Rudolf Schleier

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Rudolf August Emil Otto Schleier (born August 31, 1899 in Hamburg ; † January 4, 1959 ) was a German businessman, Nazi functionary and diplomat . During the Second World War he was the representative of Ambassador Otto Abetz in German-occupied France .

Life

Training and career entry

After completing his school career, Rudolf Schleier completed a commercial apprenticeship and took part in the First World War from June 1917 . From September 1918 to January 1920 he was in French captivity. From 1920 to 1940 he worked as a businessman, most recently as an authorized signatory . The cheese wholesaler was regularly in France on business from 1924 and, according to its own statements, was an increasingly "staunch supporter of Franco-German understanding".

Political activity

Schleier had already become a member of the Deutschvölkischer Schutz- und Trutzbund in 1920 and belonged to the DNVP from 1920 to 1924 . In December 1931 he joined the NSDAP . He was involved in setting up an NSDAP / AO country group in France and from 1933 he was a France officer for this NS organization. In 1935 he became the provisional state group leader of the NSDAP / AO in France with the rank of Gastellenleiter and was promoted to Gauamtsleiter there from 1936 to the beginning of April 1938, officially the state group leader of the NSDAP / AO. He was one of the co-founders and on the board of the Nazi-related Franco-German Society based in Berlin , from 1936 headed a branch of this society in Hamburg for the Hanseatic cities and in November 1938 became Vice President of the Franco-German Society.

Second World War

After the start of the Second World War, he stayed in the German-occupied Wartheland from November 1939 to April 1940 during the seat of the war in order to sound out the economic situation there for the Hamburg Chamber of Commerce .

Envoy in Paris

Schleier came to the Foreign Office through his friend Abetz . After the French campaign , Schleier belonged to the so-called Abetz group , which was flown to German-occupied Belgium on June 14, 1940 and from there to German-occupied Paris . In Paris, Schleier initially held the title of Consul General, and after Abetz had become Ambassador, he was appointed envoy (second class at the end of 1941 and first class in April 1943). During Abetz's absence, Schleier took over his business in Paris.

Schleier was also involved in anti-Jewish measures: In the spring of 1942, the head of Eichmann's department, Adolf Eichmann, asked the Foreign Office whether 1,000 French and stateless Jews who had already been imprisoned in Compiègne could be brought to Auschwitz as a measure of punishment for attacks against Wehrmacht soldiers . Shortly thereafter, Eichmann increased this number by 5,000 more “Jews who appeared under the state police”. This request was forwarded by telegram to Schleier by the Undersecretary of State Martin Luther in the Foreign Office , who raised "no objections to the intended Jewish action". The Foreign Office then reported to Eichmann that no objection would be raised against the deportation . On May 7, 1942, SS-Hauptsturmführer Theodor Dannecker was able to agree on the marking ordinance on the Star of David with Abetz, Schleier and the Jewish advisor at the embassy Carltheo Zeitschel , which was issued by the military administration on May 29. In September 1942 he reported to the Foreign Office that 28,069 Jews had already been deported in accordance with the demands of the Reich Security Main Office for “the purpose of the final solution ”. In February 1943 he coordinated the "Jewish measures", ie deportations for extermination, for the embassy in the newly occupied area of ​​Vichy France and in the Italian-occupied zone of France.

Schleier was transferred to Berlin on November 29, 1943.

Head of Office and Department in the Foreign Office

In 1944, Schleier was entrusted with the management of Information Center X of the Foreign Office, newly founded by Ribbentrop , which was renamed several times, most recently as Information Center XIV (Anti-Jewish Foreign Action ) . This service should coordinate the anti-Jewish propaganda centrally, u. a. Anti-Jewish radio broadcasts were produced for international radio - with reference to the alleged war guilt of the Jews , their alleged connections to Bolshevism (see Jewish Bolshevism ) or world domination plans (see World Judaism ) in order to strengthen anti-Semitic movements In this context, Schleier et al. a. to publish a “Diplomatic Yearbook on Jewish World Politics”, to organize a traveling exhibition and to set up an anti-Jewish archive. The “Working Conference of the Jewish Refiners of the German Missions in Europe” in Krummhübel on April 3rd and 4th, 1944, which was organized by Franz Alfred Six on the initiative of Horst Wagner , was chaired by Schleier.

