Walter Labs

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Walter Julius Paul Labs (born July 13, 1910 in Gladbeck ; † December 7, 1988 in Heidelberg ) was a German lawyer , administrative officer and expert on local public transport . As a representative of the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories , Labs was involved in the Holocaust in the Soviet Union occupied by the German Reich in World War II . In 1976 he received the Federal Cross of Merit for his services to local public transport .

Career until 1941

On February 1, 1931, Labs became a member of the NSDAP ( membership number 447.173). After studying law , he took up a position as a court trainee in his hometown in August 1931. At the law faculty of the University of Erlangen , an early stronghold of the National Socialist German Student Union , he submitted a dissertation with the title Purpose, Nature and Effects of Noting the Civil Code , which appeared in 1934. His license to practice medicine as a Dr. jur. took place on November 2, 1933, the speaker was the German national lawyer and classical philologist Bernhard Kübler . In February 1935, Labs became a government trainee in Münster . In June 1938 he was promoted to government assessor and in November 1939 to the government council in Hanover .

From July 1940 to June 1941, Labs served as a war administrator in German-occupied Paris . After his promotion to the war councilor, he was most recently personal assistant to the head of the Paris administrative staff.

Holocaust and Germanization of the East

Higher Government Council in the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories

From 1941 he headed Department II.1 Internal Administration in Alfred Rosenberg's Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories (RMfdbO). Labs belonged to the closest circle around Rosenberg, "in which the political and strategic decisions of the ministry were made." His direct superior was Ludwig Runte .

Labs wrote several essays on the administration of the territories conquered in the Soviet Union . He also contributed to the creation of a comprehensive presentation of the legal situation in these territories, edited by Alfred Meyer .

Kamenets-Podolsk massacre

As a representative of the RMfdbO, Labs was involved in the Holocaust . On August 25, 1941, he took part in a meeting at the headquarters of the Quartermaster General's High Command of the Army , Eduard Wagner , which was devoted to the preparations for the establishment of the Reichskommissariat Ukraine by civil, military and police authorities planned for September 1, 1941 . At this meeting, the Higher SS and Police Leader Russia South Friedrich Jeckeln , who was not present , announced that he would carry out a mass murder of thousands of Jews:

“ Major Wagner explained [...]. At Kamenetz-Podolsk the Hungarians pushed about 11,000 Jews across the border. The negotiations so far had not yet succeeded in bringing these Jews back. The Higher SS and Police Leader (SS-Obergruppenführer Jeckeln), however, hoped to have liquidated these Jews by September 1, 1941. [...] "

The participants in the meeting - in addition to Wagner and Labs, who also recorded the meeting, were present: Hans Georg Schmidt von Altenstadt as head of the War Administration Department at the Quartermaster General, Justus Danckwerts as Head of Department V "Administration" of the War Administration Department at the Quartermaster General and political adviser from Hans Georg Schmidt von Altenstadt, Otto Bräutigam as another RMfdbO representative, Paul Dargel as representative of Erich Koch , the designated Reich Commissioner in the Reich Commissioner for Ukraine, Ernst-Anton von Krosigk as Chief of Staff of Karl von Roques , the Commander of the Rear Army Area South as well possibly Ernst von Krause as Chief of Staff of the Wehrmacht Commander-in- Chief Ukraine and other, not named employees of the Quartermaster General - remained unmoved despite the clarity of this announcement, the project was not discussed further.

The historian Dieter Pohl described the meeting as an appointment for genocide, because shortly after the meeting the Kamenez-Podolsk massacre began, with 23,600 Jews shot.

Wannsee Conference

In mid-December 1941, "the usually well-informed Labs" learned through a conversation with Werner Feldscher , Jewish advisor in the Reich Ministry of the Interior, that a conference on the " final solution to the Jewish question " was imminent. In his transcript of January 16, 1942, Walter Labs noted:

" SS-Obergruppenführer Heyderich [ sic! ] had received the order from the Reichsmarschall with the permission of the Fuehrer to make preparations in order to implement an immediate and uniform solution to the Jewish question in Europe after the end of the war [...] At this meeting Heyderich would have the opinion of the Reich Security Main Office on the extension of the term Jew to mixed race want to discuss the first degree and the worse position of the previous second degree mixed race. Heyderich wanted the result of this discussion to be the basis of his lecture to the Reichsmarschall respectively. [sic] Use the Führer and his proposal to amend the Nuremberg Laws . "

This conference was postponed at short notice, but took place in Berlin on January 20, 1942 and is known as the Wannsee Conference .

