Franz Anton Basch

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Dr. Franz Anton Basch (Hungarian: Basch Ferenc Antal) (July 13, 1901 – April 27, 1946) was a German Nazi politician, the chairman of Volksbund and the leader of Germans in Hungary.

Franz was born in Zurich. He was a student of Jakob Bleyer at the University of Budapest between 1920 and 1924. In 1925 he became the secretary of the German Cultural Society of Hungary. He published many works in this period.

From 1930, he began to express extreme nationalist propaganda and became a follower of Nazism. In 1934 he resigned his position because he affronted the Hungarian nation with his ideas. In 1938 he founded his Nazi organisation the People's Union Of Germans In Hungary (the Volskbund) and became the chairman of it. In 1940 Hitler appointed him the leader of Germans in Hungary (the Danube Swabians and the Transylvanian Saxons).

In the end of the year 1944 he escaped to Germany, but was delivered up to Hungary in 1945. He was marked as a war criminal and executed in Budapest in 1946.