels 1999. Also on Google Books (as of December 2011) there were no results for Brethauer in the literature on Vichy France.
  16. ↑ Federal Archives Berlin-Lichterfelde, BArch NS 30/30
  17. ↑ Full text diss. Phil. University of Gießen 2013: The task force Reichsleiter Rosenberg and his activities in the Ukraine 1941-1944, by Nazarii Gutsul, several mentions about Brethauer, e.g. BS 313
  18. ↑ See letter of October 12, 1944 to the head of the special staff library construction of the high school of the ERR in Berlin Gerd Wunder about the correction of a wish list “for the western libraries”.
  19. ↑ Local history and history association Sydekum zu Münden e. V. (editor): Mündener personalities from six centuries . Article: Karl Brethauer: Heinz Hartung's homeland and historical researcher . Hann. Münden 2007.
  20. ^ See 1943 correspondence between Brethauer and the personal advisor Alfred Rosenbergs SA standard leader Werner Koeppen . BArch NS 8/260.
  21. ↑ Jonathan Petropoulos: The Faustian Bargain. The Art World in Germany . London 2000, p. 143.
  22. ^ Activity of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg in France - Consolidated Interrogation Report No. 1, August 15, 1945. Art Looting Investigation Unit APO 413 of the OSS / US Army.
  23. ^ Grimstead, Patricia Kennedy: The Postwar Fate of Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg Archival and Library Plunder, and the Dispersal of ERR Records
  24. ↑ BArch NS 8/260 letter of December 7, 1943 from Werner Koeppen. The last previous air raid by the Royal Air Force was on December 2, 1943. See Laurenz Demps, "The air raids on Berlin. A documentary report" in the Märkisches Museum yearbook , IV. 1978. page 55.
  25. ↑ See BArch NS 8/260, letter of December 7, 1943 from Werner Koeppen: “Due to the various events of the last few weeks in Berlin and the complete loss of our office in Bismarckstrasse…… all photos and writings of the Reichsleiter [are] up to burned to the last copy ... We found ourselves again at Margaretenstrasse 17 after the destruction of all our offices. "
  26. ↑ See Peter M. Manasse: Abducted Archives and Libraries. The activities of the Rosenberg Task Force during the Second World War , Röhrig Universitätsverlag, St. Ingbert, 1997.
  27. ↑ See Patricia Kennedy Grimstead: Reconstructing the Record of Nazi Cultural Plunder: A Survey of the Dispersed Archives of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg in the literature list.
  28. ↑ Ukrainian Archives: TSENTRAL'NYI DERZHAVNYI ARKHIV VYSHCHYKH ORHANIV VLADY TA UPRAVLINNIA UKRAÏNY ( TSDAVO ( Memento of the original from October 17, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. ). Brethauer's Ukrainian transliteration is Бретхгауэр. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / err.tsdavo.org.ua
  29. ↑ See Gymnase , school newspaper of the Gymnasium Münden, Gymnasium Münden , June 1970.
  30. ↑ Honorary membership is omitted at hna.de from March 12, 2012
  31. ↑ File of the council members of the city of Hann. Münden , city administration Hann. Münden
  32. ↑ a b Münden withdraws the ring of honor from Brethauer . HNA . Retrieved March 15, 2012.
  33. ↑ Local history and history association Sydekum zu Münden e. V. (editor): Mündener personalities from six centuries. Article: Karl Brethauer: Heinz Hartung's homeland and historical researcher . Hann. Münden 2007.
  34. ^ Institute Theresienstädter Initiative Academia (ed.), Theresienstädter Gedenkbuch , Metropol Verlag, Berlin 2000, page 478.
  35. ↑ See article about the Nazi persecution of Frieda Hartung and the obituary of Heinz Hartung.
  36. ↑ Online see web links
personal data
SURNAME Brethauer, Karl
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German Germanist
DATE OF BIRTH May 9, 1906
PLACE OF BIRTH kassel
DATE OF DEATH July 10, 1992
Place of death Hann. Münden