Josef Müller (CSU politician)

Josef Müller (27 March 1898 – 12 September 1979), also known as "Ochsensepp", was a German politician. He was a member of the resistance during World War II and afterwards one of the founders of the Christian Social Union (CSU). He was a devout Catholic and a leading figure in the Catholic resistance to Hitler.[1]

Contents

Early life

Born in Steinwiesen, Upper Franconia, he entered the legal profession.

He was a Catholic and during the Weimar Republic he became politically active as a member of the Bavarian People’s Party.

Third Reich

During the Nazi period he worked as an attorney defending many Nazi opponents. He also was part of the Catholic resistance and was in contact to resistance figures in the Abwehr (German military intelligence) such as Admiral Canaris, Hans von Dohnanyi and Hans Oster.

Early in the war (1939–1940), Müller made a number of trips to the Vatican under the identity "X." He carried correspondence between the German resistance and British intelligence that sought co-operation in a coup to replace Hitler's regime with an anti-Nazi civilian government supported by the German military. The correspondence and related intelligence passed through an intermediary to the hands of Pope Pius XII, who would review it and in turn forward it to Lord Halifax in Britain. Dohnanyi summarized the material into a report, containing list of individuals slated to assume roles in a post-coup civilian government. Despite Müller's urgings, Dohnanyi failed to destroy this document and during the purges following the failed assassination attempt on Hitler in July 1944, it fell into the hands of the Gestapo, which led to the arrests, trials and executions of many resistance members.

Müller was arrested in 1943 and interned at the concentration camp Flossenbürg. Unlike fellow inmates Canaris, Oster and Bonhoeffer, who were executed in April 1945, Müller was transferred to Tyrol in late April 1945 along with 138 other "special prisoners" (Sonderhäflinge) and "kin prisoners" (Sippenhäftlinge), persons of prominence the Nazi SS had hauled off in the final days of the war to Niederdorf, South Tyrol, where they were to be hidden and used as bargaining chips.[2] They were liberated by the Fifth U.S. Army on 5 May 1945[3].

Post-war period

After the war, he advocated forming a new Christian party of both Catholics and Protestants. With Adam Stegerwald, he was one of the founders of the Christian Social Union (CSU), serving as the party's first chairman from 1946 to 1949. Müller belonged to the more liberal Franconian wing of the party and was the main opponent of the conservative Old-Bavarian wing under Alois Hundhammer. He was one of the patrons of the young Franz Josef Strauß.

After the CSU had won the first post-war elections in 1946, Hundhammer opposed Müller's nomination as minister-president of Bavaria and proposed that Hans Ehard be elected as a compromise candidate instead. Once elected, Ehard appointed Hundhammer as minister of culture, but in 1947 Müller entered the cabinet as well as minister of justice. From 1950 onwards, he also was deputy prime minister. He resigned from the government in 1952.

He died on 12 September 1979, in Munich.

References

  1. ^ Admiral Wilhelm Canaris Jewish Virtual Library, 2010 The American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise
  2. ^ Richardi, Hans-Günter: SS-Geiseln in der Alpenfestung—Die Verschleppung prominenter KZ-Häftlinge aus Deutschland nach Südtirol (Hostages of the SS in the Alpine Reduit Area: How concentration-camp prisoners of prominence were dragged off from Germany to South Tyrol). Bozen: Edition Raetia, 2006. ISBN 88-7283-229-2
  3. ^ georg-elser-arbeitskreis.de (German)
Josef Müller (1946–1949) • Hans Ehard (1949–1955) • Hanns Seidel (1955–1961) • Franz Josef Strauss (1961–1988) • Theodor Waigel (1988–1999) • Edmund Stoiber (1999-2007) • Erwin Huber (2007–2008) • Horst Seehofer (since 2008)