This article relies largely or entirely on a single source .(February 2017) |
Gustav Hermann William August Koenigs (21 December 1882 – 15 April 1945) was a German lawyer and State Secretary of Transport during the Weimar period and the Third Reich. The conspirators of the 20 July plot planned for him to become Reich Transport Minister (German : Reichsverkehrsminister) had the coup d'état succeeded. He was arrested and released by the Gestapo and died in an airstrike toward the end of the Second World War.
Gustav Koenigs was born in Düsseldorf. When his father became an official in the Prussian Ministry of Trade and Industry, the family moved to Berlin and he attended school in the district of Schöneberg. Koenigs followed in his father's profession, studying law at the universities of Freiburg im Breisgau, Bonn and Berlin. After completing his legal clerkship in 1909, he worked as a lawyer in the District of Blumenthal, in Düsseldorf, and in Nauen. He then was in various government positions including in the Prussian Interior Ministry from 1912 to 1914. From 1915 to 1919 he was a Regierungsrat (government councilor) in Düsseldorf. In 1920 he became Undersecretary in the department for waterways at the Prussian Ministry of Public Works. [1]
Koenigs transferred to the Reich Ministry of Transport (German : Reichsverkehrsministerium) and was promoted to head of the Department for Inland and Maritime transport on 1 April 1921. On 30 December 1931 he was promoted to State Secretary. At that time it was led by Theodor von Guérard. He retained his position under Guérard's successors, Gottfried Treviranus and Paul Freiherr von Eltz-Rübenach, remaining in office after the Nazi seizure of power on 30 January 1933. As early as 1933, Koenigs signed the first decrees directed against Jews and Social Democrats in the ministry. [2] In the years that followed, the ministry lost some of its areas of responsibilities by outsourcing aviation to Hermann Göring's new Reich Ministry of Aviation and road construction to Fritz Todt as General Inspector for German Roads. During the Night of the Long Knives on 30 June 1934, the ministry's department head for shipping, who also headed Catholic Action, Erich Klausener, was murdered by the SS at his workplace. Koenigs, intimidated by this, asked Eltz-Rübenach to be relieved of his post but he was persuaded to remain in office. [3]
In January 1935, Koenigs was elected President of the Board of Directors of the Deutsche Reichsbahn-Gesellschaft. In that year he was also appointed by Göring to the Prussian State Council. [4] On 30 January 1937, Minister Eltz-Rübenach refused Adolf Hitler's award of the Golden Party Badge and was forced to resign. Hitler used this as an opportunity to take the Reichsbahn under the direct administration of the Reich. The Reichsbahn became part of the Reich Ministry of Transport, and Reichsbahn General Director Julius Dorpmüller became the new Minister of Transport. Wilhelm Kleinmann, Dorpmuller's deputy at the Reichsbahn who had joined the Party in 1931, took over the management of the railway department as the new "Senior State Secretary" while Koenigs, who was actually the senior, was left with the departments for shipping, hydraulic engineering and motor transport.
In February 1940, Koenigs resigned as State Secretary. His position was not filled and State Secretary Kleinmann took over his departments. In Berlin, Koenigs had loose social contacts with conservative anti-Nazi plotters, such as Carl Friedrich Goerdeler, Ulrich von Hassell and Johannes Popitz. Goerdeler listed Koenigs as a possible transport minister or state secretary on one of his proposed cabinet lists, although it is unclear whether Koenigs was aware of this. After the failure of the 20 July plot, Koenigs was arrested by the Gestapo and held in Ravensbrück concentration camp until Christmas 1944. Shortly after his release, Koenigs died in an airstrike in Potsdam on 15 April 1945.
During the Weimar Republic, Koenigs was a member of the German People's Party (DVP) under Gustav Stresemann. After 1933, when opposition parties were banned, Koenig initially remained an independent but then joined the Nazi Party on 30 January 1938 (membership number 5,501,056). [5]
The Hitler cabinet was the government of Nazi Germany between 30 January 1933 and 30 April 1945 upon the appointment of Adolf Hitler as Chancellor of the German Reich by President Paul von Hindenburg. It was contrived by the national conservative politician Franz von Papen, who reserved the office of the Vice-Chancellor for himself. Originally, Hitler's first cabinet was called the Reich Cabinet of National Salvation, which was a coalition of the Nazi Party (NSDAP) and the national conservative German National People's Party (DNVP). The Hitler cabinet lasted until his suicide during the defeat of Nazi Germany. Hitler's cabinet was succeeded by the short-lived Goebbels cabinet, with Karl Dönitz appointed by Hitler as the new Reichspräsident.
