Richard Wagner (politician, 1902)

Richard Wagner

Richard Eugen Wilhelm Wagner (born December 2, 1902 in Colmar ; † July 14, 1973 in Darmstadt ) was a German agricultural engineer and politician ( NSDAP ). Wagner already had sympathy for National Socialism during the Weimar Republic and was a member of the NSDAP from 1930. In August 1931 he hosted the conference at which the Boxheim documents were discussed, which later became public and caused outrage. During the National Socialist era , Wagner was a member of the Reichstag and held various offices and functions within the framework of the National Socialist agricultural policy . During the Second World War he initially worked in administration and in 1944 became a member of the Waffen SS .

Live and act

Wagner, son of the colonel and farmer Eugen Julius Franz Wagner and his wife Margarethe, née Scheuten, attended elementary school and grammar school in Bruchsal , and later the secondary school in Munich. After graduating from high school in March 1920, he studied agriculture at the Technical University of Munich . In 1923 he passed the diploma examination; in the same year he received his doctorate .

From May to October 1919, Wagner belonged to the Epp Freikorps and the Pioneer Company 21. In 1923 he was a member of the NS student company in Munich and the Reichskriegsflagge , a paramilitary association founded by Ernst Röhm in October 1923.

From 1923 to 1927 Wagner initially worked as an intern, later as an administrator and commercial manager of a large agricultural business. In 1927 he leased the state domain "Boxheimer Hof" near Lampertheim in Hesse. On October 1, 1930, he joined the NSDAP ( membership number 416.528). As early as January 1930 he had been advising the NSDAP local group Lampertheim-Bürstadt on agricultural issues; In March 1931 he became the party's agricultural district advisor in the Hessen-Darmstadt district .

On August 5, 1931, Wagner was a participant in a meeting of Gaufach advisors at the Boxheimer Hof, at which the adviser for legal issues, Werner Best , presented the so-called Boxheimer documents to the participants . The documents were a compilation of guidelines and measures that were considered necessary by leading Hessian National Socialists in the event of a communist attempted coup and a subsequent National Socialist takeover. After their publication in November 1931, the Boxheim documents attracted considerable public attention. According to the historian Karl Dietrich Bracher , the documents allow "an informative look into the specific circles of ideas of National Socialist functionaries who, contrary to the opportunistic rallies of the top leadership, adhered to the totalitarian concepts of rule and followed a radically totalitarian course in their regional areas of influence and action".

In November 1931 Wagner became a member of the Landtag of the People's State of Hesse , to which he was a member until June 1932. In 1932 he was not elected, but moved to the state parliament for Hubert Köster . In July 1932 Wagner was elected to the Reichstag as a candidate of the NSDAP for constituency 33 (Hessen-Darmstadt) . In the November 1932 elections , he lost his seat again, but could after the Reichstag elections of March 1933 in the Reichstag return, of which he was subsequently throughout the period of Nazi rule.

Wagner ended the lease of the Boxheimer Hof in 1932; from that year he worked full-time as a party employee for the NSDAP. He joined the SS (membership number 23,376) in February 1932. Wagner was promoted several times in the SS, most recently in November 1943 to SS Brigadefuhrer . From July 1933 he built up the training system for SS Section XI and from 1939 until the end of the war he took over the post of peasant consultant for the SS Upper Section “Rhine” in Wiesbaden. Previously, he was assigned to the Race and Settlement Main Office of the SS (RuSHA) for two years .

After the National Socialist " seizure of power " Wagner took on a number of important functions in the National Socialist party organization and in the Nazi state . He was the state farmer's leader in the Hesse-Nassau district and the state farmer president in the Hessian state government. Furthermore, Wagner was head of the "Working Group for Geopolitics", head of the main department for agriculture in the Hesse-Darmstadt region and specialist in geopolitics in the Office for Agricultural Policy in the Hesse-Darmstadt region and in the Reich leadership of the NSDAP. He was also Gauamtsleiter, a member of the inner board of the Hessian Land Federation and the Free Hessian Peasantry, Head of the Hessian Settlers Federation and, from 1933, a member of the Reichsbauernrat . From 1935 to 1939 he worked part-time for the Reich Ministry of Food and Agriculture , where he was responsible for general issues relating to agricultural production and nutrition. Before 1941 Wagner was concerned with plans to relocate German farmers to the east; the plans were not carried out.