On April 21, 1944, he succeeded Hans Bernd von Haeften as the ministerial director of the cultural policy department in the Foreign Office. As a representative of the Foreign Office, he also became Vice President of the Union of Intergovernmental Associations in May 1944 . From the end of March 1945 to the middle of April 1945, he was in charge of the Foreign Office offices that were outsourced to Thuringia .

post war period

After the end of the war, Schleier was in Allied detention . During his internment in 1947 in Nuremberg he was questioned several times as part of the Nuremberg Trials . During the interrogations, Schleier emphasized that he had nothing against the Jews in his personal circle and that until 1939 he also had a Jewish tailor and stayed with a Jewish hotelier on business trips in France and had breakfast with him. He denied the telegram he had made out for the deportation during interrogation; he did not want to have found out about the extermination camps until after the end of the war, so that after months of interrogation Robert Kempner rejected Schleier's involvement in the Wilhelmstrasse trial in order to refer to the indictment against the Focus on State Secretary Ernst von Weizsäcker . He was released from the Dachau internment camp in December 1947. In November 1948, Schleier was arrested again and transferred to France. He was "removed from prosecution" by a military court in Paris.

After his release from internment, Schleier lived as an envoy for reuse (e.g. Wv.) In Hamburg-Blankenese . He committed 1959 suicide . After his death, his extensive estate came to the Political Archive of the Foreign Office in Bonn .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g Roland Ray: Approaching France in the service of Hitler? Otto Abetz and the German policy on France 1930–1942 , Munich 2000, p. 20.
  2. ↑ Hans-Jürgen Döscher: The Foreign Office in the Third Reich. Diplomacy in the shadow of the final solution. , Berlin 1987, p. 219.
  3. ↑ a b c Eckart Conze, Norbert Frei, Peter Hayes, Moshe Zimmermann: The office and the past . German diplomats in the Third Reich and the Federal Republic , Munich 2010
  4. ↑ Biographical Handbook of the German Foreign Service 1871–1945. Volume 4: p . Published by the Foreign Office, Historical Service, edited by: Bernd Isphording, Gerhard Keiper, Martin Kröger. Paderborn et al. 2012, p. 80.
  5. ^ Roland Ray: Approaching France in the service of Hitler? Otto Abetz and the German policy on France 1930–1942 , Munich 2000, p. 284.
  6. ↑ cf. Ernst Klee: Das Personenlexikon zum Third Reich , Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 539.
  7. ↑ Ludwig Biewer , Rainer Blasius: In the files, in the world. A foray through the political archive of the Federal Foreign Office. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2007, p. 78f.
  8. ↑ Ahlrich Meyer: perpetrators in interrogation. The “Final Solution of the Jewish Question” in France 1940–1944 , Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 2005, p. 46f.
  9. ↑ Foreign Office / Political Archive and Historical Unit: Files on German Foreign Policy. 1918-1945. From the archive of the Foreign Office , Series E, Volume III, No. 283, reprinted by: Serge Klarsfeld : Vichy - Auschwitz. The “Final Solution of the Jewish Question” in France , Translated from the French by Ahlrich Meyer , Nördlingen 1989; New edition Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft WBG, Darmstadt 2007 ISBN 978-3-534-20793-0 , p. 479.
  10. ^ Serge Klarsfeld: Vichy - Auschwitz. The “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” in France . From the French by Ahlrich Meyer, Nördlingen 1989; WBG, Darmstadt 2007 ISBN 978-3-534-20793-0 , p. 496f. See also p. 513.
  11. ↑ For more participants see Lemma Krummhübel
  12. ↑ Publication Number: M-1019, Publication Title: Records of the United States Nuernberg War Crimes trials Interrogations, 1946–1949, Date Published: 1977 (PDF; 186 kB)
  13. ↑ Ahlrich Meyer: perpetrators in interrogation. The “Final Solution of the Jewish Question” in France 1940–1944 , Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 2005, pp. 31–33.
  14. ^ The National Archives. Untitled Personal Files. Rudolf Schleier (KV 2/1274)
  15. ↑ a b Ahlrich Meyer: perpetrators in interrogation. The “Final Solution of the Jewish Question” in France 1940–1944 , Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 2005, p. 364.
  16. ^ Ernst Klee: Das Personenlexikon zum Third Reich , Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 539.
  17. ↑ Wolfgang A. Mommsen (editor): The bequests in the German archives: (with additions from other holdings) , Part II, Writings of the Federal Archives, Harald Boldt Verlag, Boppard am Rhein 1983, (No. 7092), p. 1097.
personal data
SURNAME Veil, Rudolf
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Schleier, Rudolf August Emil Otto (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German businessman, diplomat and National Socialist
DATE OF BIRTH August 31, 1899
PLACE OF BIRTH Hamburg
DATE OF DEATH 4th January 1959