Karl Rasche

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Karl Rasche as a defendant in the Nuremberg trials

Karl Emil August Rasche (* 23. August 1892 in Iserlohn , † 13. September 1951 in Basel ) was a German lawyer , SS leader and as a banker board member and later speaker of the Dresdner Bank in the period of National Socialism . On April 11, 1949, Rasche was sentenced to seven years' imprisonment in the Wilhelmstrasse trial .

Life

Youth and education

After attending elementary school and secondary school in Iserlohn, Rasche was a one-year volunteer from April 1, 1911 to March 30, 1912 in the infantry regiment "Herwarth von Bittenfeld" (1st Westphalian) No. 13 in Münster . He then studied law and political science in Münster, Leipzig , Berlin and Bonn until the outbreak of the First World War .

After the outbreak of World War I, Rasche was drafted back into the Prussian army and used as a soldier on the Western Front. After being wounded, he was taken to the Düsseldorf-Vinzenhaus hospital. While he was wounded, he attended the communal academy there. On October 15, 1914, he passed the first legal state examination as a notexamen with the grade good. At the suggestion of his professor Josef Lukas (1875–1929), he also began working on a legal dissertation entitled The Police Concept in Prussian Law today, taking special account of the special laws that he finally concluded in 1917. He had already passed the oral doctoral examination on February 19, 1916 with the grade cum laude .

Returned to the front as a lieutenant in the reserve around 1916 , Rasche was deployed first on the western front and then on the eastern front until the end of the war. In the first post-war period he was involved in the Baltic Landwehr in the form of fundraising and the recruitment of volunteers.

From July 1919 Rasche worked as a court trainee in Hamm and in 1921 switched to Barmer Bankverein , where he became a restructuring specialist. From the beginning of 1933 Rasche was a member of the board of the Bochum Westfalenbank , where he also worked with Paul Pleiger .

time of the nationalsocialism

In 1934 Rasche was initially deputy and from August 1935 a full member of the Board of Management of Dresdner Bank . A quick employment relationship at Dresdner Bank came about through intervention by Wilhelm Keppler . Together with board member Emil Meyer , Rasche was considered a trusted banker of the SS.

Rasche's membership in the NSDAP , which he received in May 1933, was not valid, as Rasche did not receive a membership card in the Essen local group or paid any membership fees. It was not until August 1939 that Rasche was re-admitted to the party retrospectively to May 1937 ( membership number 2,207,508). According to the historian Karsten Heinz Schönbach, however, Rasche joined the NSDAP on August 23, 1932. This is shown by an entry in his SS personnel file. From 1933 on, Rasche is also said to have been a member of the German Labor Front (DAF), the Nazi law enforcement association and the Nazi association for physical exercises .

During the 1936 Summer Olympics , Rasche was deputy head of the Reich Office for Athletics and was thus allowed to take part in the Nazi Party Congress of that year as Hitler's guest of honor . Shortly afterwards he was introduced to the Himmler Circle of Friends by Fritz Kranefuß in autumn 1936 . Rasches was accepted into the SS (membership number 323.879) in May 1939 retroactively to November 1938 as SS-Hauptsturmführer. As an SS honorary leader , he achieved the rank of SS Obersturmbannführer in 1943 .

After the “ Anschluss of Austria ” in March 1938, Rasche became involved in expanding the business of his bank in Austria and later also in the Sudetenland and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia . Thereupon the mocking verse was coined on him:

“Who is marching behind the first tank? This is Dr. Quick from Dresdner Bank! "

This mockery verse was based on the fact that the German state finances were notoriously clammy as a result of the excessive armaments policy pursued by the Hitler government. Therefore, after every violent occupation of a country neighboring the German Reich, the country in question was economically cannibalized (confiscation of the gold reserves of the respective state banks, takeover of important economic enterprises, etc.) in order to rehabilitate or relieve the German treasury and the impending financial collapse to procrastinate.

From the mid-1930s he was chairman or member of the supervisory board of several war-important companies. He also headed the departments of the subsidiaries Handelstrust West NV (Amsterdam) and Continentale Bank SA in Brussels.

