Rudolf Jung
| Rudolf Jung | |
|---|---|
| File:Rudolf Jung.jpg | |
| Member of the Czechoslovak National Assembly | |
| In office 1919–1933 |
|
| Member of the Reichstag | |
| In office 1936–1943 |
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| Personal details | |
| Born | 16 April 1882 Plasy |
| Died | Script error: The function "death_date_and_age" does not exist. Prague |
| Political party | DAP (1909–1918) DNSAP (1919–1933) NSDAP (1935–1945) |
| Occupation | politician, engineer |
Rudolf Jung (16 April 1882 – 11 December 1945) was a German politician and political theorist.
Biography
Jung was born in Plasy in Bohemia and went to school in Jihlava, a town fractured by national antagonisms. He studied mechanical engineering at the Vienna Technical University from 1900 to 1905. During his studies he became a member of the Markomannia fraternity in Vienna in 1900. Jung served his military service as a one-year volunteer in the Imperial and Royal Navy. From October 1906 he worked as a civil servant mechanical engineer for the Imperial and Royal Austrian Railways, first in Floridsdorf and finally as workshop manager in Iglau.
In July 1907, Jung became a member of the Pan-German-oriented German Workers' Party (DAP) and became a municipal deputy of the party in Iglau. In 1912, Jung was elected as one of three DAP deputies to the Moravian Diet; in 1913 he appeared as co-author of the "Iglau Program," the party program of the DAP.[1]
The DAP renamed itself the German National Socialist Workers' Party (DNSAP) in May 1918 and broke up into two currents as a result of the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. Jung became the second chairman of the Sudeten German DNSAP on November 16, 1919. In the 1920 elections to the Czechoslovak parliament, he won a parliamentary mandate and became club chairman of the DNSAP deputies.
His book Der nationale Sozialismus ("National Socialism"), published in Troppau in 1919, concerned what he considered to be the essential identity issues of the German nation and the strategies for the desirable political future of the Germans. His book was one of the first programmatic writings of the all-German National Socialist movement and was anti-liberal and anti-democratic in its statements. He co-edited the monthly magazine Volk und Gemeinde. Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte alongside Hans Krebs and Alexander Schilling-Schletter. On August 7, 1920, Jung delivered the programmatic speech in the conference hall of the Salzburg parliament at a so-called supranational meeting of the National Socialists. Adolf Hitler also gave a speech here, but was Rudolf Jung, not Hitler, who was acclaimed as a visionary by the assembled National Socialists.
On October 17, 1926, Jung assumed the office of chairman of the DNSAP; from May 1, 1931, he led the Volkssport association, a party organization comparable to the SA. In the fall of 1933, the DNSAP dissolved in anticipation of an impending party ban, and Jung lost his parliamentary mandate. In connection with the "Volkssport trial," Jung spent seven months in pretrial detention beginning in October 1933; after his release, he was placed under police supervision.
In September 1935, Jung fled to the Reich on the orders of German authorities. After being granted Reich citizenship in November 1935, Jung became a lecturer at the German Academy for Politics in Berlin in December 1935, and held a professorship at the college from 1940 to 1945. Hitler conferred the title of professor on Jung on June 9, 1938.
After fleeing, Jung became a member of the NSDAP in 1935 (retroactive to April 1, 1925), and was thus also officially considered an old fighter. On March 29, 1936, he became a member of the Reichstag, which was meaningless during the National Socialist era. Jung joined the SS (membership number 276,690) on June 17, 1936, with the rank of SS-Sturmbannführer. After several promotions, he reached the rank of SS-Gruppenführer on April 16, 1942.
On February 1, 1940, Jung was appointed president of the Central German Labor Office, headquartered in Erfurt. From March 1942, he was a member of the expert staff of the General Plenipotentiary for the Employment of Labor, Fritz Sauckel, and was also Sauckel's representative and plenipotentiary. In November 1943, he was put on hold, and on May 1, 1944 he became General Director of the Prague Savings Bank, and in December 1944 he was appointed Plenipotentiary for the Labor Deployment in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. The intended appointment as Lord Mayor (Primátor) of Prague did not materialize before the end of the war.
In May 1945 Jung was arrested in Prague and imprisoned in Pankrác Prison. On December 11, 1945, he committed suicide in prison before the opening of the trial.
Works
The author of numerous books and writings from 1919 onward, Jung was considered one of the most important theorists of National Socialism. His work National Socialism. Its Foundations, Its Development, and Its Goals (1919) developed the Pan-German, völkisch program of National Socialism even before Adolf Hitler's My Struggle (1925–1926) and Alfred Rosenberg's The Myth of the 20th Century (1930).
Hitler's program, however, pushed Rudolf Jung into the background even after his escape to Germany. After the end of World War II, many of Jung's writings were placed on the list of literature to be eliminated in the Soviet Occupation Zone.
Major publications
- Der Rassengedanke im nationalen Sozialismus (1923)
- "Kapitalismus und Judentum." In: Hans Krebs and Otto Prager, eds., Weltfront. Eine Sammlung von Aufsätzen antisemitischer Führer aller Völker (1926), pp. 23–28.
- Nationaler oder internationaler Sozialismus (1930)
- Der nationale Sozialismus im Sudetendeutschtum (1933)
- Die Tschechen: Tausend Jahre deutsch-tschechischer Kampf (1937)
- Böhmen und das Reich: Die deutsch-tschech (1938)
- Die Schicksalsfrage Mitteleuropas : das deutsch-tschech. Problem im Wandel d. Zeiten (1938)
References
- ↑ Whiteside, Andrew G. (1961). "Nationaler Sozialismus in Österreich vor 1918," Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, Vol IX, pp. 333–56.
