Karl Kaufmann (Gauleiter)

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Karl Kaufmann

Karl Otto Kaufmann (born October 10, 1900 in Krefeld , † December 4, 1969 in Hamburg ) was a German politician of the NSDAP , who was Nazi Gauleiter from 1925 to 1945 , Reichsstatthalter from 1933 to 1945 , from July 30, 1936 to May 3, 1945 "leader" of the state government, from 1937/38 head of the Hamburg state and municipal administration, Reich Defense Commissioner in military district 10 and from 1942 Reich Commissioner for Maritime Shipping .

Youth and Careers under National Socialism

Kaufmann was the son of a medium-sized laundry owner and of Catholic denomination.

For a long time his life was noticeably unsteady. After changing schools differently, he left the Elberfeld secondary school without a high school diploma and worked as an agricultural assistant. Shortly before the end of the war in 1918 , he was drafted, but did not return to the front. In 1919 Kaufmann was a member of the 2nd Marine Brigade under the Free Corps Leader Corvette Captain Hermann Ehrhardt . He broke off an apprenticeship in his parents' company after arguments with his father. He then lived for several years on unskilled labor and secret payments from his mother.

As aimless as his professional career was, he consistently sought confirmation in political work. So he was in the Freikorps Oberschlesien and fought in 1923 in the illegal organization "Heinz" against the Ruhr occupation by the French. From 1920 he was a member of the German National Guard and Defense Association and in 1921 took over the leadership of the youth group in Elberfeld, succeeding Alfred Günther. From 1922 he was a member of the NSDAP ( membership number 95, until 1935 he had the number 32,667). In his address of allegiance to Adolf Hitler on October 28, 1923, it says:

“In their great need, the ethnic youth on the Rhine and Ruhr eagerly await the day on which you, esteemed Mr. Hitler, will call for liberation from the enemy from inside and outside. Our hope is that this day will not be far off. "

Kaufmann wrote these lines before he took an active part in the Hitler putsch on November 9, 1923 .

In 1925, when he was only 25 years old, Kaufmann became Gauleiter of the “Rheinland-Nord” party house that had been created by Salomon the year before with Goebbels and Franz Pfeffer and is based in Düsseldorf . Joseph Goebbels, who was Kaufmann's only friend at the time, remained the general manager. In March 1926, the Parteigau in the "Groß-Gau Ruhr" ( Elberfeld ) created by Goebbels and Georg Strasser , which consisted of 10 districts, comprised the entire Rhenish-Westphalian industrial area including Westphalia and whose management was initially Kaufmann together with Goebbels and Salomon , then took over alone in the same year until the “Groß-Gaus” split up in the summer of 1928. Goebbels' diary entries depict Kaufmann as an internally torn man. Goebbels even mentions a few nervous breakdowns and a suicide attempt at the beginning of 1926. Kaufmann himself, as a national socialist , presented himself with considerable reservations about the Wilhelmine dignitaries who at that time still dominated the völkisch movement .

In 1928 Kaufmann succeeded in entering the Prussian state parliament . The diet payment was his first regular income. On December 27 of the same year, businessman Else Speth, the daughter of a master watchmaker and jeweler from Elberfeld and sister-in-law of his confidante Hellmuth Elbrecht, married .

On May 1, 1929, he became Gauleiter in Hamburg , where the NSDAP received only 2.2% in the last township elections in 1928. It was a probationary task because in his previous function in the Ruhr area, after violent arguments with Erich Koch, he was no longer considered acceptable. Apparently consolidated in the meantime, he succeeded in gaining the upper hand in the intrigues within the party and building up a strong domestic power.

In 1930 he moved into the Reichstag , to which he belonged until 1945, even after the Enabling Act .

On the evening of March 5, 1933 (the last Reichstag election in the Weimar Republic), he commissioned the National Socialist police officer Peter Kraus to head a search unit of the Hamburg State Police, which was supposed to smash communist and socialist groups operating in illegality.

Kaufmann became Reich Governor in Hamburg on May 16, 1933 . In this function he took over the "political leadership" of the Hamburg Gestapo in 1936 and thus exercised considerable influence on this prosecution body.

