Theodor Oberländer

Theodor Oberländer (May 1, 1905 – May 4, 1998) was a German politician, military leader, and agricultural scientist.

From 1953 to 1960 he was a Minister for Displaced Persons, Refugees and Victims of War for the Federal Republic of Germany.

Biography

Oberländer was born in Meiningen, Saxe-Meiningen, part of the German Empire in 1905. He participated in Adolf Hitler's Beer Hall Putsch in Munich, Bavaria, in 1923 during the Weimar Republic. Oberländer obtained a doctorate in Agricultural Sciences and wrote several books about the need for German intervention in the agricultural systems of Poland and the Soviet Union, which he considered "un-economic".

Oberländer became a National Socialist in 1933. He became a professor at Ernst Moritz Arndt University in Greifswald, Pomerania, where he took the forefront in making the university and the province "judenfrei" (free of Jews). On August 4, 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" (BDO - "League for a German East"), 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 church leadership acquiescing in December.

When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 Oberländer became an advising officer of the Ukrainische Gruppe Nachtigall (a Ukrainian ultra-nationalist battalion of Wehrmacht) which occupied Lviv in Ukraine; his position was similar to that of Soviet political commissars, since he advised on Eastern European and "Jewish matters". He later became the leader of the mixed German and Caucasian Sonderverband Bergmann, which was especially active in anti-partisan warfare. Both army groups were later claimed to have participated in war crimes. After leaving the Bergmann group, Oberländer became a liaison officer with Andrey Vlasov's Russian Liberation Army. He was then taken prisoner by the United States Army in 1945.

After World War II, Oberländer again became active in German politics, first in the liberal Free Democratic Party, then in the Bloc of Refugees and Expellees (GB/BHE). He joined the Adenauer government of West Germany in 1953 and left the GB/BHE for the centre Christian Democratic Union in 1956 when it broke with Adenauer. A court in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) in 1960 sentenced Oberländer, in absentia, to life imprisonment for his involvement in the Lviv massacre in 1941. Under protest, refuting the accusations, he tendered his resignation as a minister. His conviction was squashed by a new German court in 1993, which contended that the Soviet evidence had been fabricated by the KGB. At the end of his life, Oberländer became involved in far right and anti-immigration politics.

A new case was opened against Oberländer in 1996 in which he was charged with the unlawful killing of a civilian in Kislovodsk in 1942 during his Bergmann leadership. However, Oberländer died in Bonn in 1998.

External References

• Theodor Oberländer in the German National Library catalogue (German)
• Article about the events in Lviv/Lemberg (German)
• Fate of the Jews in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Oberländer's involvement (German)
• Extracts from "Grenzlandpolitik" und Ostforschung an der Peripherie des Reiches. Das ostpreussische Masuren 1919-1945 by Andreas Kossert (German)

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