Rudolf Greifeld

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Rudolf Greifeld (born November 6, 1911 in Oschatz ; † April 21, 1984 ) was a German lawyer and from 1956 to 1974 managing director of the Karlsruhe Nuclear Research Center . In December 2015, the Senate of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology distanced itself from being awarded the title of Honorary Senator to Greifeld in 1969 because Greifeld, as a war administrator in Paris , had supported anti-Semitic Nazi crime policy during the Second World War .

Life

Career as a lawyer and party member

Rudolf Greifeld was born the son of a government official in Oschatz . Before starting school, the family of four moved to Löbau because the father was able to take up a job as a customs inspector there. Greifeld first attended elementary school in Löbau, then the German high school , where he graduated from high school in 1931. From the winter semester 1931/32 to the summer semester 1935 he studied law and, at times, economics at the universities of Munich, Kiel and Leipzig.

During his studies, Greifeld was involved in the strongly anti - Semitic Association of German Students and joined the SA in 1933 . In 1935 he passed the first state examination in law, and in 1938 the second. During his clerkship, he joined in 1937 in the Nazi party and his doctorate in 1938 with a thesis The sub-participation in the general partnership and the limited partnership , which was rated "rite", at the University of Leipzig Dr. jur. He then worked as a lawyer , first in Annaberg , then from March 1939 in Pirna . In addition to handling general legal matters, he was also responsible for four-year plan matters.

War Administrator in World War II

Greifeld, who had already been drafted into the Wehrmacht from May to July 1939, was reassigned to the Wehrmacht in September 1939, first returned to a civilian position as an assessor in Dresden in December, before becoming a war administrator in the civilian staff of the military commander in June 1940 Paris became. Whether Greifeld volunteered to serve the German occupiers there as a lawyer and civil servant is open. In any case, such a position in Paris was coveted and could be seen as a springboard for a further career.

As part of his work as a war administrator, Greifeld acted as a liaison between his office and the Paris city administration. On the French side, Edouard Bonnefoy was his contact person and recipient of instructions. Bonnefoy was the cabinet chief of the prefecture at the time the Wehrmacht marched into Paris . He tried again and again at Greifeld to delay anti-Jewish measures and postpone the requisitions of hotels, apartments, halls and schools, but generally in vain. In the diaries of Bonnefoy, who later died as a resistance fighter in the concentration camp, a number of anti-Semitic abuse and Nazi ideological statements by Greifeld are noted. On the other hand, a photo in front of the Eiffel Tower from June 28, 1940, which according to media reports is supposed to show Greifeld together with Adolf Hitler , Arno Breker and Albert Speer , does not actually show Greifeld next to Hitler, but SS-Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff .

On the other hand, the note dated January 3, 1941 , which was published by Serge Klarsfeld in 1977 in a collection of documents, written and signed by Greifeld and addressed to the police department, was verified as correct . This letter from Greifeld also bears the initials for knowledge of the representatives of the police department Georg Kiessel and Walter Labs . Greifeld explains and suggests:

“Lately the Jews in Paris have become very popular again. So were z. B. on Silversternacht in the cabaret 'Le bœuf sur le toit' in the building of the hotel 'George V' - apart from the members of the Wehrmacht - very many Jews. [...] I therefore suggest that the permit for extended police hours in the bars frequently visited by members of the Wehrmacht should be checked and that the extension of the police hour be made dependent on the obligation that the owner put a sign on the door stating that Jews are not allowed to enter . "

With this "suggestion" Greifeld demanded a further tightening of the measures against the Jews, so that the historian Bernd-A. Rusinek Klarsfeld's assessment is that it was a kind of “spiritual preparation” for the later tightening of anti-Jewish measures up to the beginning of the deportations, in whose organizational preparation Greifeld then no longer had any part.

Together with the couple Serge and Beate Klarsfeld , the French physicist Léon Gruenbaum (1934–2004) in particular made information about Greifeld's role as a war administrator in occupied Paris public and was posthumously awarded the 2015 Whistleblower Prize.

Greifeld remained a war administrator in Paris until September 30, 1941, then lived for a quarter of a year in Stuttgart as a probationary civil servant at the local German Institute for Foreign Affairs (DAI) , which actively supported the Nazi state's national policy during the war. From the spring of 1942 until his capture in May 1945, he was deployed as a lieutenant mainly on the Eastern Front. From the end of the war until December 1945 he was in American captivity.