As a board member of Dresdner Bank, Rasche analyzed the opportunities for economic exploitation of the country that could be realized through the Barbarossa company in 1941 in the specialist journal Der Deutschen Volkswirt :

“The greatest task in the history of our people, perhaps in world history, now lies ahead of us: the shaping of the Eastern dream - politically and economically [...] From the narrowness it goes into a still unfamiliar expanse, and from the scarcity of raw materials a natural one should be A wealth of raw materials are promoted, recorded and moved [...] Already from these hints it should be evident what growth in national wealth is to be expected for the new Ostarbeit [...] Then only the questions of the technical implementation of what is perhaps the largest amortization plan in economic history to date remain. "

At the end of December 1942, Rasche was appointed spokesman for the board at Dresdner Bank. After the bank had been restructured, he and Carl Lüer took over the West Management Group in Bad Nauheim in December 1943 .

Furthermore, during the war, Rasche was also involved in arranging loans to the SS , which were used to finance forced labor in SS factories and concentration camps and also to carry out the so-called "Germanization" in occupied Eastern Europe. In the banking business he was in turn involved in Aryanizations in the Netherlands and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. An example of his involvement in the regime's policy of robbery was, for example, the integration of Czech armaments factories into the Reichswerke Hermann Göring , which he carried out together with Hans Kehrl .

Life after the end of the war

In April 1945 Rasche was arrested near Bad Nauheim and taken prisoner by the French. After he was questioned in Paris , Rasche was able to take up limited activities in the French occupation zone to “intensify cross-border economic relations” for the French military government. In November 1945, Rasche was summoned to the American occupation zone by OMGUS investigators to exchange information and arrested immediately after his arrival in Frankfurt . First he was imprisoned in Darmstadt prison and, after staying in Frankfurt penitentiaries, was transferred to Ludwigsburg camp 74. From there he was transferred to the Dachau internment camp and finally came to Nuremberg in April 1947 as a suspect .

As the only banker from the private sector, Rasche was indicted on November 4, 1947 in the Wilhelmstrasse Trial , which took place as part of the Nuremberg Trials . His defense lawyer was Egon Kubuschok , who had already defended Franz von Papen against the main war criminals in the Nuremberg Trial . On April 11, 1949, Rasche was finally declared a war criminal for war crimes and crimes against humanity : robbery and looting , "because of his involvement in the robbery of Bohemia, Moravia and Holland", as well as membership in criminal organizations to seven years in prison, beginning with the 8th April 1945, sentenced. Rasche was acquitted of the charge of complicity in genocide .

Under count VII slave labor , the prosecution could not conclusively prove whether Rasche “visited concentration camps together with other personalities once before the war” and “found the defendant Rasche not guilty under count VII” because: “We cannot simply establish the rule that an official of a loan bank is guilty of the criminal consequences which a loan entailed and which the borrower may have intended ”.

Rasche was released early from the Landsberg War Crimes Prison in August 1950 . In October / November 1950, Rasche was classified as exonerated in the denazification process . A quick request for reinstatement at Dresdner Bank was not granted, but representatives of Dresdner Bank and Rasche agreed in May 1951 on an amicable settlement regarding his severance pay and pension entitlements. He eventually worked as a management consultant and died as a result of a heart attack on a work-related train ride to Basel.

Activity in supervisory boards

chairman of the supervisory board

  • 1938–1945: Perlmooser Cement AG , Vienna
  • 1939–1944: Böhmische Escompte Bank, Prague (subsidiary of Dresdner Bank)
  • 1939–1944: Poldihütte AG, Prague
  • 1941–1945: Handels-Kreditbank AG, Riga
  • 1943–1945: Westdeutsche Bodenkreditanstalt, Cologne
  • 1943–1945: Tatrawerke AG, Prague
  • Engelhardt Brewery AG, Berlin
  • Hardy & Co GmbH , Berlin

Deputy Chairman of the Supervisory Board

  • 1944 Allgemeine Versicherungs AG, Vienna
  • 1936–1945: Dyckerhoff-Portland-Cement-AG , Mainz-Amöneburg
  • 1939–1945: Rheinische Kunstseide AG, Krefeld

Member of the Supervisory Board

Fonts

  • The police concept in today's Prussian law with special consideration of the special laws . Menden 1917 (dissertation).

