Otto Müller-Haccius

CDU candidate poster for the state election in Lower Saxony in 1963

Otto Richard Müller-Haccius (born September 21, 1895 in Nienburg / Weser ; † May 7, 1988 in Hameln ) was a senior administrative officer who was involved in the murder and deportation of Jews from 1933 as SS-Oberführer and German regional president in Graz and Kattowitz , Roma and resistance fighters and was officially confirmed as a supporter of the Nazi regime . The Chamber of Commerce and Industry Hanover appointed him managing director for the Hameln branch in 1949, at the same time he was the syndic of the working group of entrepreneurs in the central Weser region in Hameln and from 1961 for the CDU in the council of the city of Hameln and from 1963 a member of the Lower Saxony state parliament .

Life

Müller-Haccius was the son of a district judge and a mother who came from the Baring family; from her he had taken the maiden name Haccius. He attended the secondary school in Nienburg and graduated on April 14, 1914 with the Abitur. After that, he had just the study of law , economics and French at the University of Lausanne began when he was in August 1914 as a volunteer reported and until January 1919 as a field artillery at the First World War took part. He then continued his studies in political science and law at the universities of Tübingen (where he became a member of the free student union Saxonia ) and Göttingen , where he received his doctorate in 1921. He completed his legal clerkship in 1924 with the assessor exam and worked as a trainee lawyer in the Weißenfels district office and with the governments in Potsdam and Breslau. In 1926, as a member of the government, he became head of the “rural municipal department” at the Potsdam regional council. In 1929 he moved from the Prussian civil service to the municipal administrative level and became managing director of the Brandenburg-Mitte state planning association, which was responsible for the settlement system in the area around the capital and carried out preparatory work for German spatial planning . At the same time he joined the DVP , of which he remained a member until 1932.

On May 11, 1933 he was appointed by the Gauleiter and Oberpräsident of Brandenburg-Berlin Wilhelm Kube to the First Provincial Councilor and State Treasurer and thus at the same time to the Representative of the State Director Dietloff von Arnim of the Provincial Association of Brandenburg , responsible for settlements, municipal economy and regional planning . Together they both introduced the National Socialist leader principle and rearranged the administrative structure in the sense of abolishing the separation of state and provincial self-government that had existed until then , which was reversed by the municipal code of 1935. During this time, the Provincial Association pursued a "strict economy" in public welfare and participated in the deportation of the mentally handicapped . From 1936 to 1939, Müller-Haccius was also appointed a member of the finance, auditing, settlement and constitutional committee of the German Municipal Assembly and as a settlement specialist in the Gauheimstättenamt . After he was appointed regional president by the Reich Minister of the Interior in August 1939, he completed another military exercise as an artillery captain on the Siegfried Line and in November of the same year took up his new position with the governor (from 1940 Reich governor) and Gauleiter for Styria , SA group leader Sigfried Uiberreither , in Graz, whose deputy he became at the state level. In addition to the deputies in the state administration, Gauhauptmann Dadieu , and at party level Portschy , both were also SS-Oberführer, he only had a subordinate position. Only after the invasion of Yugoslavia in 1941 and the annexation of large parts of Slovenia , which received a separate administration as the Lower Styria CdZ area , which in turn was directly subordinate to Hitler by express order , did Müller-Haccius play a decisive role there. He led the regular staff meetings of the civil administration, at which in addition to the 12 district administrators, three three mayors and three police presidents, the heads of the other authorities of the special services created during the Nazi era came together. Mention should be made here of Franz Steindl from the Styrian Heimatbund and Helmut Carstanjen, head of the office of the Reich Commissioner for the Consolidation of German Volkstum , who were responsible for the implementation of the Germanization policy. A powerful man on the staff was SS-Standartenführer Otto Lurker , former prison sergeant of Adolf Hitler and Rudolf Heß in Landsberg in 1924, who as commander of the security police and the SD in Lower Styria and from 1941 SD section leader Maribor the shooting of hostages and resistance fighters (as "Bandits") as well as communists and Jews ordered. Müller-Haccius took note of its execution reports in the round with satisfaction and demanded "iron severity and the sharpest retaliation", furthermore he instructed to proceed with "fundamental severity", all relatives of killed communists were to be "removed". Incidentally, Lurker was the head of the Lower Styria resettlement staff and was responsible for the resettlement of 36,000 Slovenes who were brought to camps of the Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle and the deportation of opponents of the regime to reception camps from which they were transported to concentration camps. The political commissioner and from 1942 district administrator of the Cilli district , Anton Dorfmeister , was given the special task of national politics , whose reports on massive arrests and hostage shootings are documented in the relevant biography.

From August 1944 to April 1945 he was the (initially provisional, from October 1944 full) successor to Walter Springorum, President of the District of Katowice, in which the Upper Silesian industrial area was located, as well as the District of Bielitz with the Auschwitz concentration camp . There, as before in Graz, he led the regular service meetings with the eleven district administrators, six mayors and three police presidents. It was also about the persecution and shooting of resistance fighters, which he described in a letter: "We shoot around 150 here every month and take 300 bandits prisoner". As early as October 1944, he was preparing the construction of the Volkssturm , consisting of young people and older men , which he used for extensive entrenchment work: "Positioning and Volkssturm secure Upper Silesia against the Soviets 140 km away". In January 1945, he swore the men to make a “dramatic sacrifice” before the approaching “Mongol storm”. From a greeting on New Year's Eve 1944 it becomes clear how he appeared as a fanatical National Socialist: "For us Germans there is only one thing: a breakthrough, believing and hard-minded, every strength tense, ready to sacrifice". [1]

On January 27th, Soviet troops also occupied Katowice. Müller-Haccius had left first to Teschen, then to Karlsbad.

