Adolf-Heinz Beckerle (4 February 1902 – 3 April 1976) was a German politician, SA officer and diplomat who played a significant role in the Holocaust in Bulgaria.
[1] The book Wir wollten arbeiten: Erlebnisse deutscher Auswanderer in Südamerika (We wanted to work: Experiences of German emigrants in South America) was published under the pseudonym Heinz Edelmann.
[2] The plot of Wir wollten arbeiten concerned an young German man, disillusioned with the Weimar Republic, who travels to South America, depicted in colonialist terms as a place of bountiful natural resources mostly inhabited by racially inferior people of entirely or partial indigenous descent which was waiting to be exploited by Aryans.
After many adventures in South America, the hero learns in 1925 that Adolf Hitler has been released from prison, which shows that there is still hope for Germany and inspires him to return to the Fatherland to join the Nazi "freedom struggle".
Beckerle was unusual among the SA leaders in that he was too young to have served in either the First World War and/or the Freikorps, and to make up for his lack of military experience, he became an especially zealous Nazi.
In report he wrote in the fall of 1939, Beckerle called the Jewish community in Łódź one of "the most dirty places of the most disgusting East European Jewry".
In January 1941, long-standing rivalries between the Auswärtiges Amt (Foreign Office) and the SS exploded with the attempted coup d'etat in Bucharest that saw SS back the coup by the Iron Guard under its leader Horia Sima against the Prime Minister, General Ion Antonescu while the Auswärtiges Amt together with the Wehrmacht backed Antonescu.
Taking an advantage of the long-standing rivalries between the SS and the SA, in 1941, Ribbentrop appointed an assemblage of SA men to head the German embassies in Eastern Europe, with Beckerle going to Bulgaria, Manfred Freiherr von Killinger going to Romania, Siegfried Kasche to Croatia, Dietrich von Jagow to Hungary, and Hanns Ludin to Slovakia in order to ensure that there would be minimal co-operation with the SS.
[9] It was believed that Beckerle's role in forcefully upholding the authority of the German state as the police chief of Frankfurt and then in Łódź prepared him well for a diplomatic mission in Bulgaria.
[10] Unlike the lebensraum, which was to be colonised with millions of German settlers while the indigenous peoples living there would be exterminated, expelled or enslaved, the ergänzungsraum were seen as a source of food, raw materials and manpower that would assist the Reich in its quest for "world power status".
[12] Significantly, the five SA ambassadors in south-east Europe were all told that their diplomatic postings were only temporary, and that after the "final victory" that the German embassies and legations in Bratislava, Zagreb, Sofia, Bucharest, and Budapest would all be converted into formal colonial institutions along the same lines as the Protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia.
[13] It was a great relief to Boris that Beckerle did not press for a Bulgarian declaration of war against the Soviet Union, which would be unpopular in traditionally Russophile Bulgaria.
Reflecting his self-image as a great artist who would bring the benefits of German power and culture to the Balkans, Beckerle spent his spare time in Sofia writing poems and short stories while also drypointing.
[17] Beckerle was extremely unpopular in Bulgaria and even the Bulgarian volksdeutche (ethnic German) community leaders whom he sought to cultivate intensely disliked him.
[15] In October 1941, in one of the first acts of resistance in Bulgaria, a Bulgarian Jewish Communist named Leon Tadzher blew up a fuel depot in Ruse.
[20] Through the exchange of telegrams was quite routine, Beckerle was greatly exercised by what his staff had told him had been published in the Bulletin, causing him to send a stream of excited dispatches to Berlin, warning that the king was falling under "Jewish influence".
[20] In August 1942, the Bulgarian government set up a Commissariat of Jewish Affairs headed by an anti-Semitic lawyer, Alexander Belev, whose major concern at first was seizing assets owned by Jews.
On 16 October 1942, Martin Luther, the head of the Jewish Office in the Auswärtiges Amt, ordered Beckerle "to discuss the question of a transport to the East of the Jews due to resettlement under the new Bulgarian regulations".
[22] In early 1943, Filov told Beckerle that he learned via the Swiss minister that the British government was prepared to accept 5,000 Bulgarian Jewish children whose parents held valid passports into the Palestine Mandate (modern Israel) via Turkey.
[26] However, the government never gave the Jews living in "new Bulgaria" as the annexed regions were called Bulgarian citizenship and on 11 March 1943 deportations began in what had been Yugoslav Macedonia.
[27] Accompanying Beckerle to Skopje were the Bulgarian Jewish Affairs commissioner Alexander Belev, SS-Hauptsturmführer Theodor Dannecker, and two police chiefs, Penco Lukov and Zahari Velkov.
[30] Beckerle did not mention this, but at least one of the reasons for the failure of anti-Semitic propaganda in Bulgaria was because there was much greater prejudice directed against the Turkish minority who numbered about a half million people.
Several German doctors told Beckerle that the possibility of the king being poisoned could not be ruled out, saying a more through autopsy would be needed to determine the cause of Boris's death.
[33] However, Beckerle was saddened to learn that his wife had committed suicide in 1951 after the Jewish owners of a luxurious villa he had "Aryanized" in the 1930s successfully sued to get it back.
[4] The Association of Politically Persecuted Social Democrats complained about this award, stating "with indignation the crying injustice" of the financial compensation to a war criminal.
[4] Beckerle was investigated for acts of persecution he had committed as police chief of Frankfurt against anti-Nazis, but the prosecutor-general of Hesse closed the case in 1957 without bringing charges.
[28] Kiesinger had been a member of the National Socialist Legal Guild and the NSDAP in the Nazi era and through he joined both only for opportunistic reasons as he was an ambitious lawyer hoping to advance his career, his past was a constant issue during his chancellorship.