Sigfried Uiberreither

Sigfried Uiberreither, 1941

Sigfried Uiberreither (also Siegfried) (born March 29, 1908 in Salzburg , † December 29, 1984 in Sindelfingen ) was an Austrian lawyer and officer of the NSDAP .

Life

In 1924 Uiberreither joined the Schill Youth , which pioneered the Hitler Youth . After graduation he studied at the University of Graz law and was 1933 Dr. jur. PhD . During his studies in 1927 he became a member of the Cheruskia Graz fraternity . In addition to his studies, he worked temporarily as a construction worker. From 1930 he was secretary of the agricultural health insurance fund in Graz . In 1931 he joined the SA , in which he was appointed group leader while the Nazi organizations were banned in the Austrian corporate state . After the " Anschluss of Austria " in 1938, he was first acting police director for Graz.

After the occupation of Austria , the National Socialist leadership had the intention of turning the Grenzgau Styria into a model district on the southeast corner of the German Empire . The selection of the Gauleiter was therefore given particular importance. The Gauleiter from the illegal days of the NSDAP, Sepp Helfrich , and the other “ old fighters ” were not trusted to do this job. Uiberreither was appointed Gauleiter by Hitler on May 22, 1938, in the hope that he would become the desired "strong Grenzgauleiter". On June 9, 1938, he also became governor . In the same year he was appointed SA Brigade Leader for Central Styria . In 1939 he married Käte (1918–2012), the daughter of the meteorologist and geoscientist Alfred Wegener . In 1939/40 he did military service as a mountain hunter and took part in the occupation of Norway . In April 1940 he was dismissed from the Wehrmacht as a lieutenant .

Between 1938 and the end of 1939, the almost 3,000 Jews who lived in Gau Styria were expelled from the country through persecution, terrorization, the destruction of their synagogues and ceremonial halls, and the confiscation of their property .

On March 31, 1940, Uiberreithers activity as governor ceased because Styria had become a Reichsgau . He became Reich Governor of Styria. At the head of the Reichsgau was the Reich Governor for the state and the Gauleiter for party affairs. As was often the case in other districts, both functions were combined in one person, Uiberreither.

From left: Uiberreither, Martin Bormann , Adolf Hitler and Otto Dietrich on the Draubrücke in Marburg an der Drau (1941), photo from the collection of Adolf von Bomhard in the Federal Archives

After Germany's Balkan campaign in early April 1941, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia , which had been conquered by the German Wehrmacht, was smashed, and Lower Styria and parts of Upper Carniola became part of the German Reich. Uiberreither was appointed by Hitler as head of the civil administration for Lower Styria . A rigorous Germanization policy began and Uiberreither announced that the necessary measures would be taken with freezing cold to Germanize the country in three years. After the arrest of the Slovenian leadership and the dissolution of the Slovenian associations and cultural organizations, thousands of Slovenes were resettled to Serbia , Croatia and the Old Reich . Furthermore, as early as May 1941, 1200 younger teachers from Styria were assigned to work in Lower Styria, and German was introduced as the language of instruction at around 400 schools instead of Slovenian . With a few exceptions, Slovenes were no longer allowed to work as teachers. In addition, all Slovenian documents from Lower Styria were to be confiscated. The brutal policy of Germanization soon led to Slovenian counter-actions such as passive resistance, sabotage , robbery and attacks. The Nazi regime responded to these reactions with the shooting of prisoners, whose names were placarded across the country as a deterrent. With the continuation of the war, were partisans ever more popular, and against the war, the increasing number of attacked Communist -dominated resistance activity even on the Upper Styrian industrial zones over.

Uiberreither was also appointed Reich Defense Commissioner for the Gau Styria in 1942 . The next year he was appointed SA-Obergruppenführer. From 1944 he was leader of the Volkssturm in Styria.

Despite the approaching Eastern Front and the almost daily Allied bombing raids from August 1943 and the massive destruction caused by this as well as the increasing actions of resistance movements, Uiberreither and the Nazi regime managed to maintain arms production and the food supply for the population until the end of the war to stay. The regime responded mercilessly to resistance, boycott of measures ordered, sabotage and desertion. Shootings have increased particularly in recent months. The German-speaking minority of Lower Styria paid for the barbaric Germanization policy of the Nazi regime after the war with its almost complete expulsion and expropriation , personal persecution, imprisonment, torture and murder, which were initiated by the Tito regime , which had come to power .

Escape

After the end of the war, Uiberreither surrendered to the Allies and appeared as a witness before the International Military Court in Nuremberg . Several proceedings were initiated against him before the People's Court in Graz, including orders for mass shootings of freedom fighters at the Feliferhof near Graz and in the SS barracks in Graz-Wetzelsdorf . Uiberreither himself never appeared in court. The threatened extradition to Yugoslavia, which, like the other Gauleiters or high SS or Wehrmacht officers who were extradited to Yugoslavia, would most likely have resulted in a death sentence , he escaped by fleeing, probably with the help of the US secret service. There are rumors that he bought this escape by handing over unpublished scientific works by his late father-in-law Alfred Wegener . After that there were only untrusted indications of a stay in Argentina and rumors that Uiberreither would later have lived in Sindelfingen under a different name .

Uiberreithers "second life"

In a report in the Graz monthly newspaper Korso from July 2008, contemporary witnesses are quoted, one of whom worked with Uiberreither in the same company around 1954. Sigfried Uiberreither had acquired a new identity and called himself Friedrich Schönharting. He worked for a refrigerator company in Sindelfingen and in later years was employed by the Deutsche Bundesbahn . His last years of life were overshadowed by Alzheimer's disease , he finally died on December 29, 1984. His urn was buried at the Burghaldenfriedhof in Sindelfingen.

Uiberreithers wife appeared under her new name Käthe Schönharting in a film about her father Alfred Wegener broadcast on December 31, 2006 by ARD . The four sons of the Uiberreither-Schönharting couple live in Germany. They refuse to make any statements on the matter.

literature

• Helge Dvorak: Biographical Lexicon of the German Burschenschaft. Volume I: Politicians. Volume 6: T-Z. Winter, Heidelberg 2005, ISBN 3-8253-5063-0 , pp. 83-86.
• Stefan Karner : Styria in the Third Reich 1938–1945. ISBN 3-7011-7171-8 .
• Emmerich Tálos , Ernst Hanisch, Wolfgang Neugebauer and Reinhard Sieder (eds.): Nazi rule in Austria. öbv and hpt, Vienna 2000, ISBN 3-209-03179-7 .

swell

1. ↑ Heimo Halbrainer, Christian Stenner: Dr. Sigfried Uiberreither - the Gauleiter's second life. In: korso.at. Christian Stenner, July 5, 2008, accessed January 10, 2017 . 
2. ^ The first: Eismitte by Ernst Waldemar Bauer on December 31st at 12.50 p.m. In: presseportal.de. November 13, 2006, accessed January 10, 2017 . 

Web links

Commons : Sigfried Uiberreither  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Sigfried Uiberreither in the catalog of the German National Library
• Sigfried Uiberreither in the database of members of the Reichstag