He used his position of power to enrich and create an unprecedented brown boncentury , which also became part of his system of rule. The “governing” mayor of Hamburg, Carl Vincent Krogmann , was in fact just the recipient of Kaufmann's orders. Even the SS von Himmler failed to intervene in the "Kaufmann system" when Kaufmann disempowered the Hamburg chief of the SD Carl Oberg in order to prevent spying against him. When Kaufmann had a case of homicide illegally put down in the Fuhlsbüttel concentration camp he had established in 1934 , opponents within the party gathered material against him in order to eliminate his system based on “inexperience and irresponsibility”. Himmler did not want to deal with it and decided in February 1935 to submit the case to the Party Supreme Court . Kaufmann got away unscathed, because Walter Buch did not pursue the matter any further.

The Budge-Palais at Harvestehuder Weg 12, from 1938 the residence of the Reich Governor Karl Kaufmann

On July 30, 1936 he deposed Carl Vincent Krogmann as governing mayor and took over the leadership of the state government himself. He thus united the five most important political offices of Hamburg in his person: NSDAP Gauleiter, Reich Governor, Leader of the State Government, Head of the Hamburg State and Municipal Administration and Reich Defense Commissioner in Military District X. From May 30, 1942, the office of Reich Commissioner for the Maritime shipping in addition. Kaufmann thus had an extraordinary wealth of power. For example, he received certain authority from the Prussian Prime Minister Hermann Göring (who was also commissioner for the four-year plan) to give Prussian authorities certain powers to claim Prussian areas bordering Hamburg for a future Greater Hamburg. On January 26, 1937, the Greater Hamburg Law was passed. During the November pogroms of 1938 , on the evening of November 9th, Kaufmann from Munich gave orders to the Hamburg NSDAP party organization to destroy the synagogues and the shops and apartments of Hamburg's Jews.

After the German occupation of Denmark in 1940, the architect Heinrich Bartmann initiated construction-ready plans for a “ bird flight line ” (Fehmarnsund Bridge and ferry connection to Denmark), which was to connect Greater Hamburg with Scandinavia, on Kaufmann's behalf . In contrast to an old plan from 1912, a four-lane Reichsautobahn should now cross the Fehmarnsund Bridge alongside the railway line . In Denmark, Storstrømsbroen between the islands of Falster and Sjælland was inaugurated in 1937 .

Kaufmann enjoyed the role of an independent complaints authority towards the citizens. He held a weekly citizens' consultation hour. In his omnipotence, he levered administrative decisions if he liked, which significantly worsened legal certainty within the Hamburg administration . His form of social populism made Kaufmann popular to a certain extent with Hamburg residents. In a speech to the Hamburg Chamber of Commerce in October 1940 , he revealed the intention of his "socialism of action" :

“If, before the war, I attached so much importance to this chapter of looking after, educating and guiding the German workers, then I did so with the knowledge that total war in an industrial state was not only with weapons and soldiers, but above all with Workers. "

On January 30, 1942, Karl Kaufmann was promoted to SS-Obergruppenführer (SS No. 119.495).

Since the bombing of Hamburg in July / August 1943 (" Operation Gomorrah "), Kaufmann seemed to be preparing for personal damage limitation for the time after the war. His previously unconditional belief in Hitler was gone. His reports as Reich Commissioner for Maritime Shipping left no doubt about the desperate military situation, and he hoarded huge amounts of food and foreign currency at his seat in Duvenstedt Brook . As a precaution, Kaufmann's wife was included by name in the lease.

End of war

At the end of 1944, plans to defend the city began in Hamburg, and soon afterwards the expansion of two defense lines began. The anti-tank traps in the inner ring were partly located in the middle of densely populated residential areas. Karl Kaufmann and the combat commander Alwin Wolz were convinced of the pointlessness of a defense. According to the controversial historian and archivist Kurt Detlev Möller , Kaufmann is said to have felt in Hitler's bunker on April 3, 1945 whether it was possible to surrender Hamburg as an "open city" without a fight. According to the information provided by Kaufmann, it was a very "frosty" conversation. Field Marshal Ernst Busch and Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz insisted on defending the city at this time. At the beginning of May, Kaufmann and Wolz are said to have agreed after these representations that they wanted to surrender the city without a fight. After Doenitz, who by Hitler in his will to the President had been determined, and with the last imperial government of Flensburg - Mürwik had settled, had agreed on May 2, a bloodless surrender of Hamburg, accompanied Wolz on 3 May 1945 by Hans Georg von Friedeburg run German delegation to the British headquarters near Lüneburg . In the Villa Möllering Wolz signed the conditions for the handover of the city. In the afternoon of the same day, the British soldiers marched into Hamburg.