Member of Nazi organizations

On May 1, 1933, Müller-Haccius joined the NSDAP (membership number 2.171.765), in which he was promoted to head of the main branch in the Gau Kurland and deputy head of the provincial office of Arnim-Rittgarden in what was later to become Gau Mark Brandenburg . In April 1940 he also joined the SS as a Standartenführer (membership number 351.375), in which he last held the rank of SS Oberführer. The promotion to the rank of general to SS Brigade Leader , which Himmler had planned for April 20, 1944 , was postponed to April 20, 1945, but was then no longer carried out. On December 27, 1944, he wrote that in Silesia he was "proud to be an SS leader in this sense".

denazification

In the denazification proceedings in 1948, Müller-Haccius untruthfully stated that he had “not exercised any kind of activity within the framework of the party” and concealed his work as head of the main branch and as deputy head of the provincial office in the Kurmark district (later Brandenburg). Instead, he stated that he had been "Head of the Gauheimstättenwerk" of the DAF. Such a function only existed in the NSDAP; in the Gauheimstättenwerk he only worked as a specialist advisor. He also claimed that his appointment as treasurer of the province of Brandenburg was made “against the resistance of the NSDAP”, which was also not true, as he had been appointed to this office by Gauleiter Kube. He also attempted to portray himself as a man of the July 20 resistance by claiming that he "had exchanged ideas for years with men who later played a role in the resistance group". He also referred explicitly to Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenburg , whom he supervised during his traineeship training in the Potsdam Regional Council and who had also belonged to the Saxonia Association; When asked, his widow stated that she did not know “whether Müller-Haccius was privy to the plans for July 20”. In any case, he is not included in the list of persons of July 20, 1944 . Likewise, his claim that he had "no relationship with the SS" is in no way true. Apart from his wish to be classified directly as Oberführer, he has proven through various letters of congratulation and thanks to the "Reichführer SS" that he fully supported this organization in terms of content. The main denazification committee for special professions classified Müller-Haccius in category IV "supporters" on February 1, 1949, with the simultaneous denial of eligibility and demotion to the Upper Government Council. H. from grade B 6 to A 14.

His application for reclassification to Category V, which he submitted the following year, was rejected on January 8, 1952, the decision made on February 1, 1949 was revoked and it was established that “the person concerned supported the NS”; no further measures were ordered, so the agreement on eligibility and the downgrading was repealed.

Activity after 1945

After the end of the war, Müller-Haccius initially worked as a gardener in a facility of the Bodelschwingh Foundation in Farrel near Diepholz from 1946 . From 1949 to 1961 he was managing director of the Hanover Chamber of Commerce and Industry in the Hameln branch. He was also the syndic of the working group of entrepreneurs for industry, trade and commerce in the middle Weser area (AdU) eV In 1961 he was city councilor for the CDU of the city of Hameln. He also became a member of the Lower Saxony State Parliament from May 20, 1963 to June 5, 1967 in the fifth and sixth electoral terms.

Honors, awards

As a soldier in World War I, the Iron Cross I and II Class and the Wound Badge and, as a civil servant, the War Merit Cross, Class II (spring 1942), Class I (September 1942) and Class I with swords (April 1945) as well as the SS - Skull ring (1943). In 1940 he was appointed honorary professor for administrative law at the University of Graz . Member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Walter Raymond Foundation in Cologne and various socio-political committees at the state and federal level.

Web links

• Literature by and about Otto Müller-Haccius in the catalog of the German National Library

literature

• Bernhard Gelderblom : The Two Lives of Dr. Müller-Haccius , lecture on May 5, 2015 in the Hamelin Forum and on October 10, 2015 at a conference of the Lower Saxony Memorials Foundation in Hanover, ( online as PDF)
• Stephan A. Glienke: The Nazi past of a later member of the Lower Saxony state parliament . Final report on a project of the Historical Commission for Lower Saxony and Bremen on behalf of the Lower Saxony State Parliament. Published by the President of the Lower Saxony State Parliament. Revised reprint of the first edition. Hannover 2012, pp. 66f, 184f ( online as PDF) .
• Barbara Simon : Member of Parliament in Lower Saxony 1946–1994. Biographical manual. Edited by the President of the Lower Saxony State Parliament. Lower Saxony State Parliament, Hanover 1996, pp. 267–268.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Christian Engeli: State planning in Berlin-Brandenburg . Stuttgart 1986.
2. ^ Kurt Adamy and Kristina Hübener: Province of Mark Brandenburg - Gau Kurmark. An administrative history sketch . In: Dietrich Eichholtz (ed.), Persecution, everyday life, resistance. Brandenburg during the Nazi era . Berlin 1993, p. 11-31 .
3. ^ Fabian Scheffczyk: The Provincial Association of the Prussian Province of Brandenburg 1933 - 1945. Regional service and steering administration under National Socialism . Mohr-Siebeck, Tübingen 2008, p. 40 f. u. 61 f .
4. ↑ Stefan Karner: The staff meetings the Nazi civil administration in Lower Styria 1941-1944 . In: G. Schöpfer, St. Karner, Our Time Story Vol. 3 . Leykam. Graz 1996.
5. ↑ Quoted from: Wolfhard F. Truchseß: Entstrickt in NS-Verbrechen. Researched the past of Otto-Müller Haccius, who later became member of the state parliament. Dewezet of September 23, 2014, p. 11
6. ↑ Main State Archives Hanover: Denazification files Müller-Haccius . In: Nds 171 Hannover, No. 21321 . 1952.