Franz Rademacher
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Franz Rademacher (1906-1973) was an official in the Nazi government of the Third Reich during World War II, known for initiating action on the Madagascar Plan.
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[edit] Nazi Beginnings
Rademacher was born on February 20, 1906 in Neustralitz, Mecklenburg. His father was a railway engineer. He studied law in Rostock and Munich, and entered the profession as a jurist in April 1932. He held membership in the Sturmabteilung (Nazi stormtroopers) between 1932 and 1934. In 1933, he joined the Nazi party. He was a vocal anti-semite.
From 1937, he was a diplomat with the German Foreign Office, serving at the German embassy in Montevideo, Uruguay until May, 1940. In 1940, he was selected to lead Referat D III, or Judenreferat, of Ribbentrop's Foreign Affairs Ministry. His direct superior was Nazi diplomat Martin Luther. It was during his tenure in this office, throughout the spring and summer of 1940, that Rademacher kick-started the Madagascar Plan, which sought to forcibly deport all of Europe's Jews to the island of Madagascar. He jousted briefly with Adolf Eichmann over organizational control of the plan, which would shortly be abandoned amidst Germany's changing fortunes in World War II.
In October 1941, he was responsible for mass deportations and executions of Serbian Jews. He also had a hand in the deportation of Jews from France, Belgium, and the Netherlands.
[edit] Downfall
In 1943, Rademacher became embroiled in Luther's attempted coup to oust Ribbentrop. He was dismissed from the Foreign Affairs Ministry, and sent to fight in the navy as an officer for the remainder of the war.
Immediately following the war, Rademacher went into hiding until his capture by the Americans in September 1947, who ultimately released him. He was eventually brought to trial in Germany in February 1952 for the murders he supervised in Serbia. However, with the aid of Nazi sympathizers, he fled to Syria in September of that year while released on bail. A German court convicted him in absentia for the murder of Serbian Jews, and sentenced him to 3 years and 5 months imprisonment.
In 1963, he was arrested in Syria on charges of spying, but was released in 1965 due to ill health. He returned to Germany in 1966, where he was again convicted of war crimes and sentenced to five and half years' imprisonment. However, his sentence was never carried out, the court having considered it already served.
In 1971, a German high court in Karlsruhe overruled this judgment against Rademacher, and ordered a new trial for his crimes during World War II. He died on March 17, 1973, before proceedings began.
[edit] References
- Browning, Christopher R.: The Origins of the Final Solution, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, and Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, 2004 ISBN 0-8032-1327-1
[edit] See also
[edit] Further reading
- Browning, Christopher R. (1978). The final solution and the German Foreign Office: a study of Referat D III of Abteilung Deutschland, 1940-43. New York: Holmes & Meier.
- Wistrich, Robert S. (1995). Who's Who in Nazi Germany. London: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-26038-8.
