Theodor Oberländer
Theodor Oberländer was an Ostforschung scientist and German Nazi official and politician, who after the Second World War served as Federal Minister for Displaced Persons, Refugees and Victims of War in West Germany from 1953 to 1960, and as a Member of the Bundestag from 1953 to 1961 and from 1963 to 1965.
Oberländer earned a doctorate in agriculture in 1929 and a second doctorate in economics in 1930. He spent time in the Soviet Union during the 1920s and early 1930s, including as an employee of DRUSAG,
a German company involved in developing Soviet agriculture in cooperation with the Soviet government. Subsequently, he became active in Ostforschung, area studies of the Soviet Union, the Baltic states, Poland and other countries of Eastern and Central Europe, advocating elimination of Jews and subjugation of Polish people in Poland, which he characterised in his writings as having "eight million inhabitants too many". In 1933, he became Director of the Institute for East German Economy in Königsberg, and in 1938 he became Professor of Agriculture at the University of Greifswald. He served as a lieutenant in the German military intelligence service in the Soviet Union during the Second World War and was promoted to captain of the reserve before his discharge in 1943; in the same year he became Director of the Institute for Economic Sciences. From 1944 he was affiliated with the staff of Andrey Vlasov's collaborationist Russian Liberation Army. He became a member of the Nazi Party in 1933. However, from 1937 until the end of Nazi rule, he was under surveillance by the Sicherheitsdienst, as he was suspected of disloyalty to the Nazi cause. In 1940, he endorsed the ethnic cleansing of Poland. He later became the leader of the mixed German and Ukrainian Nachtigall Battalion, as well as the German-Caucasian Bergmann Battalion, which were active in anti-partisan warfare. Both groups were later accused of participation in war crimes.
After the war, the Americans held Oberländer as a POW. He worked with the American-sponsored Gehlen intelligence organisation as an expert on Eastern Europe.
He entered politics for the liberal Free Democratic Party from 1948. In 1950, he was a co-founder of the All-German Bloc/League of Expellees and Deprived of Rights and served as its chairman from 1954 to 1955. He served as a member of the Parliament of Bavaria from 1950 to 1953 and as Secretary of State for Refugee Affairs in the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior from 1951 to 1953. He then served as Federal Minister for Displaced Persons, Refugees and Victims of War in the Second and Third Cabinets of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer from 1953 to 1960, and as a Member of the Bundestag from 1953 to 1961 and from 1963 to 1965, during which time he represented Hildesheim from 1957 to 1961. In 1956, Oberländer became a member of the Christian Democratic Union. Oberländer was one of the most staunch anti-communists in the German government. He received the Grand Cross of Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, the Bavarian Order of Merit and the Legion of Honour.
Background and early career
Oberländer was born in 1905 in Meiningen, Duchy of Saxe-Meiningen, part of the German Empire, to a Protestant family; his father Oskar Oberländer was a civil servant and director of the insurance agency in Thüringen.After the First World War, Oberländer was a member of the Gilde Greif, a student association that emerged from the youth movement. As part of a military exercise in Forstenried, he, aged 18 and other members of the guild took part in Adolf Hitler's Beer Hall Putsch in Munich, Bavaria, on 9 November 1923, during the Weimar Republic era, according to their own admission, “rather by chance”. As a result of this he was imprisoned for four days.
Oberländer then became a member of the right-wing extremist paramilitary association Bund Oberland and the fiercely antisemitic Deutschvölkischer Schutz- und Trutzbund, before finally adhering to the NSDAP in 1933.
From 1923 to 1927, he studied agricultural science at LMU, the University of Hamburg and the University of Berlin, and earned a master's degree in this field in 1927. In 1928, he spent half a year in the Soviet Union as an employee of DRUSAG, which was involved in developing Soviet agriculture in cooperation with the Soviet government. In 1929, he earned a doctorate in agriculture at the University of Berlin with a dissertation titled Die landwirtschaftlichen Grundlagen des Landes Litauen. In 1930, he earned a doctorate in economics at the University of Königsberg with the dissertation Die Landflucht in Deutschland und ihre Bekämpfung durch agrarpolitische Maßnahmen. From 1930 to 1931, he spent nearly two years in the Soviet Union, China, Canada and the United States, where he worked for the Ford Motor Company. In 1931, Oberländer became an assistant professor at the Institute for East German Economy in Königsberg, and in 1933 he became Director of the institute. From 1934, he was also Associate Professor of Agriculture at the Technical College of Danzig. He became Associate Professor at the University of Königsberg in 1937. In 1938, he became Professor of Agriculture at the University of Greifswald.