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Ralf Ahrens: The exemplary candidate - The Dresdner Bank and the Nuremberg trial against Karl Rasche. In: Institute for Contemporary History Munich (Ed.): Quarterly Issues for Contemporary History. 52nd volume, issue 4, 2004, p. 641ff.
  2. ↑ Klaus-Dietmar Henke, Johannes Bähr, Dieter Ziegler, Harald Wixforth: The Dresdner Bank in the Third Reich. 2006, p. 477.
  3. ^ Johannes Bähr: The Dresdner Bank in the economy of the Third Reich. P. 95. In Klaus Dietmar Henke Hrsg: The Dresdner Bank in the Third Reich. Munich, Oldenburg 2006, p. 95.
  4. ^ SS personal file Karl Rasche, Federal Archives Berlin, microfilm SSO 007B, image number 939. Karsten Heinz Schönbach: The German corporations and National Socialism 1926–1943 . Trafo, Berlin 2015, ISBN 978-3-86464-080-3 (also dissertation, Free University Berlin, 2012) p. 319.
  5. ^ The judgment in the Wilhelmstrasse trial . Official wording of the decision in case no. 11 of the Nuremberg Military Tribunal against von Weizsäcker and others, with differing reasons for the judgment, rectification decisions, d. basic legal provisions, e. Directory of court persons and witnesses and introductions by Robert MW Kempner u. Carl Haensel ., P. 274 f.
  6. ↑ Klaus-Dietmar Henke, Johannes Bähr, Dieter Ziegler, Harald Wixforth: The Dresdner Bank in the Third Reich , 2006, pp. 482, 485.
  7. ↑ Mockery of Karl Rasche after the start of the Second World War . Quoted in: Harold James, Avraham Barkai, Karl Heinz Siber: Deutsche Bank and the "Aryanization". Beck 2001, p. 154.
  8. ^ Karl Rasche: Secured Eastern Region - stable overall economy. In: The German economist. Year 16 (December 19, 1941) No. 12/13, p. 392 ff. Quoted from: Rolf-Dieter Müller : Hitler's Eastern War and German Settlement Policy. Frankfurt a. M. 1991, pp. 174-177.
  9. ^ Ralf Ahrens / Ingo Koehler / Harald Wixforth / Dieter Ziegler: The Dresdner Bank 1945–1957. Consequences and continuities after the end of the Nazi regime. 2007, p. 25.
  10. ↑ Gerald Braunberger: Third Reich - Opportunists of Money: Bankers under the swastika. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung . Issue 33, August 21, 2005, p. 36.
  11. ↑ Ralf Ahrens / Ingo Köhler / Harald Wixforth, Dieter Ziegler: The Dresdner Bank 1945–1957. Consequences and continuities after the end of the Nazi regime , 2007, pp. 83f.
  12. ^ The judgment, p. XXI
  13. ^ The judgment, p. 236
  14. ↑ The Judgment, p. 274
  15. ↑ The Judgment, p. 277.
  16. ↑ Cf. Rainer A. Blasius: The Wilhelmstrasse Trial against the Foreign Office and other Ministries , in: Gerd R. Ueberschär : The Allied Trials against War Criminals and Soldiers 1943–1952 , Frankfurt am Main 1999, pp. 187ff.
  17. ↑ Florian Hauswiesner: The Alien Tort Claims Act of December 12, 2002
  18. ↑ The Judgment, p. 270.
  19. ^ Ralf Ahrens, Ingo Köhler, Harald Wixforth, Dieter Ziegler: The Dresdner Bank 1945–1955. Consequences and continuities after the end of the Nazi regime , 2007, pp. 64, 455
  20. ↑ Obituary from Dr. jur. Karl Rasche , in: Die Zeit , issue 38 of September 20, 1951
personal data
SURNAME Rasche, Karl
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Rasche, Karl Emil August (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German SS-Obersturmbannführer, spokesman for the Dresdner Bank during the Nazi era
DATE OF BIRTH August 23, 1892
PLACE OF BIRTH Iserlohn
DATE OF DEATH September 13, 1951
Place of death near Basel