Wilhelm Kube

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Wilhelm Kube (September 1942)

Richard Paul Wilhelm Kube (born November 13, 1887 in Glogau , † September 22, 1943 in Minsk ) was a journalist , Gauleiter of Brandenburg and General Commissioner for Belarus in Minsk.

Life

The German Imperium

Kube was the son of tax collector Richard Kube. He grew up in Berlin and attended the grammar school in the gray monastery , where he excelled with anti-Semitic remarks. Kube studied history , political science and theology from 1908 to 1912 . In 1911 he received a Moses Mendelssohn scholarship from the Berlin University and became a co-founder and leader of the anti-Semitic Deutschvölkischer student association and a member of the Association of German Student Associations . In 1912 he became chairman of the Völkischer Akademikerverband . In 1917 he was postponed from military service after a few weeks of barrack service because of his party work for the Conservative Party in Silesia . After graduating, he worked as a journalist for various conservative papers.

Weimar Republic

Kube was one of the founders of the DNVP ( Bismarck Youth ) youth association and became its Reichsführer. In 1920 he became general secretary of the Berlin regional association of the DNVP, for which he was a member of the Berlin city council from 1922 to 1923 . In September 1923 he left the DNVP and joined the DVFP the following year . In May 1924 he was elected to the Reichstag for the National Socialist Freedom Party , an alliance of DVFP and the NSDAP , which was banned at the time . In the DVFP successor organization Deutschvölkische Freiheitsbewegung (DVFB), Kube was Reich Managing Director and Gauleiter for Berlin from 1926. In the course of disputes about a program geared more towards the interests of the workers, he was expelled from the DVFB in February 1927. A number of DVFB members from northern and eastern Germany joined a Völkischsocial working group founded by Kube . In December 1927 or February 1928, Kube joined the NSDAP ( membership number 71,682). In 1928 he became Gauleiter of the NSDAP in the Gau Ostmark , which was called Gau Kurmark after the union with the Gau Brandenburg in May 1933 . In 1939 it was renamed Gau Mark Brandenburg after further growth . Between 1928 and 1933 Kube was a member and chairman of the NSDAP parliamentary group in the Prussian state parliament . In 1932 he became the church leader of the Berlin Gethsemanegemeinde and the district synod Berlin-Stadt III and initiator of the religious movement German Christians .

Wilhelm Kube, 1933
General Commissioner Kube (left) in the "Main Ostland Working Group " of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (December 1942)
Wilhelm Kube at the Polish cemetery in Minsk, 1943

Third Reich

Entry into the SS

After the so-called seizure of power by Hitler , Kube was appointed Upper President of Brandenburg - Berlin . He also took over this position on an interim basis for Posen-West Prussia . He held both offices until 1936.

Between 1933 and January 1935, Kube also took over the management of the " Kyffhäuser Association of German Students " and in 1933 he also announced that he would join the NSDAP's protection squad (SS number 114.771).

On 27 January 1934 Kube was honorary for group leader of the Schutzstaffel appointed and the SS regiment 27 assigned.

His anti-Semitic attitude towards Jews culminated in 1934 with the statement: "The plague carrier must be exterminated."

Loss of all political offices

In 1936 he was relieved of all state and party offices due to numerous differences with Martin Bormann , as Kube was considered to be extraordinarily corrupt. Several proceedings for theft, defamation and the like were already pending. For example, he anonymously sent a letter to the highest party judge, Walter Buch , signed “by Jewish fellow citizens”, in which it was claimed that his wife had “Jewish blood” in her. A short time later, Kube was found to be the author of this letter. In order to ward off a possible and thus dishonorable expulsion from the SS, Kube declared his resignation from the General SS on March 11, 1936 .

Reactivation of Kubes

1940 Kube was as SS man reactivated when he spoke of Heinrich Himmler shortly as pack leader in the Dachau concentration camp was used.

After the German invasion of the Soviet Union , he was politically reactivated and on July 17, 1941, he was appointed General Commissioner for the General District of Belarus in Minsk . He held this office until he was killed in 1943.