Career in the Federal Republic of Germany

After three months of unemployment, in April 1946 he became legal advisor of the Württembergische Girozentrale and the Württemberg Sparkassen und Giroverband Stuttgart. Greifeld originally planned to practice as a lawyer. But this would have required the classification as "exonerated" in his denazification process . However, the Spruchkammer 37 Stuttgart classified him in 1946 as a “fellow traveler” and ordered the payment of 180 Reichsmark “atonement amount”. Greifeld's attempt at revision in 1948 failed, even if his former Parisian colleague as war administrator Walther Labs issued him a so-called clean bill of health. a. claimed that Greifeld had practically put up resistance by, among other things, by blocking requisitions that were actually intended to "soften the measures of the occupation authorities in practice" and thus, for example, had "hundreds of French families keep their apartments". The Arbitration Chamber rejected the reopening of the proceedings and the classification as exonerated as unfounded.

In April 1948, Greifeld became an employee of the then still Württemberg Ministry of Economics. Later he was promoted to senior government councilor in the Baden-Württemberg Ministry of Economics , where he was responsible for the energy industry. In this function, from 1953 onwards, he was involved in the negotiations on a planned “reactor station and the resulting nuclear research center”. In 1956 he became - alongside the chemist and before 1945 as manager of IG Farben , Gerhard Ritter, who was now selected by the industry ( Hoechst AG) and responsible for the technical area, and Otto Haxel from the Physics Institute of Heidelberg University as a voluntary interest representative of the Science - one of the three managing directors of the Kernreaktor-Bau und Betriebsgesellschaft (KBB), from which the Nuclear Research Center (KfK) emerged in 1963. According to Günther Oetzel in his dissertation on the origins and development of the Karlsruhe Nuclear Research Center, he was seen as the “boss” of the three managing directors, as he had the say in administrative matters.

After taking office, Greifeld described the purpose of the facility as "research into all problems connected with the operation of reactors", which should ultimately serve to gain "our own patents" and added:

“The Karlsruhe reactor should also help to create new sales opportunities for German industry, e. B. by moderators, auxiliary materials of all kinds and finally entire power plants to be found. The use of the results should be left to the industry. Interested companies will receive licenses for the exploitation of the research results for a fee. "

During his term of office, Greifeld repeatedly advocated cooperation between the nuclear research center and the University of Karlsruhe . In 1969 he was made an honorary senator of the research center . In 1975 he had to resign as a member of the supervisory board of the French institute Laue-Langevin after his previous work as a war administrator in Paris and "anti-Semitic statements" had become known; 350 French scientists had demanded his removal.

As managing director of the Karlsruhe Nuclear Research Center, Greifeld “retired” in 1974, after having advanced the facility through appropriate administrative competence, decisive action and excellent contacts with the state authorities, according to Wolfgang D. Müller in his history of nuclear energy in the Federal Republic of Germany , but on the other hand "various frictions that burdened the research climate so important for excellent research results", especially "in relation to the scientists". Before that, Greifeld had signed a “cooperation agreement with the Pakistani Atomic Energy Agency”. When he retired, he was awarded the Great Federal Cross of Merit on June 24, 1974 .

Rusinek's opinion and examination by the ethics committee

In January 2013, the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) announced that Greifeld's honorary senatorial position was currently suspended, that the KIT ethics committee had been entrusted with the examination and that a historian was responsible for examining the allegations and with regard to a possible decision by the senate Withdrawal should be used. In a report in the Badische Neuesten Nachrichten from June 2013, the newspaper announced that the historian and archive manager of the Jülich Research Center , Bernd-A. Rusinek , will scientifically work on the question of the "Nazi past" among the staff of the research center and will present a corresponding report by October 2014.

In December 2013, Rusinek told the same newspaper that the results of his research so far ruled out that Greifeld was "one of the leading personnel of the occupation regime in Paris". His rank as war administrator was too low to be able to see Greifeld as decisive for the preparation of Hitler's visit to Paris in 1940. It is true that the fact that Greifeld's anti-Semitic statements from his time in Paris are known to prohibit characterizing him as “harmless”. But the photo that allegedly shows him with Hitler in front of the Eiffel Tower in Paris is actually not Greifeld, but a different person. In his report, Rusinek shows, in particular by referring to a technical statement by the historian Julien Reitzenstein, that this other person is SS-Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff.

