Ernst Boepple


Ernst Boepple was a Nazi official and SS-Oberführer, serving as deputy to Josef Bühler in occupied Poland during World War II and the Holocaust, who was executed for war crimes.

Life

Boepple earned his Abitur in 1905 at the Gymnasium in Reutlingen. Then he studied languages and history at several universities: University of Tübingen, University of Paris, University of Oxford, and the
University of London and earned his PhD in 1915.—with the doctoral thesis: Frederick the Great's Relation to Württemberg. He fought in the First World War in the infantry and left the German Army with the rank of first lieutenant in 1919.

Director of Nazi publishing enterprise

Boepple became a co-worker of the publisher Julius Friedrich Lehmann and was one of the founders of the German Workers' Party. In 1919 he took over the Deutsche Volksverlag publishing house, which had been established by Lehmann. There he published Anton Drexler's My Political Awakening. The Deutsche Volksverlag published a large section of the early formative Nazi literature including:
  • Rudolf Jung: National Socialism. Its Foundations, Its Development and Its Goals, 1919
  • Wilhelm Meister : Jewry's debt-book - a German accounting, 1919
  • Dr. Ferdinand Werner: Make Way for Truth! A Reckoning with Jewry and its accomplices, 1919
  • Minister Karl Gerecke: Biblical anti-Semitism: Jewry's character in world history, guilt and the end in prophet Jona's reflection, 1920
  • Maria Groener: Schopenhauer and the Jews, 1920
  • Dr. Hans Grunsky: Richard Wagner and the Jews, 1920
  • Alfred Rosenberg: Immorality in the Talmud, 1920
  • Emil Kloth: Soul searching - Reflections of a social democratic trade unionist about the politics of social democracy, 1920
  • Dr. Paul Tafel: The new Germany. A socialist state on a national foundation, 1920
  • Fridrich Andersen : The German Saviour, 1921
  • Dietrich Eckart, Otto von Kursell: Austria under Jewry's star, Russia's gravedigger, 1921
  • Dr. Max Maurenbrecher: Goethe and the Jews, 1921
  • Dr. Alfred Falb: Luther and the Jews, 1921
  • Hugo Christoph Meyer: The Jew and his Slavery, 1921
  • Ottokar Stauf von der March: Jewry in the Opinions of the Ages, 1921
  • Otto Armin: The Jews in the War-Business and the War-Economics, 1921
  • Adolf Bartels: Hebbel and the Jews, 1922
  • Alfred Rosenberg: Being, principles, and goals of the National Socialist German Worker's Party, 1922
  • Dr. Albrecht Wirth: Crosswise our present time, 1922
  • Alfred Rosenberg: The Plague in Russia. Bolshevism, its heads, henchmen, and victims, 1922
  • Alfred Rosenberg: Bolshevism, hunger, death, 1922
In November 1923 Ernst Boepple took part in the Beer Hall Putsch.

World War II

When Hans Schemm died in 1935 after an aircraft crash, Boepple became the Bavarian Minister for Culture until the invasion of Poland in 1939. In 1940 he again served in the military. On 1 September 1941 he was appointed the State Secretary of the General Government in occupied Poland, serving as deputy to Deputy Governor Josef Bühler. Boepple was deeply implicated in the Final Solution as the deputy to Bühler and also held rank in the Schutzstaffel, being an SS-Oberführer.
Several months after Germany's surrender, Boepple was arrested by U.S. soldiers in Bavaria. He was extradited to Poland in 1947, where he was sentenced to death by a Polish court on 14 December 1949. Boepple was hanged on 15 December 1950.

Publications

  • Friedrich des Großen Verhältnis zu Württemberg, Dissertation, C. A. Seyfried, 1915
  • Die Judenfrage und der deutsche Buchhandel, Deutscher Volksverlag, 1920
  • Zwischen Front und Heimat: Zum Vierjahrestag des Generalgouvernements, Pressechef d. Regierg d. Generalgouvernements, 1943