Wilhelm von Holzschuher

Place of birth: Holzschuher-Schlösschen Almoshof (picture from 2005)

Artelshofen Manor and Castle were acquired in 1931 (picture from 1894)

Freiherr Wilhelm von Holzschuher , since 1918 Wilhelm Freiherr von Holzschuher (born September 2, 1893 in Almoshof ; died March 31, 1965 in Lucerne , Switzerland ) was a German landowner , farmer and from 1934 to 1939 National Socialist President of Lower Bavaria and the Upper Palatinate . In the SS he had the rank of SS-Gruppenführer ( lieutenant general ).

Life

The Holzschuher von Harrlach family comes from the Nuremberg patriciate . Wilhelm's father Karl Sigmund was a landowner and had a civil marriage. Wilhelm Holzschuher himself was married three times, his son Joerg Adolf Sigismund, born on March 10, 1934, had Adolf Hitler as godfather and therefore received his first name.

Holzschuher attended the Progymnasium in Rothenburg ob der Tauber before he joined the Bavarian Cadet Corps in Munich . As an ensign he moved into the 4th Bavarian Infantry Regiment in Metz and in 1914 became a soldier in the First World War .

After the war he joined Rudolf Berthold's "Franconian Peasant Detachment Eiserne Schar Berthold" . In 1919 he went to Königsberg with the “Iron Group” and from there intervened in the fighting in the Baltic States . In March 1920, the “Eiserne Schar” took part in the Kapp Putsch .

Holzschuher became a member of the NSDAP on January 1, 1928 (No. 75.001), where he was a member of the Braunes Haus group as well as the holder of the golden party badge . He had been a member of the SS since 1934 (No. 214.975). In the SS he reached the rank of group leader, was assigned to the RFSS staff and was awarded the SS skull ring .

In 1934 Holzschuher received as "Reichsinspektor z. b. V. of the Reichsleitung of the NSDAP “a special order to investigate and prevent the party-internal terror in the Cologne area.

With effect from December 1, 1934, Holzschuher was appointed regional president of Lower Bavaria and Upper Palatinate . In the struggle against the churches , he was of the same opinion with the leaders of the party organization on goals, and tried to use less conspicuous tactics on the means. On March 24, 1938, Holzschuher met Hubert Karl, Theodor Eicke and Oswald Pohl , as well as local politicians, to agree on the establishment of a concentration camp in Flossenbürg , in which the German Earth and Stone Works (DESt) needed granite for the representative buildings of National Socialism cover cheap. The Flossenbürg concentration camp was established on May 1, 1938.

On another question, Holzschuher tried to defend his official powers and to prevent Gauleiter Fritz Wächtler from intervening directly in the staffing of the district offices, bypassing the regional council, but in this dispute and because of allegations about irregularities in the Regensburg Dörnberg Foundation by the Bavarian Minister of the Interior (and Gauleiter von Oberbayern) Adolf Wagner on leave on November 10, 1938. As a result, Reich Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick brought him to the main office of the Ordnungspolizei in Berlin . As an agricultural specialist, he was commissioned after the German occupation of Poland between November 7, 1939 and June 1, 1940 with the management of the settlement office and the central land office at the RKF . Holzschuher was one of the promising candidates in the appointment of a new manager to the main SS court office . Since he did not succeed in making the right career leap, he took a leave of absence on April 8, 1941 in the rank of Vice Chief of War Administration and returned to the Artelshofen farm he had acquired in 1931 . The Holzschuher-Schlösschen Almoshof was sold in 1941 for 70,000 Reichsmarks to the city of Nuremberg, which wanted to use it as a guest house for National Socialist officials.

denazification

His son was quoted by the AP news agency in 1985 as saying that the father later joined the resistance and was arrested, "but later opposed the Nazis and was arrested". In the denazification proceedings in 1948, however, the argument was not brought up by the father.

Nothing is known about internment after the end of the Second World War . In the denazification procedure in Nuremberg , his government vice-president Hermann Edler von Gäßler gave him an impeccable testimony, according to which he had defended the officials in the administration against the interventions of the party by Gauleiter Fritz Wächtler. After a public hearing on November 18, 1948 , he was punished with a fine of 10,000 DM as a minor offender. In the appeal on March 3, 1949, he was classified as a follower. Since Holzschuher had arranged for November 4, 1937 that in Pilsting a pastor and his cooperator in protective custody taken and were then forcibly transferred, he was on 20 August 1948 by the Landshut regional court for false imprisonment and coercion to one year in prison on probation convicted. Holzschuher also appealed against this ruling and litigated for years for his civil servant rights under the 131 Law , in Berlin he had reached salary group B6 in 1941 . The Bavarian Social Democratic Prime Minister Wilhelm Hoegner finally rejected his pension claims on August 18, 1956.

literature

• Isabel Heinemann: "Race, settlement, German blood": the race and settlement main office of the SS and the racial reorganization of Europe , Wallstein-Verlag, Göttingen 2003, ISBN 3-89244-623-7 . Contains a short biography.
• Annemarie Liebler: In the home country of Raute and Panther: History of the Government of Lower Bavaria , Utz, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-8316-0836-2 . Contains a short biography.
• Government of the Upper Palatinate (ed.): 200 years of government of the Upper Palatinate "Old and New at the same time" , Pustet, Regensburg 2010, ISBN 978-3-7917-2343-3 . Contains a short biography and a photo of Holzschuher in Nazi uniform.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Los Angeles Times, May 1, 1985 , AP interview by Peter Roussel on the occasion of Ronald Reagan's stay at the family estate at Gymnich Castle
2. ^ Jan Erik Schulte : Concentration Camps in the Rhineland and Westphalia 1933-1945 , p. 19 [1]
3. ↑ Liebler: History of the Government , p. 124.
4. ↑ Jörg Skriebeleit  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 3.8 MB)  
5. ↑ Interview Los Angeles Times, May 1, 1985