In his report that has been available to the KIT ethics committee since autumn 2015, Rusinek, according to the researcher in an interview with the daily newspaper Badische Latest Nachrichten, came to the conclusion that “Greifeld was a National Socialist in 1941 who was fully in line with the Nazi ideology - but not a functionary of the beginning Holocaust ”. His outrage that Jews were “spreading out” in Parisian pubs and that the German occupying power's war administrative councilor called on the police to prevent this was clearly anti-Semitic. In his report, which has also been published as a book in expanded form since May 2019, Rusinek sums up that Greifeld "(was) part of the anti-Jewish persecution apparatus in the military-occupied zone of France from June 1940 to September 1941". On the basis of the report, the ethics committee recommended that the KIT Senate distance itself from its honorary senator status.

Distance from Greifeld by the KIT Senate

In a statement dated December 14, 2015, the KIT Senate followed the recommendation of the ethics committee. In this, the university expressly "distances itself" from being awarded the honorary senatorial title to Greifeld in 1969. Based on the findings of Rusinek's report on Greifeld's involvement in Nazi crimes and his anti-Semitic attitude, according to current knowledge, a corresponding honor is not ethically justifiable. A withdrawal of the title is no longer possible, however, since a legal examination had shown that this honorary title had already expired with Greifeld's death. Beyond Greifeld, the report provided information on functionaries of the TH Karlsruhe who were possibly even more seriously involved in the Nazi crime history than Greifeld, according to the co-inventor of the chemical warfare agent sarin and IG-Farben manager, Gerhard Ritter, or the former special manager Josef Brandl who was involved in the policy of extermination against the Jewish population in Eastern Galicia . The Senate announced that it would be commissioned to investigate "further biographies of possibly incriminated people".

Fonts

  • The sub-participation in the general partnership and the limited partnership . Dittert, Dresden 1938 (= University of Leipzig, legal dissertation, 1938)
  • American Military Government Laws No. 52 and No. 53 with Explanatory Notes. "Blocking and supervision of assets" u. "Foreign Exchange Management". Published by the Württembergische Sparkassen- u. Giro Association in Stuttgart. With explanations by Rudolf Greifeld. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt (DVA), Stuttgart 1947