Also on May 3, 1945, British planes sank several German ships in the Bay of Lübeck, which they thought were troop transports. Among them was the Cap Arcona , to which thousands of concentration camp prisoners, especially from Neuengamme concentration camp , had been relocated, as the approaching British troops were supposed to find the camp empty. The plan for this went back, among other things, to Karl Kaufmann, to whom the ship was directly subordinate as "Reich Commissioner for Maritime Shipping".

Kaufmann was arrested and interned on May 4, 1945. On the same day the partial surrender and another four days later the unconditional surrender of the Wehrmacht .

post war period

After his arrest, Kaufmann was sent to an internment camp like many Nazi officials . In October 1948 he was released on health grounds because he had suffered a serious car accident in June 1945 while driving under British guard to be questioned in the Nuremberg trial of the major war criminals , which necessitated a long hospital stay. Despite Kaufmann's “political responsibility” for all National Socialist crimes in Hamburg and thus also for the crimes that had been committed in Neuengamme concentration camp, he was not charged by the British military courts . In the main Neuengamme trial carried out in 1946 , Kaufmann only took part as a witness. In the Nuremberg trial, Kaufmann was not charged, but had to testify as a witness. Kaufmann made statements about the complex of the Reichskristallnacht . Kaufmann was arrested again on August 3, 1950 because of the risk of escape and blackout . While still in detention, he had joined a so-called “brotherhood”, an “elitist right-wing underground organization” made up of former Nazi activists and officers. This was supposed to shower the newspapers with letters to the editor "to help one of the best German men". On November 18, 1950, Kaufmann was released from custody and in January 1951 achieved his classification in Group III as a minor offender and the release of his property in the denazification process . At the time he was living in Hamburg-Poppenbüttel .

As a member of the circle around Werner Naumann , the former State Secretary in the Reich Ministry of Propaganda, Kaufmann made an attempt to become politically active again . The Naumann Circle tried to infiltrate the BHE , DP and FDP parties and to create a “national collection movement”. This operation was observed by the British secret service and led to the arrest of Kaufmann and others involved on January 15 and 16, 1953. At the end of March 1953, Kaufmann was released from the British military hospital in Iserlohn .

A preliminary investigation by the public prosecutor's office for “ crimes against humanity ” led to an indictment against Kaufmann, but never a main trial.

From 1959 on, Kaufmann acted as a partner in an insurance company run by his former deputy district economic advisor, Otto Wolff . He was also a partner in a chemical factory. Kaufmann lived as a well-off citizen in Hamburg until his death on December 4, 1969.

Legends and Truth

As early as April 1946, the Hamburg citizenship had asked the Senate to investigate the processes involved in the surrender of the city without a fight. The book with the title The Last Chapter of the Archives Councilor Kurt Detlev Möller appeared in 1947 and sparked controversy. It did show correctly that the surrender without a fight had been prepared according to plan and consciously brought about by Kaufmann - a representation that also agrees with the findings of more recent research. But by limiting it to the last weeks of the war, Gauleiter Kaufmann was stylized as the savior of the city and his responsibility for Nazi crimes, the persecution of Jews and favoritism ignored.

As a witness before the International Military Court in Nuremberg in 1946, Kaufmann testified falsely that he had banned the November pogrom in Hamburg. When questioned by prosecutor Sir David Maxwell Fyfe , he claimed that on November 9th he had not been to the annual memorial service of Nazi celebrities in Munich for the 1923 Hitler coup and that he had therefore not heard Goebbels' request at around 10 p.m. to initiate a pogrom against them Jews carry out. When pogroms started in Hamburg too, he banned them. Pogroms, which were carried out in Hamburg despite his ban, were committed by foreign commandos. This explanation seemed to many historians such as B. Hermann Graml credible until the end of the 20th century. It also contributed to the long positive image of Kaufmann's role in the Nazi state. In fact, the destruction of the SA commandos in Hamburg followed the same pattern as elsewhere. It was not until the archivist Jürgen Sielemann investigated in 1998 the true participation of Kaufmann in the pogrom. He proved that a businessman was in Munich and from there passed Goebbels orders to carry out the pogrom to Hamburg by telephone.