Germanization

On February 4, 1942, two weeks after the Wannsee Conference, Labs took part in a cross-agency meeting in the RMfdbO, which dealt with the question of Germanization - especially in the Baltic countries, but also in Czechoslovakia and Poland . Labs attended this meeting as a representative of the RMfdbO, as did Wilhelm Kinkelin , Gerhard von Mende , Hermann Weitnauer and Ehrenfried Schütte . The Reich Security Main Office was represented by Heinz Hummitzsch and Theodor Girgensohn , the Race and Settlement Main Office by Bruno Kurt Schultz , the Reich Commissariat for the Consolidation of German Volkstum with SS-Hauptsturmführer Helmut Schubert , the Institute for Border and Foreign Studies with Gerhard Teich and Kaiser-Wilhelm -Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics with Eugen Fischer .

Discussions included the extent to which the “ racially undesirables would have to be evacuated to the East ” or “ whether the industrialization of the Baltic region could expediently scrap the racially undesirable parts of the population. “The participants of this meeting came to the conclusion“ that with regard to the question of the east country, a precise examination of the population had to be carried out beforehand, which should not be labeled as a racial inventory, but rather as a hygienic examination and the like. Like. Must be camouflaged so that there is no unrest in the population. "

Career in the Federal Republic of Germany

At the end of the war, Labs was captured or interned for about three months. From December 1945 to April 1946 he worked as a laborer. He completed an apprenticeship as a carpenter, which he started in May 1946, with a journeyman's certificate in March 1948. For Labs' subsequent career it was important that he successfully survived his denazification proceedings before the Gladbeck General Denazification Committee . In this he was also a so-called. Clean bill of his Paris colleagues War Directors Rudolf Greifeld zupass. This certified that Labs had prevented the requisition of an entire street near the avenue George V in Paris in the spring of 1941 . The main committee came to the decision on December 3, 1948 to classify labs in the category V ("unencumbered"). The Spruchkammer credited Labs with joining the NSDAP out of youthful “idealism”. Regarding his role in World War II, it was said that he had only performed “administrative” tasks, and that “without any political influence”. The classification in "Category V 'relieved" made possible ", so the historian Bernd-A. Rusinek , "Labs the Second Career".

Until the end of 1949, "Oberregierungsrat Labs" worked as a "scientific assistant in the Research Institute for Social and Administrative Science at the University of Cologne " and was co-editor of a commentary on the re-established administrative jurisdiction in the British zone . In the introduction, the authors described the "years of the totalitarian National Socialist regime" as a "regression to the police state, to the thinking of the authoritarian state", in which the "judicial independence" was "eliminated from a political point of view". A year later he published a paper on training and the professional conception in the public service.

From January 1, 1950, Labs held a leading position in the Association of Public Transport Companies (VÖV) based in Essen (until 1959) and Cologne (from 1959) for 26 years . There he started as a legal advisor and advisor for coordination and licensing issues. In 1952 he was promoted to deputy association director. Since 1957 Labs has been the association director and executive member of the presidency. In 1975, Labs was not only able to look back on 25 years of influential work at the VÖV, but at that time also held the following executive functions: He was a member of the advisory board of the Federal Minister for Spatial Planning, Building and Urban Development, member of the management board of the Transport Action Committee of the European Communities, and member of the main board of the German Transport Science Society and board member in the German Road Safety Council. Historian Rusinek judges: “In traffic matters, one could say that Dr. jur. Labs no way around. ”On December 31, 1975, he retired. After 1949, Labs published a number of publications on local public transport.

Honors

On January 14, 1976, on the suggestion of Heinz Kühn , Prime Minister of North Rhine-Westphalia , Labs received the Federal Cross of Merit, 1st Class, for his services to local public transport. Labs was also the owner of the VÖV ring of honor .