Oberländer wrote several books about the need for German intervention in the agricultural systems of the Soviet Union and Poland, which he considered "un-economic".
During the Nazi regime
Oberländer became a member of the Nazi Party on 1 May 1933. He also joined the Sturmabteilung, the Nazi paramilitary unit, rising to the rank of SA-Obersturmführer on 1 July 1938. He was a member of the leadership of Gau East Prussia where he served until June 1937. On 4 August 1935, he became an assistant to Gauleiter Erich Koch, under whose authority he started to gather information about non-German minorities in East Prussia. A significant role in this process was played by the "Bund Deutscher Osten", which advocated radical Germanization of the eastern provinces and the elimination of the Polish language in Masuria. The language's traditional usage in the Protestant churches of the Masurians was outlawed in November 1939, with the Lutheran Prussian Church leadership acquiescing in December.In March 1935, he attended a meeting of professors, scholars and NSDAP training specialists dedicated to the study of the "East" where he focused his essays on what he described as "border struggle" with Poland. The meeting was divided into two groups:”base" and "front". The "base" included 58 professors, lecturers and research assistants, the "front" was made up of political functionaries, seven training specialists of the NSDAP, the Hitler Youth, three heads of Reichsarbeitsdiensts, two teachers and two civil servants. It was Oberländer who introduced the 72 participants on the first day and set for them the task to study the "border struggle" against Poland. Attacking Poland, he advocated fighting the Polish minority in Nazi Germany and demanded that social relationships between Germans and Polish immigrants be prohibited. Oberländer implied that Poland was not capable of sociopolitical and agrarian reforms due to the fact that it was not a "racially homogenous" nation state. He dismissed the population of Polish cities as "transplanted rubes". Sharing Hitler's views, Oberländer believed that the treaties regarding the East, like the German–Polish declaration of non-aggression, were only conditional, and that Ostforschung studies should go on as usual "so that after ten years we have everything ready that we could need in any given circumstances". Continuing his studies on the rural population of Poland he noted in his works that "Poland has eight million inhabitants too many". Reflecting on the temporary lack of possibility of open war in the East, Oberländer wrote the following: "The struggle for ethnicity is nothing other than the continuation of war by other means under the cover of peace. Not a fight with gas, grenades, and machine-guns, but a fight about homes, farms, schools and the souls of children, a struggle whose end, unlike in war, is not foreseeable as long as the insane principle of the nationalism of the state dominates the Eastern region, a struggle which goes on with one aim:extermination!" Other features of Oberländer's thoughts concentrated on depicting Jews as carriers of communism, and the benefits of peasant antisemitism to German goals in Central and Eastern Europe. His preparatory work in the BDO involved monitoring over 1,200,000 Poles living in Germany, with a card-name index of untrustworthy Poles and Germans living in the borderlands, and proposals to Germanise Polish place, street, and family names.
In the middle of 1937, Oberländer formulated a "divide and conquer" strategy for Poland. Within Poland, ethnic groups were to be directed into fighting with each other in order to prepare the ground for German rule. The Poles were to be steered away from opposing Germans and guided into confrontation with Russians and Jews. Oberländer additionally called for elimination of "assimilated Jewry" which in his view carried "communist ideas". Polish peasants were to be "taught" that they benefit from German "law". In order to win over Poles to the side of German hegemony in Europe, Oberländer proposed that they share in the theft of Jewish property. Around 3.5 million Polish Jews and 1.5 million people who were considered "assimilated Jews" were to be deprived of all of their rights. He is considered by some historians to be among the academics who laid the intellectual foundation for the Final Solution.
By 1937, Oberländer, however, started to lose influence in the Nazi Party as his views on the treatment of the Polish population were losing out to more hardline positions and his personal conflict with Erich Koch. As a result, he had lost his position in East Prussia and within the BDO by 1938. He was essentially fired by the University of Königsberg, after the Nazi government had attacked the "political nature" of his work. He was instead appointed Professor of Agriculture at the University of Greifswald, and was ordered to refrain from involving himself in Ostforschung. From 1937 until the end of Nazi rule he was under surveillance by the Sicherheitsdienst, as he was henceforth suspected of being disloyal to the Nazi cause. From 1 April 1938, he worked as Professor of History at University of Greifswald.
In 1939, Oberländer moved to work in Abwehrstelle Breslau; one of the main centers of sabotage and diversion organised by the Nazis that conducted operations against Poland. At the same time, his work concerned issues connected to Ukraine and the Sudetes region and he had contacts with Osteuropa Institut located in Breslau.