Kaufmann drove the establishment of the notorious Fuhlsbüttel concentration camp because the treatment of opponents of the regime in Wittmoor concentration camp seemed "too lax" to him. He prevented public prosecutor's examinations, illegally ordered prisoners beaten to death to be cremated immediately, and thus prevented a mandatory autopsy.

In his “Hamburg Foundation of 1937”, Kaufmann collected at least 8.6 million Reichsmarks , which came from public funds, donations from the economy and levies from “ Aryanizations ”. He served his favorites and "deserving party comrades" with cash, well-paid bogus offices and land, houses and businesses of Jewish previous owners. The President of the Court of Auditors, who dared to object, was suspended and transferred in 1938.

After a bomb attack on September 16, 1941, Kaufmann took the initiative and obtained Hitler's consent to deport the Hamburg Jews. In a letter to Hermann Göring he wrote:

“In September 1941, after a heavy air raid, I approached the Fiihrer with the request that the Jews be evacuated so that at least a certain part of the victims could be allocated an apartment again. The Fuehrer immediately complied with my suggestion and issued the appropriate orders for the evacuation of the Jews. "

This deportation failed due to the resistance of the Governor General Hans Frank , who did not want to accept the Jews from Hamburg. However, Kaufmann's early advance probably contributed to getting the deportations in motion across the Reich from October 1941.

