Siegfried Kasche

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Siegfried Kasche (around 1938)

Siegfried Kasche (born June 18, 1903 in Strausberg ; † June 19, 1947 in Zagreb ) was a German SA Obergruppenführer and from 1941 to May 1945 envoy 1st class in Zagreb ( Independent State of Croatia ).

Live and act

Kasche had a younger brother, Eberhard Kasche, who, like him, later became a leading SA functionary. In his youth he attended the Cadet Corps in Potsdam and the Lichterfelde Cadet Institute . He then took part in battles in Berlin and the Baltic States as a member of the Freikorps in 1919 and 1920 .

In 1925 he joined the SA and in January 1926 the NSDAP . From 1928 to 1931 Kasche was deputy Gauleiter in Gau Ostmark . In September 1930 he was elected to the Reichstag . In 1934, like numerous other SA leaders, Kasche was slated to be murdered as part of the so-called Röhm Putsch , but survived because he managed to persuade Göring until he let him go. Appointed Reich speaker of the NSDAP from December 1936 , Kasche received the rank of "Commissioner for the Nazi fighting games". In November 1937 he became leader of the SA group "Hansa". Within the SA, Kasche held the rank of SA-Obergruppenführer.

Kasche proceeds together with the Croatian Foreign Minister Lorkovic (right), a guard of honor of Ustasha militia from (Zagreb, May 1941).

From April 17, 1941 until the end of the war in May 1945, he was envoy 1st class in Zagreb. Reasons for appointing an SA leader as envoy were both general reservations of Reich Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop about professional diplomats and efforts to curb the growing influence of the SS under Heinrich Himmler in Eastern and Southeastern Europe.

Other SA envoys were Adolf Beckerle in Sofia , Dietrich von Jagow in Budapest , Manfred von Killinger in Pressburg and Bucharest, and Hanns Ludin in Pressburg.

War crimes

In addition to his involvement in the deportation of Jews from Croatia , Kasche stood out as an advocate of the Ustasha regime and tried to justify the terror against the Serbian civilian population.

On July 16, 1941, a few days after the start of the war of aggression against the Soviet Union , Adolf Hitler , Alfred Rosenberg and Hermann Göring discussed filling positions for the highest civil administrative offices in the eastern territories to be filled in the future. Unlike Rosenberg and Göring, Hitler decided to appoint Siegfried Kasche as Reich Commissioner for a future " Reichskommissariat Moskowien " . Due to the course of the war, this planning became obsolete.

In a telex dated March 4, 1943, he informed the Foreign Office in Berlin: “Preparatory work for a new Jewish campaign in Croatia will be completed at the end of this week.” On April 22, 1944: “The Jewish question in Croatia has been largely resolved.”

The brutality of the approach brought him into conflict with Colonel General Alexander Löhr , the Commander-in-Chief of the Southeast, and with Konstantin Kammerhofer , Himmler's representative in Croatia, who viewed the Ustaša regime as a burden on German interests. With the deterioration of the military situation in Croatia, especially as a result of the partisan and Četnica movement , Kasche's position in Berlin became increasingly less important.

After the war he was extradited to Yugoslavia by the Allies . In May and June 1947 the treason and war crimes trial against " Slavko Kvaternik and others" took place before the Supreme Court of the People's Republic of Croatia , in which ministers and high-ranking officials of the Ustasha regime as well as Kasche were indicted and convicted. Seven death sentences were passed. While the death sentences of the other defendants were to be enforced by shooting, Kasche, former diplomatic representative of the German Reich, by had the rope to die. The sentence was carried out the day after his 44th birthday.

literature

  • Ernst Klee: The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. 2nd revised edition. Frankfurt am Main 2003, ISBN 3-10-039309-0 , p. 299.
  • Joachim Lilla , Martin Döring, Andreas Schulz: extras in uniform: the members of the Reichstag 1933–1945. A biographical manual. Including the Volkish and National Socialist members of the Reichstag from May 1924 . Droste, Düsseldorf 2004, ISBN 3-7700-5254-4 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Heinz Höhne : Mordsache Röhm . In: Der Spiegel . No. 26 , 1984, pp. 122-141 ( online ).
  2. Andreas Zellhuber: "Our administration is heading for a catastrophe ..." The Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories and the German occupation in the Soviet Union. Munich 2006, p. 87.