On May 31, 1941, Wagner was drafted into the Wehrmacht as head of the war deputy administration . Three weeks before the German attack on the Soviet Union , he took over the management of the Chief Agriculture Group of the Central Economic Inspection, which was assigned to Army Group Central and was subordinate to the Eastern Economic Staff under Lieutenant General Wilhelm Schubert . Against the background of German war planning, which provided for the extensive feeding of German troops from the occupied country, the chief group headed by Wagner was the most influential. Whether the German plans included the starvation of residents of the occupied Soviet territories in the sense of a hunger plan is disputed among historians.

Wagner was seen by his superiors as "versatile and cultivated" and was rated more as a "realistic agricultural politician" than a "blood-and-soil ideologist". At the beginning of July 1941, Wagner spoke to Arthur Nebe , head of Einsatzgruppe B, for the release of some of the inmates of a civilian prisoner camp in Minsk , Belarus , because Wagner needed the prisoners as labor. Nebe and his task force had previously murdered Jews held in the camp. In December 1941, Wagner signed a contract with Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski under which the former kolkhozes and sovkhozs were transferred to the possession of the SS. In view of disappointing harvests, Wagner advocated the dissolution of the collective and state farms in the second half of 1941. In December 1941 Wagner passed on a proposal from Axel de Vries , who later became a member of the Bundestag FDP , who advocated the murder of Jews living in the country, who would form the backbone of the partisan organizations operating there. According to de Vries, who works as a special agricultural leader in Wagner's chief group, the anti-Semitism of Belarusian and Baltic police associations should be exploited. De Vries' suggestions were implemented in a corresponding service instruction. From September 1942, Wagner advised General Field Marshal Günther von Kluge on all agricultural issues affecting Army Group Center. When Wagner left Belarus, he assessed the agriculture there as a hopeless case, conditions there would be like in Germany 200 years earlier.

In November 1943 Wagner was transferred to Brussels to head the military administration for Belgium and northern France, where he headed the nutrition group. In this position he was replaced on March 1, 1944, because he had sexually molested several military assistants . In the same month Wagner was drafted into the Waffen-SS with the rank of Unterscharführer of the reserve and transferred to the staff of the 13th Waffen-Gebirgs-Division of the SS "Handschar" , a unit made up mainly of Bosnian volunteers . From January 1945 Wagner was, most recently in the rank of SS-Obersturmführer in the reserve of the Waffen-SS, staff leader of the SS-Oberabschnitt "Main" in Nuremberg.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Herbert Linder, From the NSDAP to the SPD. The political life of Dr. Helmuth Klotz (1894–1943) , Universitätsverlag Konstanz, Konstanz 1998, ISBN 3-87940-607-3 , p. 157.
2. ^ Karl Dietrich Bracher, The Dissolution of the Weimar Republic , Villingen / Black Forest 1960, p. 432; quoted in Linder, NSDAP , p. 158 f.
3. ^ Christian Gerlach : Calculated murders. The German economic and extermination policy in Belarus 1941 to 1944. Hamburger Edition, Hamburg 1999, ISBN 3-930908-54-9 , p. 114.
4. ↑ ^{a b c} Gerlach, Morde , p. 147.
5. ↑ Gerlach, Morde , p. 508.
6. ↑ Gerlach, Morde , p. 340.
7. ↑ Gerlach, Morde , p. 686.
8. ↑ Gerlach, Morde , p. 333.

literature

• Hans Georg Ruppel, Birgit Groß: Hessian MPs 1820–1933. Biographical evidence for the estates of the Grand Duchy of Hesse (2nd Chamber) and the Landtag of the People's State of Hesse (= Darmstädter Archivschriften. Vol. 5). Verlag des Historisches Verein für Hessen, Darmstadt 1980, ISBN 3-922316-14-X , p. 259.
• Joachim Lilla , Martin Döring, Andreas Schulz: extras in uniform. The members of the Reichstag 1933–1945. A biographical manual. Including the ethnic and National Socialist members of the Reichstag from May 1924. Droste, Düsseldorf 2004, ISBN 3-7700-5254-4 , pp. 701–702.
• Erich Stockhorst: 5000 people. Who was what in the 3rd Reich . Arndt, Kiel 2000, ISBN 3-88741-116-1 (unchanged reprint of the first edition from 1967).

Web links

• Richard Wagner in the database of members of the Reichstag