Pre WWII – Weimar Document – SS-Obergruppenführer Bouhler – Aktion T4 / Aktion 14f13 – Franz von Epp (Sold)
Description
Very nice original document with Weimar Eagle embossed.
This document states that he was dismissed from the Police in Munich, which coincides with the other offices he would later hold.
There is a lot of information about Bouhler online, including pictures with all the Nazi top brass. Due to copyrights I could not add them here in the listing.
Document is hand signed by Franz von Epp.
Comments: An incredible document to tone of the most horrible men of the Third Reich, I was unable to find anything else related to him ever sold online.
More on Bouhler:
Philipp Bouhler (11 September 1899 – 19 May 1945) was a German senior Nazi Party functionary who was both a Reichsleiter (National Leader) and Chief of the Chancellery of the Führer of the NSDAP. He was also the SS official responsible for the Aktion T4 euthanasia program that killed more than 250,000 disabled adults and children in Nazi Germany, as well as co-initiator of Aktion 14f13, also called Sonderbehandlung (‘special treatment’), that killed 15,000–20,000 concentration camp prisoners.
Bouhler was arrested on 10 May 1945 by American troops. He committed suicide on 19 May 1945 while in the U.S. internment camp at Zell am See in Austria.
Bouhler was born in Munich, to a retired colonel, and spent five years in the Royal Bavarian Cadet Corps. He entered the 1st Royal Bavarian Foot Artillery Regiment in 1916 during the First World War, was commissioned as a Leutnant in July 1917, and was badly wounded the next month. He was awarded the Iron Cross, 2nd class, and was hospitalized through the end of the war.[2] From 1919 to 1920, he studied philosophy[3] and in 1921 became a contributor in the publishing house that put out the Nazi Party newspaper Völkischer Beobachter.
Bouhler joined the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in July 1922 with membership number 12. By late 1922 he had become deputy business manager of the NSDAP under Max Amann.[4] He took part in the failed Beer Hall Putsch in Munich and when the Party was banned, became the Business Manager for the Nazi front organization, the Greater German People’s Community, based in Munich.[2]
Upon the refounding of the party on 27 February 1925, he immediately rejoined and was made National Business Manager of the NSDAP, holding this post until November 1934. After the seizure of power in 1933, he was elected as a member of the Reichstag for electoral constituency 18, Southern Westphalia.[5] On 2 June 1933 Hitler appointed him a Reichsleiter, the second highest political rank in the Nazi Party.[6] He joined the SS in the rank of SS-Gruppenführer on 20 April 1933 with membership number: 54,932.[1] On 30 January 1936, Bouhler was promoted to the rank of SS-Obergruppenführer.[7]
From the end of August to the end of October 1934, Bouhler was police president of Munich. In September he was made a member of the Academy for German Law. He was next appointed chief of Adolf Hitler’s Chancellery, a post specially created on 17 November 1934 that was first and foremost set aside for party business. He held that position until 23 April 1945.[8] In this job, for instance, secret decrees might be prepared, or internal business managed, before being brought before Adolf Hitler. Moreover, Bouhler was chairman of the “Official Party Inspection Commission for the Protection of National Socialist Literature” (Der Chef der Kanzlei des Führers und Vorsitzender der Parteiamtlichen Prüfungskommission zum Schutze des NS-Schrifttums), which determined what writings were and were not suitable for Nazi society.[3]
Bouhler’s office was responsible for all correspondence for Hitler, which included private and internal communications as well as responding to public inquiries (for example, requests for material help, godfathership, jobs, clemency, NSDAP business, and birthday wishes). His personal adjutant was SS-Sturmbannführer Karl Freiherr Michel von Tüßling. By 1944, much of the functions of the Kanzlei des Führers were absorbed by the Party Chancellery (Parteikanzlei) under Martin Bormann.[9]
During the war, Bouhler published Der großdeutsche Freiheitskampf (“the greater German freedom struggle”), a three volume book featuring the speeches given by Hitler from September 1, 1939, to March 15, 1942.[10][11][12]
War crimes
Bouhler was responsible for the killing of disabled German citizens. By order of Hitler (backdated to 1 September 1939), Bouhler with Karl Brandt developed the Nazis’ early euthanasia program, Aktion T4 in which mentally ill and physically disabled people were killed.[13][14] The actual implementation was supervised by Bouhler. Various methods of killing were tried out. The first killing facility was Schloss Hartheim in Upper Austria. The knowledge gained from the euthanasia program was later applied to the industrialized annihilation of other groups of people, especially the Jews.[15]
In 1941 Bouhler and Heinrich Himmler initiated Aktion 14f13. Bouhler instructed the head of the Hauptamt II (“main office ll”) of Hitler’s Chancellery, the Oberdienstleiter Viktor Brack to implement this order. Brack was already in charge of the various front operations of T4.
The scheme operated under the Concentration Camps Inspector and the Reichsführer-SS under the name “Sonderbehandlung 14f13″. The combination of numbers and letters was derived from the SS record-keeping system and consists of the number “14” for the Concentration Camps Inspector, the letter “f” for the German word “deaths” (Todesfälle), and the number “13” for the means of killing, in this case, for gassing in the T4 killing centers.[note 1] “Sonderbehandlung” (“special treatment”) was the euphemistic term for execution or killing.