Kube tried to win the sympathy of the Belarusian population. He described the Belarusians as "healthy peasant people" and promised them a "resurrection of the Belarusian people's consciousness". According to his reading, his subjects were White Ruthenians , not Russians . Furthermore, several institutions such as the Belarusian Self-Help Organization and the Belarusian Youth Organization were brought into being during his tenure . From June 29, 1942, Kube's shop steward was Ivan Yermachenka .

On September 9, 1941, he published an appeal to the population: “Anyone found in possession of any weapon or ammunition will be shot. Likewise, those who know of the presence of weapons or ammunition are shot. "

Kube was often involved in power struggles. There were disputes not only with Martin Bormann and Eduard Strauch, but also with Reinhard Heydrich and Heinrich Himmler .

Participation in the Holocaust

Kube was involved in the Holocaust , but initially opposed the planned extermination of German Jews on his territory. On December 16, 1941, he wrote to Hinrich Lohse : "I am certainly hard and ready to help solve the Jewish question, but people who come from our culture are something completely different from the down-to-earth hordes." systematic mass murders of local Jews were to be resumed at the end of March 1942 at the urging of the civil administration, according to the protocol, Kube attached "importance to the correct approach to liquidation".

Later he appealed to the Reich Security Main Office and sabotaged a liquidation action against Jews in the Minsk Ghetto by SS-Obersturmbannführer Eduard Strauch . Strauch's methods met with complete rejection by Kube. This type of procedure is "unworthy of a German person and a Germany of Kant and Goethe". In a letter to Obergruppenführer Erich von dem Bach , Strauch recommended that Kubes be released. He accused Kube of not being able to distinguish between Germans and German Jews. He insisted that the Jews had culture and expressed his preference for Jacques Offenbach and Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy . He called a policeman who shot a Jew a "pig". He also warned Jews when the Judenrat in Minsk was asked to provide 5,000 Jews for "evacuation".

On the other hand, Kube apparently did not object to the killing of disabled German Jews, showed a delegation of Italian fascists a gas chamber and personally enriched himself with Jewish property. In the spring of 1942, Kube ordered, contrary to the opinion of SS-Obersturmführer Burkhardt , to resume the mass murders in the ghettos , which were interrupted in the winter months because of the frozen ground . One of the most important impulses for this was fear of the spread of epidemics in the ghettos. In an order dated September 8, 1942, Kube emphasized that “the strong appearance of the Jews among the bandits [ie partisans]” could only be counteracted by “clearing the country of Jews”.

death

This article or the following section is not adequately provided with supporting documents ( e.g. individual evidence ). Information without sufficient evidence could be removed soon. Please help Wikipedia by researching the information and including good evidence.
see disc

On September 22, 1943, Kube was killed in Minsk by a bomb that the Belarusian partisan Jelena Grigoryevna Masanik (1914–1996) had smuggled under the bed as a maid. There were many myths surrounding the Kube assassination attempt in Soviet times, because the Soviet military intelligence service and the NKVD bitterly argued about which of them actually killed Kube. In addition, the Belarusian assassin, the housekeeper of the Kube couple, did not act out of purely patriotic motives, but was strongly coerced into the assassination under threat of revenge. After the attack, the SS and Police Leader White Ruthenia Curt von Gottberg temporarily took over the office of Kubes as General Commissioner.