literature

  • Walter Habel (Ed.): Who is who? The German who's who. 17th edition of Degeners Who's It? Societäts-Verlag Frankfurt a. M. 1973, p. 331
  • Serge Klarsfeld (ed.): German documents 1941–1944. The final solution to the Jewish question in France . Paris 1977
  • Wolfgang D. Müller: History of nuclear energy in the Federal Republic of Germany. Beginnings and setting the course . Schäffer Verlag for Economics and Taxes, Stuttgart 1990, ISBN 3-8202-0564-0
  • Günther Oetzel: Research Policy in the Federal Republic of Germany. Establishment and development of a large-scale research institution based on the model of the Karlsruhe Nuclear Research Center (KfK) 1956–1963 (also dissertation, University of Karlsruhe, 1995). Peter Lang, Frankfurt a. M. 1996, ISBN 3-631-30412-9
  • Bernd-A. Rusinek: The Greifeld Case, Karlsruhe - Science Management and the Nazi Past (= publications from the archive of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology; 5). KIT Scientific Publishing, Karlsruhe 2019, ISBN 978-3-7315-0844-1 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Walter Habel (Ed.): Who is who? The German who's who. 17th edition of Degeners Who's It? Societäts-Verlag Frankfurt a. M. 1973, p. 331; Place of birth according to Serge Klarsfeld (Ed.): German documents 1941–1944. The final solution to the Jewish question in France . Paris 1977, p. 234.
  2. ↑ a b c Klaus Gaßner: NS networks on the trail. The KIT has its history processed . In: Badische Latest News, June 22, 2013, p. 5.
  3. ↑ Bernd-A. Rusinek: The Greifeld Case, Karlsruhe - Science Management and the Nazi Past (= publications from the archive of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology; 5). KIT Scientific Publishing, Karlsruhe 2019, p. 13
  4. ↑ Bernd-A. Rusinek: The Greifeld case , pp. 34–35.
  5. ↑ Bernd-A. Rusinek: The case of Greifeld , 35–37 u. Pp. 46–48 (on SA and NSDAP membership).
  6. ↑ Bernd-A. Rusinek: The Greifeld case , pp. 56–58.
  7. ↑ Bernd-A. Rusinek: The Greifeld case , pp. 89–92.
  8. ↑ a b c Rüdiger Soldt: History of an Honorary Senator . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, December 28, 2012 ( online )
  9. ↑ Bernd-A. Rusinek: The Greifeld case , pp. 64–68.
  10. ↑ Bernd-A. Rusinek: The Greifeld case , pp. 97–101.
  11. ↑ Serge Klarsfeld (Ed.): German documents 1941–1944. The final solution to the Jewish question in France . Paris 1977, p. 13
  12. ↑ Bernd-A. Rusinek: The Greifeld case , p. 98 u. P. 232.
  13. ^ SWR Landesschau aktuell Baden-Württemberg : Awarding of the Whistleblower Prize in Karlsruhe , October 16, 2015; Léon Gruenbaum posthumously received the 2015 Whistleblower Prize . In: Südwest Presse, October 15, 2015
  14. ↑ Bernd-A. Rusinek: The Greifeld case , p. 110 u. P. 118.
  15. ↑ Bernd-A. Rusinek: The Greifeld case , pp. 119–120.
  16. ↑ Bernd-A. Rusinek: The Greifeld case , pp. 127–128.
  17. ↑ Bernd-A. Rusinek: Der Fall Greifeld , pp. 133-139, quotation Labs p. 136.
  18. ↑ Bernd-A. Rusinek: The Greifeld case , pp. 127–128.
  19. ↑ Wolfgang D. Müller: History of nuclear energy in the Federal Republic of Germany. Beginnings and setting the course . Schäffer Verlag for Economy and Taxes, Stuttgart 1990, p. 109f.
  20. ^ Günther Oetzel: Research Policy in the Federal Republic of Germany. Establishment and development of a large-scale research institution based on the model of the Karlsruhe Nuclear Research Center (KfK) 1956–1963 . Peter Lang, Frankfurt a. M. 1996, p. 69.
  21. ↑ Wolfgang D. Müller: History of nuclear energy in the Federal Republic of Germany. Beginnings and setting the course . Schäffer Verlag for Economics and Taxes, Stuttgart 1990, p. 212f.
  22. ↑ Annoyance at the ILL Grenoble - 350 French scientists demand the recall of R. Greifeld . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, November 26, 1975
  23. ↑ Wolfgang D. Müller: History of nuclear energy in the Federal Republic of Germany. Beginnings and setting the course . Schäffer Verlag for Economy and Taxes, Stuttgart 1990, pp. 214f.
  24. ↑ Office of the Federal President
  25. ^ Forum Ludwig Marum e. V. , Chairman Harald Denecken Retired Mayor. D., Karlsruhe
  26. ↑ Honorary senator dignity suspended: Nazi allegations against Dr. Rudolf Greifeld , website of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, January 10, 2013.
  27. ↑ The Karlsruhe Institute of Technology has the Nazi past of former managers clarified. In: Badische Zeitung , November 4, 2015.
  28. ↑ Klaus Gaßner: No traces of Greifeld. Historian Rustinek presents the first results of his Nazi investigation on KIT . In: Badische Latest Nachrichten, December 18, 2013, p. 10.
  29. ↑ Bernd-A. Rusinek: The Greifeld case , pp. 67–72.
  30. ↑ Elvira Weisenburger: "Greifeld was involved in anti-Semitic politics". KIT distances itself from its dead honorary senator / ban on Jews in Parisian pubs . In: Badische Latest Nachrichten, December 15, 2015, p. 14.
  31. ↑ Serge Klarsfeld (Ed.): German documents 1941–1944. The final solution to the Jewish question in France . Paris 1977, p. 13
  32. ↑ Bernd-A. Rusinek: The Greifeld case , p. 232.
  33. ↑ Honorary senator dignity suspended: Nazi allegations against Dr. Rudolf Greifeld , website of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, last updated on December 14, 2015.
  34. ↑ Elvira Weisenburger: "Greifeld was involved in anti-Semitic politics". KIT distances itself from its dead honorary senator / ban on Jews in Parisian pubs . In: Badische Latest Nachrichten, December 15, 2015, p. 14.
  35. ↑ Press release of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology: KIT Senate distances itself from honoring Rudolf Greifeld , press release 155/2015 of December 14, 2015.
personal data
SURNAME Greifeld, Rudolf
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Greifeld, Helmut Rudolf
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German lawyer and managing director
DATE OF BIRTH November 6, 1911
PLACE OF BIRTH Oschatz
DATE OF DEATH April 21, 1984