Ludwig Grauert (State Secretary)

Greed during the Nuremberg trials

Ludwig Grauert (* 9. January 1891 in Münster , † 4. June 1964 in Cologne ) was a German State Secretary in the Ministry of Interior and SS brigade leader in the era of National Socialism .

Life

After attending school, Grauert studied law and passed his legal traineeship in 1913 . At the First World War he initially took from August 1914 as a soldier of Münster Cuirassier Regiment and then as a member of machine gun department part. Most recently he was deployed as a pilot on the Western Front. In 1921 he became a court assessor at the Münster public prosecutor's office. He was then transferred to Bochum in the same position .

In 1923, Grauert was appointed department head of the employers' association of iron and steel works in Düsseldorf . From 1928 to 1931 he acted as a managing board member of the employers' associations of German iron and steel industrialists (Northwest Group). In the context of this activity he supported the NSDAP financially without having agreed this with the board of directors of the Northwest Group, Ernst Poensgen . Fritz Thyssen reimbursed the association for the amount of 100,000 Reichsmarks that Grauert had paid the party; therefore Grauert was not dismissed by the influential men Poensgen and Gustav Krupp von Bohlen and Halbach , the owners of Friedrich Krupp AG . At Poensgen's request, he joined the People's Conservative Association in 1930, unsuccessfully, in the 1930 Reichstag election .

In the spring of 1933, Grauert officially joined the NSDAP on May 1, 1933 ( membership number 3,262,849). On February 22, 1933 he was appointed by Hermann Göring to succeed Erich Klausener as Ministerial Director of the Police Department of the Prussian Ministry of the Interior. In this capacity he was instrumental in the cleaning up of the Prussian civil servants, and especially the police, in the National Socialist sense. In 1934, in recognition of this "achievement", he was publicly attested that under his leadership the rearrangement of the police and the incorporation of the leader idea into the Prussian administration had taken place.

On the night of the Reichstag fire of February 28, 1933, Grauert proposed the adoption of an “emergency ordinance against arson and acts of terrorism”, which ultimately formed one of the bases of the Reichstag fire ordinance , through which the basic rights of the Weimar Republic were suspended and thus the basis for the Elimination of the rule of law and the establishment of the Nazi dictatorship was laid. It is controversial in research whether Grauert suggested the regulation spontaneously on the night of the Reichstag fire or whether it had already been worked out and only needed to be taken "out of the drawer". Likewise, it is not clear whether he was heavily involved in the drafting and design of the content or whether he was merely presenting the finished government document at the ministerial meeting in the Ministry of the Interior on the night of February 27-28 or the cabinet meeting on February 28th. February submitted. As a result, the ordinance presented by Grauert provided the legal basis for the first mass arrests of political opponents of the National Socialists and the establishment of the first concentration camps.

On April 11, 1933, at Göring's instigation, Grauert was appointed State Secretary in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior, while the post of Ministerial Director was transferred to Kurt Daluege . In his function as State Secretary, Grauert issued the order to establish the Emsland camps on June 22, 1933 . Also in 1933 he was appointed a member of the Prussian State Council. As a result of the gradual transfer of control of the police to the SS and investigations against him by the Party Supreme Court , Grauert was given temporary retirement on July 1, 1936 - at that time he was second state secretary in the now unified Reich and Prussian Interior Ministry offset.

Furthermore, Grauert was one of the founding members of the Academy for German Law Hans Franks and chaired the Board of Trustees for General and Internal Administration of the Administrative Academy in Berlin. He joined the SS on June 2, 1933 (SS No. 118.475) and was promoted directly to SS-Oberführer on the same day - probably due to his high position as State Secretary . On April 20, 1935, he was appointed SS brigade leader .

After retiring from civil service, Grauert was a member of the supervisory board of the Deutsche Continental-GasGesellschaft in Dessau.

In the Wehrmacht from November 1942 to September 1944 he was a colonel and commander of the air defense command in Denmark.

After the end of the war

He was questioned as a witness at the Nuremberg trials . Grauert also made himself available as an exonerating witness for Wilhelm Stuckart in his proceedings for the provision of civil servants in 1953.

literature

• Ernst Klee : Personal Lexicon for the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt / Main 2005 (revised paperback edition). ISBN 3-596-16048-0 .
• Grauert, Ludwig In: Alfons Labisch / Florian Tennstedt : The way to the "Law on the standardization of the health system" of July 3, 1934. Development lines and moments of the state and municipal health system in Germany , part 2, Academy for public health in Düsseldorf 1985 , ISSN 0172-2131, pp. 417-418.

Web links

• Newspaper article about Ludwig Grauert in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .

Remarks

1. ^ ^{A b c} Grauert, Ludwig In: Alfons Labisch / Florian Tennstedt: The way to the "law on the standardization of the health system" of July 3, 1934. Development lines and moments of the state and local health system in Germany , part 2, Academy for public Health care in Düsseldorf 1985, p. 417f.
2. ↑ Federal Agency for Civic Education
3. ↑ Hannah Arendt , Günter Gaus : Interview with Hannah Arendt from the series Zur Person mit Günter Gaus, 1964 ( Memento of the original from September 30, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . 
4. ^ Yearbook of the Academy for German Law, 1st year 1933/34. Edited by Hans Frank. (Munich, Berlin, Leipzig: Schweitzer Verlag), p. 254
5. ↑ Hans-Christian Jasch: State Secretary Wilhelm Stuckart and Jewish Policy - The Myth of Clean Administration , Oldenbourg, Munich 2012. ISBN 978-3-486-70313-9 . Short bio on p. 471