Franz Anton Basch

Dr. Franz Anton Basch (

Danube Swabian) community in Hungary

Franz Basch was born in Zürich in 1901. He was a student of the more moderate nationalist activist Jakob Bleyer and earned his doctorate at the University of Budapest between 1920 and 1924. He matriculated from the University of Munich on 5 December 1925^[1] In 1925 he became the secretary of the German Cultural Society. He published many works in this period.

From 1930, he began to express extreme

Third Reich. In 1939, Basch took the title Volksgruppenführer (Racial Group Leader) of the ethnic Germans in Hungary. In 1940 Hitler appointed him the leader of Germans in Hungary (the Danube Swabians and the Transylvanian Saxons).^[2] In the first two enlistment periods of ethnic Germans in Hungary in 1942 and 1943, Franz Basch, as head of the VDU, actively participated and was responsible for enlisting over 40,000 Hungarian citizens in the Waffen-SS

for Nazi Germany.

At the end of 1944, he escaped to Germany but was captured by the Americans and sent back to Hungary in 1945. He was tried and sentenced to death for war crimes and executed in Budapest in 1946. A detailed but sympathetic analysis of Basch's trial is available in Seewann and Spannenberger (1999).[3]^[4]

References

^ Spannenberger, N. (2005) Der Volksbund der Deutschen in Ungarn 1938 - 1944. Oldenbourg: Munich.
^ Lyon, P. W. (2008) AFTER EMPIRE: ETHNIC GERMANS AND MINORITY NATIONALISM IN INTERWAR YUGOSLAVIA. PhD Dissertation. College Park:UMd. P. 556
^ Seewann, G. & Spannenberger, N. (1999) Akten des Volksgerichtsprozesses gegen Franz A. Basch, Volksgruppenfuehrer der Deitschen in Ungarn, Budapest 1945/46. Munchen.
^ Paikert, G. C. (1967) The Danube Swabians. Nijhoff:The Hague