literature

Web links

Commons : Karl Kaufmann (NSDAP)  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Uwe Lohalm: Völkischer Radikalismus. The history of the Deutschvölkischer Schutz- und Trutz-Bund. 1919-1923. Leibniz-Verlag, Hamburg 1970, pp. 321, 375, ISBN 3-87473-000-X .
  2. ↑ Quoted from Frank Bajohr: Gauleiter in Hamburg. On the person and activities of Karl Kaufmann (1900–1969). In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte (VfZ). 43 (1995), p. 272.
  3. ^ Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich . Who was what before and after 1945. 2nd edition, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-596-16048-8 , p. 301; Hermann Weiß (Ed.): Biographical Lexicon for the Third Reich . Frankfurt am Main 2002, ISBN 3-596-13086-7 , p. 258.
  4. ↑ a b Jürgen John , Horst Möller , Thomas Schaarschmidt (eds.): The NS-Gaue. Regional middle authorities in the centralized “leader state”. Oldenbourg, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-486-58086-0 , p. 460 (publisher's appendix).
  5. ^ Horst Wallraff: Friedrich Karl Florian. NSDAP Gauleiter (1894–1974). In: Internet portal "Rheinische Geschichte" , LVR , accessed in October 2019.
  6. ^ Karl Höffkes : Hitler's political generals. The Gauleiter of the Third Reich , 1986, p. 172.
  7. ^ Herbert Diercks : Documentation town house. The Hamburg police under National Socialism. Texts, photos, documents. Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial, Hamburg 2012, p. 32.
  8. ↑ Second law for the alignment of the states with the Reich of April 7, 1933 (RGBl. 1933 I p. 173) .
  9. ↑ Ludwig Eiber: Under the leadership of the NSDAP Gauleiter. The Hamburg State Police (1933–1937). In: Gerhard Paul, Klaus-Michael Mallmann (ed.): The Gestapo. Myth and Reality. Darmstadt 1995, p. 101 f.
  10. ↑ Henning Timpke: The KL Fuhlsbüttel. In: Martin Broszat (ed.): Studies on the history of the concentration camps. Stuttgart 1970, p. 19 f., Note 32.
  11. ^ A b Frank Bajohr: Gauleiter in Hamburg. On the person and activities of Karl Kaufmann (1900–1969). In: VfZ. 43 (1995), p. 267.
  12. ↑ Jürgen Sielemann: Questions and answers to the Reichskristallnacht. In: Hans Wilhelm Eckardt (Hrsg.): Preserving and reporting. Festschrift for Hans-Dieter Loose on his 60th birthday. Journal of the Association for Hamburg History Volume 83/1, Hamburg 1997, ISSN  0083-5587 . P. 481 f.
  13. ^ Bridge plan from 1912
  14. ^ Bridge plan from January 1941
  15. ↑ Quoted from Frank Bajohr: Gauleiter in Hamburg. On the person and activities of Karl Kaufmann (1900–1969). In: VfZ. 43 (1995), p. 287.
  16. ↑ Bastian Hein: Elite for people and leaders? The General SS and its Members 1925–1945 , p. 173
  17. ↑ Hartmut Rübner: Concentration and Crisis in German Shipping. Maritime economy and politics in the German Empire, in the Weimar Republic and in National Socialism. Bremen 2005, pp. 397-402.
  18. ↑ Oliver Schirg: By night and fog: Hamburg's surrender. In: Hamburger Abendblatt, April 18, 2015, pp. 20–21 ( online ).
  19. ^ Helge Grabitz, Werner Johe: The unfree city of Hamburg 1933-1945. Hamburg 1995, ISBN 3-929728-18-4 , p. 116.
  20. ^ Letter to the Citizen. Announcements from the Bürgerverein Lüneburg e. V. Number 75 (PDF) of: May 2015; Page 11 f .; accessed on: May 1, 2017
  21. ↑ Oliver Schirg: By night and fog: Hamburg's surrender. In: Hamburger Abendblatt, April 18, 2015, pp. 20–21 ( online ).
  22. ↑ Norddeutscher Rundfunk : On the silk thread: Hamburg's way to surrender , from: May 2, 2015; accessed on: May 1, 2017
  23. ^ Tragedy at the end of the war - sinking of the Cap Arcona at ndr.de, on May 1, 2015
  24. ↑ Alyn Bessmann, Marc Buggeln: Commander and direct offender before the military court. British prosecution of crimes in Neuengamme concentration camp and its satellite camps. In: Journal of History. Issue 6, 2005, p. 540 f.
  25. ↑ Alyn Bessmann and Marc Buggeln: Givers of orders and direct perpetrators before the military court (PDF) from: 2005, page 531; Retrieved on: May 2, 2017
  26. ^ Werner Skrentny: What became of Hamburg's Nazis. In: Everything wasn't so bad here. Hamburg 1984, ISBN 3-87975-284-2 , p. 139.
  27. ^ Frank Bajohr: Hamburg's 'Führer'. In: Hamburg in the Third Reich. Edited by the LZ for political education , Hamburg 1988, ISBN 3-929728-42-7 , p. 146/147.
  28. ^ Skrentny: What became of Hamburg's Nazis. 1984, p. 140.
  29. ^ Frank Bajohr: Hamburg's "Führer". In: Hamburg in the Third Reich. Published by the LZ for political education, Hamburg 1988, ISBN 3-929728-42-7 , p. 147.
  30. ↑ Arnold Sywottek: The scientific "city memory". In: Peter Reichel : The memory of the city. Hamburg 1997, ISBN 3-930802-51-1 , p. 223.
  31. ^ Hermann Graml: Reichskristallnacht. Anti-Semitism and persecution of the Jews in the Third Reich (= dtv 4519). Deutscher Taschenbuch-Verlag, Munich 1988, ISBN 3-423-04519-1 , p. 25.
  32. ↑ Jürgen Sielemann: " November Pogrom ". In: Institute for the history of the German Jews (Hrsg.): Das Jüdische Hamburg - a historical reference work. Göttingen 2006, p. 201 f.
  33. ^ Frank Bajohr: Gauleiter in Hamburg. On the person and activities of Karl Kaufmann (1900–1969). In: VfZ. 53 (1995), p. 276; and Lothar Gruchmann: Justice in the Third Reich. 3rd, verb. Edition. Munich 2001, ISBN 3-486-53833-0 , pp. 374-379.
  34. ^ Frank Bajohr: Parvenus and Profiteurs. Corruption in the Nazi Era. Frankfurt am Main 2001, ISBN 3-596-15388-3 , pp. 43 f., 145 f., 201.
  35. ^ A b Frank Bajohr: The deportation of the Jews: Initiatives and reactions from Hamburg. In: Beate Meyer (ed.): The persecution and murder of Hamburg's Jews 1933–1945. Hamburg 2006, ISBN 3-929728-85-0 , p. 33.
personal data
SURNAME Kaufmann, Karl
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Kaufmann, Karl Otto (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician (NSDAP), MdR, NS Gauleiter in Hamburg, Reich Commissioner for German Shipping, perpetrator of the Holocaust
DATE OF BIRTH October 10, 1900
PLACE OF BIRTH Krefeld
DATE OF DEATH 4th December 1969
Place of death Hamburg