literature

Web links

Commons : Wilhelm Kube  - Collection of Images

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Kurt Jacob Ball-Kaduri : The life of the Jews in Germany in 1933. A time report. Europäische Verl.-Anst., Frankfurt am Main 1963, p. 19. Kurt Ball was a classmate of a younger age group.
  2. ^ Uwe Puschner : The völkisch movement in the Wilhelmine Empire. Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 2001, ISBN 3-534-15052-X , p. 11.
  3. ^ Reimer Wulff: The German National Freedom Party 1922–1928. Hochschulschrift, Marburg 1968, pp. 150 f., 155.
  4. ^ A b c 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 1941–1945. Vögel, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-8965-0213-1 , p. 86.
  5. ^ Michael Grüttner : Students in the Third Reich. Paderborn 1995, p. 295.
  6. ↑ Personnel Chancellery of the Reichsführer-SS: List of seniority of the NSDAP Schutzstaffel , as of July 1, 1935, serial no.21
  7. ^ Personnel department of the Reichsführer-SS: List of seniority of the NSDAP Schutzstaffel , as of October 1, 1934, serial no.20
  8. ↑ Helmut Heiber : From the files of the Gauleiter Kube. In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte . Issue 1, 1956, p. 68.
  9. ↑ Peter Witte (Ed.): Heinrich Himmler's 1941/42 service calendar , entry “Kube, Wilhelm”; P. 698
  10. ↑ Marcus Weidner: The street naming practice in Westphalia and Lippe during National Socialism , entry "Kube, Wilhelm", in: Westfälische Geschichte , accessed on January 6, 2019
  11. ↑ Counterworld in the forest. In: Spiegel Online . March 30, 2005, accessed December 27, 2016 .
  12. ↑ Alexander Brakel: Under Red Star and Swastika. Baranowicze 1939 to 1944. Western Belarus under Soviet and German occupation (Age of World Wars 5), Ferdinand Schöningh Verlag, Paderborn et al. 2009, ISBN 978-3-506-76784-4 , p. 209.
  13. ^ Quotation from Ernst Klee : Das Personenlexikon zum Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, second, updated edition, Frankfurt am Main 2005, p. 346.
  14. ↑ See Heiber: From the files of Gauleiter Kube. 1956, letter from E. Strauch to von Bach-Zelewski, July 25, 1943; Hilberg: The annihilation of the European Jews. 1990, p. 250; IMT, Vol. XXXVIII, p. 373; Heinz Höhne: The order under the skull. The history of the SS. Weltbild Verlag, Augsburg 1992, p. 341.
  15. ↑ Quoted from: Bert Hoppe, Hiltrud Glass (edit.): The persecution and murder of European Jews by National Socialist Germany 1933–1945 (source collection) Volume 7: Soviet Union with annexed areas I - Occupied Soviet areas under German military administration, the Baltic States and Transnistria . Munich 2011, ISBN 978-3-486-58911-5 , pp. 57/58.
  16. ↑ Document VEJ 8/80 in Bert Hoppe (Ed.): The persecution and murder of European Jews by Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945 (source book) Volume 8: . Soviet Union annexed territories II Berlin 2016, ISBN 978-3-486 -78119-9 , quotation p. 239.
  17. ^ Raul Hilberg : The annihilation of the European Jews. Volume 2, Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1990, p. 406; according to a memo from Strauch, July 20, 1943 - completely printed as document VEJ 8/265 in: Bert Hoppe (edit.): The persecution and murder of European Jews by National Socialist Germany 1933-1945 (source collection) Volume 8: Soviet Union with annexed areas II. Berlin 2016, ISBN 978-3-486-78119-9 , quotation point p. 631.
  18. ^ Raul Hilberg: The annihilation of the European Jews. Volume 2, Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1990, p. 406.
  19. ↑ Hans-Jürgen Döscher : The Foreign Office in the Third Reich. Diplomacy in the shadow of the final solution. Siedler Verlag, Berlin 1987, p. 300.
  20. ↑ Clara Hecker: German Jews in the Minsk Ghetto. In: Journal of History. 56 (2008), no. 10, p. 837.
  21. ↑ Dachauer Hefte . Verlag Dachauer Hefte, 2007, p. 210 ( google.de [accessed January 1, 2020]).
  22. ↑ Alexander Brakel: Under Red Star and Swastika. Baranowicze 1939 to 1944. Western Belarus under Soviet and German occupation . (= Age of World Wars. Volume 5). Ferdinand Schöningh Verlag, Paderborn et al. 2009, ISBN 978-3-506-76784-4 , p. 103.
  23. ↑ Document VEJ 8/177 in Bert Hoppe (Ed.): The persecution and murder of European Jews by Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945 (source book) Volume 8: . Soviet Union annexed territories II Berlin 2016, ISBN 978-3-486 -78119-9 , p. 405.
personal data
SURNAME Kube, Wilhelm
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Kube, Richard Paul Wilhelm (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician (NSDAP), MdR, MdL, Gauleiter, General Commissioner for Belarus
DATE OF BIRTH November 13, 1887
PLACE OF BIRTH Glogau
DATE OF DEATH September 22, 1943
Place of death Minsk