Works

  • Purpose, nature and effects of the reservation of the civil code , Bochum-Langendreer 1934.
  • The administration of the occupied eastern territories ; in: Reich - People's Order - Living Space. Journal for national constitution and administration (organ of the Reich Research Council , Department of Political and Administrative Sciences, provisional organ of the International Academy for Political and Administrative Sciences ) ed. by Wilhelm Stuckart , Gerhard Klopfer , Werner Best , Reinhard Höhn and Rudolf Lehmann , Vol. V (1943), pp. 132–166.
  • The administration of the Reichskommissariat Ostland ; in: Deutsche Wirtschaftszeitung 39 (1942), No. 12/13, p. 157.
  • Otto v. Werder; Walter Labs; Peter Paul Ortmann: The procedure before the administrative courts: Commentary on ordinance 165 on administrative jurisdiction in d. British Zone , Dieckmann, Oldenburg 1949
  • Training and occupation in the public service. A summary of the results of the meeting of the Institute for the Advancement of Public Affairs . With treatises v. Walter Labs, JO Roach, Institute for the Promotion of Public Affairs [Carl Fr. Fleischer], Frankfurt a. M. 1950.
  • Local public transport in the city and region , Grote, Cologne, Berlin 1971, ISBN 3-7745-0114-9 .
  • Structure and types of company in local public transport , Alba-Buchverlag, Düsseldorf 1972.
  • Local public transport in the city and region , 2nd, revised. Edition of the Deutscher Gemeindeverlag Köln, Stuttgart [u. a.] 1979, ISBN 3-555-00394-1 .
  • Structure and corporate forms of local public transport , Alba-Buchverlag, 2nd edition Düsseldorf 1980, ISBN 3-87094-778-0 .
  • Journal articles by Walter Labs

