Wilhelm Ritterbusch

Head of Service Wilhelm Ritterbusch, who was entrusted with the management of the General Commissioner for Special Use in July 1943.

Wilhelm Friedrich Adolf Ritterbusch , nickname Willi (born July 3, 1892 in Werdau , † 1981 in Germany), was a German political functionary ( NSDAP ). Ritterbusch was, among other things, General Commissioner for special use in the Netherlands during the Second World War .

family

Wilhelm Ritterbusch was the son of the master brickworker Hermann Ritterbusch from Zschakau (today Beilrode ). His brother Paul Ritterbusch was one of the most prominent National Socialist science officials. Another brother, Fritz Ritterbusch , was SS-Hauptsturmführer and member of the guards at several concentration camps , as well as the head of a camp complex in Trautenau - Parschnitz .

Life and activity

Ritterbusch took part in the First World War as a company commander . In 1923 he joined the NSDAP ( membership number 6,316). During the " fighting time " before 1933, he allegedly served as Gauleiter for a time. In 1937 he took over the post of district leader of the NSDAP in Torgau, Gau Halle-Merseburg.

Since autumn 1939 Ritterbusch was considered on the staff of the Deputy Leader for the post of Deputy Gauleiter. The department head in the staff of the deputy of the Führer Hess, Helmuth Friedrichs , classified him in September 1939 as "to be used for all tasks".

After the German occupation of the Netherlands in May 1940, Ritterbusch was assigned to the administration of the occupied Netherlands in June 1940. As the representative of the Reich Commissioner for the occupied Netherlands for the province of North Brabant, he was subordinate to the Commissioner General z. b. V. Fritz Schmidt , who rated him in a report as "the best representative of the Reich Commissioner in Holland".

From October 1941, Ritterbusch was head of Department II B in the party chancellery of the NSDAP.

After Schmidt's death in June 1943, which occurred under unexplained circumstances, Heinrich Himmler and Martin Bormann agreed to appoint Ritterbusch as Schmidt's successor in his office as General Commissioner z. b. V. to be used in the Netherlands. Thereupon Adolf Hitler appointed Ritterbusch as the new general commissioner z. b. V. and head of the work area Netherlands of the NSDAP. After the Reich Commissioner for the Netherlands Arthur Seyß-Inquart and the representative of the SS , Ritterbusch was the third most important Nazi functionary in the occupation administration.

In 1943, Dutch resistance fighters carried out several attacks, some of them fatal, against leading Dutch National Socialists . On September 5, 1943, Ritterbusch secretly decided, together with the General Commissioners Hanns Albin Rauter and Friedrich Wimmer, to introduce assassinations as retaliation for the resistance attacks. There are death squads of the Dutch Waffen SS formed. The Silbertanne special command under Henk Feldmeijer emerged from these groups .

Ritterbusch (left) with Reichsleiter Robert Ley in February 1944.

During Ritterbusch's tenure as commissioner, the influence of the NSDAP party apparatus in the Netherlands was strongly pushed back in favor of expanding the power base of the SS in the occupied country. Himmler had set this as the goal before Schmidt was appointed and accordingly demanded that the successor of the deceased Schmidt, who had put a lot of obstacles in the way of the SS, had to be a “straightforward representative of the Greater Germanic line”. Bormann, who had been pursuing the policy of compliant cooperation between the party and the SS since 1942, had bowed to this claim with the appointment of Ritterbusch, who was accordingly inculcated by Seyß-Inquart at a meeting shortly after he took office on July 30, 1943 in The Hague that unconditional loyalty to the SS leadership was a necessity of his work. The representative of the SS, Rauter, judged Ritterbusch because of his docile conduct of office - in accordance with the efforts of the SS - as a "calm, very neat character with a pastoral character" who refrains from intervening "politically", i.e. as one favorable to the policy of the SS , d. H. weak, exponents of the party, which the SS posed no difficulties. Bormann also conceded in a later report that Ritterbusch was a little energetic man. The appointment of Ritterbusch as head of the NSDAP main archive, proposed by his colleague Walkenhorst, who characterized Ritterbusch as “a kind of party philosopher”, was rejected by Bormann. In literature, too, Ritterbusch has mostly been characterized as a “colorless party functionary”.

literature

• Peter Longerich : Hitler's deputy: leadership of the party and control of the state apparatus by the Hess staff and the party chancellery Bormann , Munich 1992, pp. 104 and 180.

Web links

Commons : Wilhelm Ritterbusch  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Ben Verzet: 'Seyß-Inquart' and his henchmen. In: www.dedokwerker.nl. dedokwerker.nl, accessed February 14, 2019 (Dutch). 
2. ^ German newspaper in the Netherlands (ed.): Newspaper article on "Willi Ritterbusch" . No. 40 . Amsterdam-CNZ Voorburgwal, Amsterdam July 15, 1943 ( kb.nl [accessed March 6, 2019]).
3. ^ Longerich: Party Chancellery, p. 180.
4. ↑ Joachim Lilla : The Deputy Gauleiter and the Representation of the Gauleiter of the NSDAP in the "Third Reich" , p. 8.
5. ↑ Armin Nolzen: The work area of ​​the NSDAP in the Generalvoern, in the Netherlands and the occupied SU . In: Robert Bohn (Ed.): The German rule in the 'Germanic' countries 1940-1945 , p. 266.
6. ↑ The 'SILBERTANNE' murders and Sonderkommando Feldmeijer. Nederlanders in de Waffen-SS, accessed March 12, 2019 . 
7. ^ Longerich: Party Chancellery, 1992, p. 106.
8. ^ Gabriele Hoffmann: Nazi Propaganda in The Netherlands: Organization And Control Of Journalism Under German Occupation 1940-1945 , 1972, p. 41.