In 1942, Bouhler published the book “Napoleon – Kometenbahn eines Genies” (Napoleon – A Genius’s Cometary Path), which became a favorite of Hitler’s. He had also published a Nazi publication Kampf um Deutschland (Fight for Germany) in 1938.
Capture and suicide
Bouhler and his wife, Helene, were arrested by American troops at Schloss Fischhorn in Bruck near Zell-am-See on 10 May 1945. Helene jumped to her death from a window at Schloss Fischhorn. On 19 May, Bouhler killed himself using a cyanide capsule while in the US internment camp at Zell-am-See. The couple had no children.[16]
More on Franz von Epp
Franz Ritter von Epp (born Franz Epp; from 1918 as Ritter von Epp; 16 October 1868 – 31 January 1947)[1][Notes 1] was a German general and politician who started his military career in the Bavarian Army. Successful wartime military service earned him a knighthood in 1916. After the end of World War I and the dissolution of the German Empire, von Epp was a commanding officer in the Freikorps and the Reichswehr. He was a member of Bavarian People’s Party, before joining the Nazi Party in 1928, when he was elected as a member of the German parliament or Reichstag, a position he held until the fall of Nazi Germany. He was the Reichskommissar, later Reichsstatthalter, for Bavaria, and a Reichsleiter of the Nazi Party.
Biography
Military career
Franz Epp was born in Munich in 1868, the son of the painter Rudolph Epp and Katharina Streibel. He spent his school years in Augsburg and after this joined the military academy in Munich. He served as a volunteer in East Asia during the Boxer Rebellion in 1900–01 and then became a company commander in the colony of German South-West Africa (now Namibia), where he took part in the bloody Herero and Namaqua Genocide.[2][3] During the First World War, he served as the commanding officer of the Royal Bavarian Infantry Lifeguards Regiment in France, Serbia, Romania, and at the Isonzo front.
For his war service, Epp received numerous medals, of which the Pour le Mérite (29 May 1918) was the most significant. He was also knighted, being made Ritter von Epp on 25 February 1918, and received the Bavarian Military Order of Max Joseph (23 June 1916).
Freikorps
After the end of the war, Epp formed the Freikorps Epp, a right-wing paramilitary unit mostly made up of war veterans, of which the future leader of the SA Ernst Röhm was a member.[4] This unit took part in the crushing of the Bavarian Soviet Republic in Munich, being responsible for various massacres. Epp joined the Reichswehr and was promoted to Generalmajor in 1922. He took his leave from the German Army after getting involved with right-wing associations in 1923.
When it became necessary for the Nazi Party to purchase a newspaper to publicize its political creed, Epp made available some 60,000 Reichsmarks from secret army funds to acquire the Völkischer Beobachter,[5] which became the daily mouthpiece of the party.
As the Sturmabteilung (SA) expanded, it became an armed band of several hundred thousand men, whose function was to guard Nazi rallies and disrupt those of other political parties. Some of its leaders, particularly Ernst Röhm, visualized the SA as supplanting the regular army when Adolf Hitler came to national power. To this end, a department was set up under Epp called the Wehrpolitisches Amt (Army political office). Nothing came of this, as a distrustful Hitler had the SA crushed and many of its leaders killed in the Night of the Long Knives in the summer of 1934.
Career in parliament and the Nazi Party
After leaving the Bavarian People’s Party, Epp on 20 May 1928 was elected from electoral constituency 26 (Franconia) as one of the first 12 Nazi Party deputies to the Reichstag. He would continue to be elected to the Reichstag in each subsequent election throughout the Weimar and Nazi regimes to 1945. He served as the Nazi Party’s head of its Military-Political Office from 1928 to 1945, and later as leader of the German Colonial Society, an organization devoted to regaining Germany’s lost colonies. On 31 August 1933 he was made a Reichsleiter, the second highest political rank in the Nazi Party. On 3 October 1933, he was also made a member of the Academy for German Law.[6] In May 1934 he became head of the NSDAP Office of Colonial Policy until its dissolution in February 1943.
Reichskommissar and Reichsstatthalter of Bavaria
Epp’s final notable historical action occurred on 9 March 1933, two weeks before the Reichstag passed the enabling act, which granted Hitler dictatorial powers. On the orders of Hitler and Wilhelm Frick, he abolished the Government of Bavaria and set up a Nazi regime, with himself as Reichskommissar. On 10 April Hitler appointed him Reichsstatthalter for Bavaria. In this position he often clashed with Bavaria’s Nazi Minister-President Ludwig Siebert. Epp’s attempt to limit the influence of the central government on Bavarian politics failed. He, however, retained his post as Reichsstatthalter until the end of the war, although by then he was politically insignificant.
On 8 May 1933, von Epp’s DO X crashed at the Passau Kachlet.[7] The city named one of its streets Ritter-von-Epp-Straße.[8]
Arrest and death
He was arrested on Paul Giesler‘s orders in 1945, for being associated with the Freiheitsaktion Bayern, an anti-Nazi group led by Rupprecht Gerngroß. However, Epp had not wanted to be directly involved with the group, as he considered their goal—surrender to the Allies—a form of backstabbing of the German Army.[9]
Suffering from a heart condition, he was hospitalised at Bad Nauheim at the end of the war. On 9 May 1945, a clerk at the hospital alerted agents from the US Counterintelligence Corps that Epp was a patient there, and he was arrested and sent to a prison camp in Munich to await trial at Nuremberg.[10] He died in detention on 31 January 1947.[1][11]