The Deutsche Reichsbahn, also known as the German National Railway, the German State Railway, German Reich Railway, and the German Imperial Railway, was the German national railway system created after the end of World War I from the regional railways of the individual states of the German Empire. The Deutsche Reichsbahn has been described as "the largest enterprise in the capitalist world in the years between 1920 and 1932"; nevertheless, its importance "arises primarily from the fact that the Reichsbahn was at the center of events in a period of great turmoil in German history".
Reichspost was the name of the postal service of Germany from 1866 to 1945.
Herbert Friedrich Wilhelm Backe was a German politician and SS Senior group leader (SS-Obergruppenführer) in Nazi Germany who served as State Secretary and Minister in the Reich Ministry of Food and Agriculture. He was a doctrinaire racial ideologue, a long-time associate of Richard Walther Darré and a personal friend of Reinhard Heydrich. He developed and implemented the Operation Hunger that envisioned death by starvation of millions of Slavic and Jewish "useless eaters" following Operation Barbarossa, the 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union.
Johannes Popitz was a Prussian lawyer, finance minister and a member of the German Resistance against the government of Nazi Germany. He was the father of Heinrich Popitz, an important German sociologist.
Erich Klausener was a German Catholic politician and Catholic martyr in the "Night of the Long Knives", a purge that took place in Nazi Germany from 30 June to 2 July 1934, when the Nazi regime carried out a series of political murders.
Peter Paul Freiherr von Eltz-Rübenach was Reich Postal Minister (Reichspostminister) and Reich Minister of Transport (Reichsminister für Verkehr) of Germany between 1932 and 1937.
The government of Nazi Germany was a totalitarian dictatorship governed by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party according to the Führerprinzip. Nazi Germany was established in January 1933 with the appointment of Adolf Hitler as Chancellor of Germany, followed by suspension of basic rights with the Reichstag Fire Decree and the Enabling Act which gave Hitler's regime the power to pass and enforce laws without the involvement of the Reichstag or German president, and de facto ended with Germany's surrender in World War II on 8 May 1945 and de jure ended with the Berlin Declaration on 5 June 1945.
Wilhelm Ohnesorge was a German politician in the Third Reich who sat in the Hitler Cabinet. From 1937 to 1945, he was the Reichsminister of the Reich Postal Ministry, the German postal service, having succeeded Paul Freiherr von Eltz-Rübenach. Along with his ministerial duties, Ohnesorge also significantly delved into research relating to propagation and promotion of the Nazi Party through the radio, and the development of a proposed German atomic bomb.
Julius Heinrich Dorpmueller was general manager of Deutsche Reichsbahn-Gesellschaft from 1926 to 1945, a Nazi politician and the Reich Minister for Transport from 1937 to 1945.
Albert Ganzenmüller was a German Nazi and, as the State Secretary at the Reich Transport Ministry (Reichsverkehrsministerium), was involved in the deportation of German Jews.
Werner Willikens was a German politician with the Nazi Party who largely served in agricultural administration. He was also a general officer in the SS. His phrase "working towards the Führer", which he used in a 1934 speech, has become a common description of Nazi bureaucracy.
Rudolf Oeser was a German journalist and liberal politician. From 1922 to 1924 he was a member of several governments of the Weimar Republic, serving as Minister of the Interior and Minister of Transport.
The Reich Ministry of Transport was a cabinet-level agency of the German government from 1919 until 1945, operating during the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany. Formed from the Prussian Ministry of Public Works after the end of World War I, the RVM was in charge of regulating German railways, roadways, waterways, and the construction industry - a kind of infrastructure agency in today's understanding. In the 1920s, the Ministry's involvement in the rail sector was limited to administrative and technical supervisory functions. The National Railway was initially organized as an independent state-owned company to guarantee that Germany paid war reparations according to the provisions of the 1924 Dawes Plan.
Artur Görlitzer, sometimes Anglicized as Arthur Goerlitzer, was a Nazi Party official who served as the Deputy Gauleiter of Gau Berlin from 1933 to 1943. He was also a member of the German Reichstag, and committed suicide at the close of the Second World War in Europe.
Kuno Heinrich Franziskus Maria Hubertus Reichsfreiherr und Edler Herr von und zu Eltz-Rübenach was a member of the Reichstag of Nazi Germany and a SS-Brigadeführer.
Wilhelm Otto Max Kleinmann was a German railway official and politician. From 1933 to 1942 he was Deputy General Director of the Deutsche Reichsbahn and, from 1938 to 1942, a State Secretary in the Reich Ministry of Transport. At the end of the Second World War, he was captured by Soviet forces and was declared to have died in captivity.
Bruno Wilhelm Heinrich Claußen was a German lawyer and civil servant who was the Prussian State Secretary for Economics and Labor in the first year of the Third Reich. After leaving public service, he became a successful business executive. He went missing during the final days of the Second World War.
Gustav Wagemann was a German lawyer and judge who worked in the Prussian Ministry of Justice under the German Empire, the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany. He died in an airplane accident in December 1933.