Carl Röver
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Carl Georg Röver | |
---|---|
Minister-President of the Free State of Oldenburg | |
In office 16 June 1932 – 5 May 1933 | |
Preceded by | Friedrich Cassebohm |
Succeeded by | Georg Joel |
Personal details | |
Born | National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) | 12 February 1889
Carl Georg Röver (12 February 1889 – 15 May 1942) was a German Nazi Party official. His main posts were as Gauleiter of Gau Weser-Ems and Reichsstatthalter of both Oldenburg and Bremen.
Early years
Röver was born in
Nazi career
Already before the Nazi seizure of power, Carl Röver had been active in politics. He joined the Oldenburg Stadtsrat (Municipal Council) in 1924. He was an Ortsgruppenleiter for the party in April 1925 and a Bezirksleiter (District Leader) in Oldenburg and East Friesland in July 1927. On 20 May 1928 he became a member of the Oldenburg Landtag. Finally, Adolf Hitler appointed him Gauleiter when the Gau Weser-Ems was established on 1 October 1928. In September 1930 he was elected to the Reichstag from electoral constituency 14, Weser-Ems. On 16 June 1932, he became Minister-president of Oldenburg, thus uniting under his control the highest party and governmental offices in his jurisdiction.[2]
When in September 1932 the Oldenburg superior church council, the executive board of the
On 5 May 1933 Röver was appointed to the post of
However, in this role Röver also clashed with Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, who as Minister President of Prussia, made no secret of his desire to incorporate Bremen into Prussia. Röver, however, opposed the move consistently and managed to convince Hitler to decline Göring's requests.[6]
On 4 September 1935, Rover was made a member of Hans Frank's Academy for German Law.[7] He was something of a favourite of Martin Bormann, a fact that helped to ensure that when an Arbeitsbereich ("working sphere" - an external unit of the Nazi Party) was set up in the neighbouring occupied Netherlands most of its staff were drawn from Weser-Ems.[8]
Death
Röver supposedly suffered a stroke in May 1942 and died in Berlin soon afterwards, Paul Wegener succeeding him as Gauleiter.[9] His official cause of death is listed in some sources as pneumonia[1] and in others as heart failure.[10] His state funeral at the Reich Chancellery in Berlin proved a lavish event, with Adolf Hitler himself in attendance and Alfred Rosenberg delivering the eulogy.[11]
Röver's cause of death is disputed by David Irving, who claims in his book Hitler's War that Röver was killed by Nazi agents who had been sent specifically by Martin Bormann.[12] This is also the conclusion of Bormann's biographer Jochen Von Lang, who states that Röver's increasingly erratic behaviour was caused by progressive dementia brought on by late stage syphilis, supposedly contracted before the First World War: “Bormann ordered that the nature of the disease be kept secret. From Munich he dispatched two agents to Oldenburg who, on 15 May, were able to report to him that Röver had died, officially from heart failure.”[10]
References
- ^ a b c Ernst Klee: Das Personenlexikon zum Dritten Reich. Wer war was vor und nach 1945. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Zweite aktualisierte Auflage, Frankfurt am Main 2005, p. 504.
- ^ ISBN 978-1-932970-32-6.
- ^ Georg Joel und Jens Müller an das Oldenburger Staatsministerium. Printed in: Klaus Schaap: Oldenburgs Weg ins „Dritte Reich“. Quellen zur Regionalgeschichte Nordwest-Niedersachsens, Heft 1. Oldenburg 1983, Dokument Nr. 157. See also: Bekenntnisgemeinschaft und bekennende Gemeinden in Oldenburg in den Jahren der nationalsozialistischen Herrschaft. Evangelische Kirchlichkeit und nationalsozialistischer Alltag in einer ländlichen Region, Bd. 39, Teil 5, p. 52.
- ^ Peter D. Stachura, The Shaping of the Nazi State, Taylor & Francis, 1978, p. 216
- ^ David Cesarani, Holocaust: The "final solution", Routledge, 2004, p. 83
- ^ Maiken Umbach, German federalism: past, present, future, Palgrave Macmillan, 2002, p. 131
- ^ Miller & Schulz 2017, p. 405.
- ISBN 0-822-9-3253-9
- ^ Orlow, The History of the Nazi Party , p. 352
- ^ ISBN 9780394503219.
- ^ Orlow, The History of the Nazi Party , p. 358
- ^ David Irving, Hitler's War, p. 392
External links
- Newspaper clippings about Carl Röver in the 20th Century Press Archives of the ZBW
- Information about Carl Röver in the Reichstag database