Franz Reinhold Schwede (5 March 1888 – 19 October 1960)[1] was a Nazi German politician, Oberbürgermeister (Lord Mayor) of Coburg and both Gauleiter and Oberpräsident of Pomerania.

Franz Schwede was born in the small town of Drawöhnen near Memel, East Prussia (now Dreverna in Klaipėda District Municipality, Lithuania) in 1888, when it was part of the German Empire.

After attending volksschule, he worked briefly as a forester, then trained as a millwright and in 1907 joined the Imperial German Navy as a machinist in the Wilhelmshaven shipyard.

He then took a job as operations manager at a sawmill in Sankt Andreasberg in the Prussian Province of Hanover, before being hired as foreman at the Coburg Municipal Electrical Works in March 1922.

[5] In November 1922 Schwede joined the Nazi Party (membership number 1,581) and in April 1923 co-founded a Local Group (German: NSDAP Ortsgruppe) in Coburg, a historic city in northeastern Bavaria.

[6] After the Party was banned in the wake of the Beer Hall Putsch, Schwede became Kreisführer (County Leader) in Coburg for the Völkischer Block, a Nazi front organization active in Bavaria.

[8] In 1928, the paper began a slander and harassment campaign against Abraham Friedmann, the Jewish General Director of the Coburg meat company Großmann AG.

In the ensuing re-election campaign, which included public speeches in Coburg by Adolf Hitler himself, the Nazis won 43.1% of the popular vote and 13 of the 25 seats in June 1929.

[8] All this created a cult of personality around Schwede, a highlight of which was the 1933 dedication of Coburg City Hall's new bell, bearing the rhyming inscription Zu Adolf Hitler ruf ich dich, Franz Schwede-Glocke heiße ich (roughly translated "To Adolf Hitler I call, I am called the Franz Schwede Bell").

Around the same time the existing Gauleiter of the Prussian Province of Pomerania, Wilhelm Karpenstein, ran afoul of NSDAP headquarters and was arrested during the Night of the Long Knives.

Schwede moved to Stettin, forced 23 of the 27 District Kreisleiters out of office, and replaced Karpenstein's staff with loyal friends from Coburg, including: Arno Fischer as state building surveyor, Kuno Popp as Gau propaganda leader and regional representative of the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, Alfred Seidler as Gau treasurer, Johannes Künzel as a regional representative of the German Labor Front, Emil Mazuw as SS-Stabsführer of SS District XIII Pomerania, and Werner Faber as Lord Mayor of Stettin.

[15] On 8 November 1934, Schwede was named to the Prussian State Council; on 9 September 1935, he was made a member of the Academy for German Law; and at the March 1936 Reichstag election, he was returned from electoral constituency 6, Pomerania.

[18] After learning of the Aktion T4 program, Schwede immediately ordered the evacuation of psychiatric hospitals and nursing homes in Treptow, Ueckermünde, Lauenburg, Meseritz-Obrawalde and Stralsund.

[20] On 12 and 13 February 1940, the remaining 1,000 to 1,300 Pomeranian Jews, regardless of sex, age and health, were deported from Stettin and Schneidemühl to the Lublin-Lipowa Reservation that had been set up following the Nisko Plan, to their ultimate demise.

Despite this, the province was regarded as "safe" compared to other parts of the Third Reich and it became a shelter for evacuees from hard hit Berlin and the industrial areas of western Germany.

On 7 April 1951 a court in Coburg sentenced him to another ten years' imprisonment on 52 counts of abuse of power and grievous bodily harm that he participated in during the terrors of March, 1933.