literature

  • 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 , especially the chapter A Closer Look: Greifeld's denazification advocate Dr. Jur. Walter Labs (1910-1988) , pp. 145-149.
  • Andreas Zellhuber: "Our administration is driving a catastrophe ...". The Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories and German occupation in the Soviet Union 1941–1945 . Vögel, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-89650-213-1 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See the information on the university website ( memento of the original from September 2, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.uni-erlangen.de
  2. ↑ See Walter Labs: Purpose, nature and effects of the reservation of the Civil Code , Bochum-Langendreer 1934. pp. I and II. For Kübler see The Professors and Lecturers of the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen 1743-1960 . Published by Renate Wittern on behalf of the Rector . Part 1: Faculty of Theology, Faculty of Law , edited by Eva Wedel-Schaper, Christoph Hafner and Astrid Ley, Universitätsbund Erlangen-Nürnberg eV, Erlangen 1993, p. 136 f, ISBN 3-922135-92-7 , ( PDF file ) .
  3. ↑ Andreas Zellhuber: "Our administration is driving a catastrophe ..." , p. 106, footnote 451.
  4. ↑ 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. 146.
  5. ↑ For the scope of this department, see Andreas Zellhuber: “Our administration is driving a catastrophe…” , p. 119 f.
  6. ↑ Andreas Zellhuber: "Our administration is driving a catastrophe ..." , p. 163.
  7. ↑ Andreas Zellhuber: "Our administration is driving a catastrophe ..." , p. 106, footnote 451 and p. 108.
  8. ^ The Law of the Occupied Eastern Territories. Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine. Collection of ordinances, decrees and other regulations on administration, administration of justice, economy, finance and traffic with explanations of the speakers , edited by Alfred Meyer. With the collaboration of Walter Wilhelmi, Walter Labs, Hans Schäfer, CH Beck Munich 1943.
  9. ↑ Quoted from the Hamburg Institute for Social Research (ed.): Verbrechen der Wehrmacht. Dimensions of the War of Extermination 1941–1944. Exhibition catalog , Hamburger Edition, 1st edition, Hamburg 2002, p. 132, ISBN 3-930908-74-3 .
  10. ↑ The English translation of this protocol can be found as document PS-197 ( Concerning the conference that has taken place on the OKH concerning the transfer of a part of the Ukraine to the civil administration ) in: Office of United States Chief of Counsel For Prosecution of Axis Criminality (Ed.): Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression , VOLUME III, United States Government Printing Office , Washington 1946, pp. 210-213 ( PDF file , accessed September 11, 2011).
  11. ^ Klaus-Michael Mallmann : The qualitative leap in the destruction process. The Kamenets-Podolsk massacre in late August 1941 ; in: Jahrbuch für Antisemitismusforschung , Vol. 10 (2001), pp. 239–264, here p. 249.
  12. ^ Participants according to Andrej Angrick : The Escalation of German-Rumanian Anti-Jewish Policy after the Attack on the Soviet Union, June 22, 1941 , p. 23, footnote 65 ( PDF file , accessed on August 10, 2011) and Andrej Angrick : On the role of the military administration in the murder of the Soviet Jews , in: Babette Quinkert (Ed.): "We are the masters of this country". Causes, course and consequences of the German attack on the Soviet Union. VSA-Verlag, Hamburg 2002, pp. 104–123, here p. 114, footnote 38, ISBN 3-87975-876-X .
  13. ↑ “ Basically, the gentlemen agreed to commit genocide here. "(Dieter Pohl: The Rule of the Wehrmacht. German military occupation and native population in the Soviet Union 1941-1944 , Oldenbourg, Munich 2008, p. 258, ISBN 3-486-58065-5 )
  14. ↑ Andreas Zellhuber: "Our administration is driving a catastrophe ..." , p. 234.
  15. ^ John M. Steiner, Jobst Freiherr von Cornberg: Arbitrariness in the arbitrariness. Exemptions from the anti-Semitic Nuremberg laws . In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 46 (1998), issue 2, pp. 143–188, here p. 150 PDF
  16. ^ Note from a meeting with Feldscher, a government councilor, written by Walter Labs, January 1942 (BA, R6 / 74, p. 54). Quoted from the facsimile document from The Wannsee Conference and the Genocide of the European Jews. Permanent exhibition catalog. Published by the House of the Wannsee Conference, Berlin 2006, ISBN 3-9808517-4-5 , p. 95 / Götz Aly u. Susanne Heim , pioneer of annihilation. Auschwitz and the German plans for a new German order , Frankfurt a. M. 1993, p. 454, give January 16, 1942 as the specific date for the note Labs.
  17. ↑ See report on the meeting on February 4, 1942 with Dr. Kleist on the question of Germanization, especially in the Baltic countries , printed in VfZ , vol. 6 (1958), issue 3, pp. 293–296 (PDF; 5.2 MB).
  18. ^ The document is also printed by Czesław Madajczyk (ed.): Vom Generalplan Ost zum Generalsiedlungsplan , Saur, Munich [u. a.] 1994, pp. 38-41; for the meaning see Isabel Heinemann: "Rasse, Siedlung, German blood". The Race and Settlement Main Office of the SS and the racial reorganization of Europe , Wallstein-Verlag, Göttingen 2003, p. 367 , ISBN 3-89244-623-7 ; Anahid S. Rickmann: "Rassenpflege in the Völkisch State". On the relationship of racial hygiene to National Socialist politics. Inaugural dissertation to obtain a doctorate from the Philosophical Faculty of the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Bonn 2002 (PDF; 1.9 MB), p. 239 f.
  19. ↑ Bernd-A. Rusinek: The Greifeld Case, Karlsruhe - Science Management and the Nazi Past , pp. 147–148.
  20. ↑ Otto v. Werder, Walter Labs, Peter Paul Ortmann: The procedure before the administrative courts. Commentary on Ordinance 165 on Administrative Jurisdiction in d. British Zone , Dieckmann, Oldenburg 1949. Description of function on the title, quotation p. 19 f.
  21. ↑ Bernd-A. Rusinek: The Greifeld Case, Karlsruhe - Science Management and the Nazi Past , pp. 148–149.
  22. ↑ For a career in VÖV, see the messages in the city day. Journal for Communal Practice and Science, New Series , Volume 29, Issue 1, January 1976, p. 40 as well as the city day. Journal for Communal Practice and Science, New Series , Volume 33, Issue 9, September 1980, p. 537.
  23. ↑ See section “Works”.
  24. ↑ the city day. Journal for Communal Practice and Science, New Series , Volume 29, Issue 2, February 1976, p. 87. According to the Office of the Federal President , this honor was given on December 15, 1975.
  25. ^ According to the obituary, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , December 10, 1988, p. 28.
personal data
SURNAME Labs, Walter
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Labs, Walter Julius Paul (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German lawyer, administrative officer and expert in local public transport
DATE OF BIRTH July 13, 1910
PLACE OF BIRTH Gladbeck
DATE OF DEATH December 7, 1988
Place of death Heidelberg