Giesler, Paul.

Giesler, Paul, born 15-06-1895, in Siegen, was raised in victories in a long-established Protestant commune and family of notables, like his father. Giesler grew up in a bourgeois and protestant environment. His father is an architect.  He volunteered to go to the front and in August 1914, he with the outbreak of World War I, commanded a company of an engineer battalion of the Guard. He was injured several times and was awarded the Iron Cross first and second class. When the war ended, he moved to Siegen as a freelance architect. His brother Hermann, an architect by training, is a very fashionable man, taking part in the construction of the SS training castle in Sonthofen and the grave that Adolf Hitler wanted to build. During the Night of the Long Knives, which is on vacation, he is not stopped.

Between 1919 and 1921, he attended the higher country building school in Darmstadt, the today’s University of applied sciences. From 1922 to 1933, he worked as an independent architect in Siegen. His younger brother Hermann Giesler 

also studied architecture in Munich and was appointed Professor by Adolf Hitler (did you know). He had highlighted importance as a planner of Nazi prestigious buildings like the Ordensburg Sonthofen and entrusted by Hitler (see Hitler parents) (see William Hitler) with the reorganization of the entire city of Linz.  , was next to Albert Speer

      one of the two court architect of Hitler’s, and was intended as an architect of his tomb. In 1he paramilitary Stahlhelm   under Franz Seldte,    which he remained until 1927. In 1920 he was a member of belletristic order. From 1925 to 1927, he was a district leader of Siegen of war’s Association. Politically he organized first in the active people’s Party (DNVP) . Giesler later claimed to be entered, having founded the SA in the Siegerland, and to have been active in 1924 as party speaker for the Nazi party 1922 the Nazi party. Nr 72 741. Re-entry NSDAP 01-01-1928. During the Night of the Long Knives, (see Ernst Julius Röhm)

he only narrowly missed being arrested and murdered. He served in the Poland and France campaigns. Only from August 1941 did Giesler once again take up important Party functions, at Martin Bormann’s   instigation, first becoming NSDAP Gauleiter of Westphalia-South in 1941, and then as of April 1942 Adolf Wagner‘s,

he died of a stroke, age 53, on 12-04-1944, in Bad Reichenhall, successor as acting Gauleiter of Munich-Upper Bavaria. After Ludwig Siebert’s death on 01-11-1942, age 68, he was also appointed acting Ministerpräsident of Bavaria. As the war continued, he took up more and more ministerial posts, especially after Wagner’s death. In Munich, Giesler was known for speaking out against higher education for women, provoking student walk-outs of his speeches. He was also known for the capture and defeat of the White Rose student resistance movement.

 In April 1945, he was appointed Reich Defense Commissar-South and with help from SS units brutally quelled the “Freedom Action Bavaria” (“Freiheitsaktion Bayern”) uprising under Captain Dr. Rupprecht Gerngroß in Munich. He died old age 80, on 25-02-1996, in Munich. In Adolf Hitler’s will of 29-04-1945, Giesler was made Reich Minister for the Interior. He never had the chance to assume this latest post, though. As American troops approached, Giesler was reported to be planning the murder of the surviving inmates at Dachau concentration camp in March 1945. SS Obergruppenführer, police president of Munich during Kristallnacht, Karl Eberstein 

  claimed he was ordered to ‘use my influence with the commander of Dachau’ to have 25.000 prisoners shot when the US approached. Eberstein refused. Giesler said he would poison the prisoners. Eberstein claimed he stopped Giesler by getting an order from Heinrich Himmler

(Did you know) to simply surrender the camps. Giesler then fired Eberstein on April 20, on orders of Martin Bormann, for ‘defeatism’. During this final phase of the war, Giesler ordered the execution of 16 civilians and an unborn child in the Penzberg Massacre. The Penzberg Massacre took place on 28-04-1945 in Penzberg (about 50 km south of Munich) As the collapse of Nazi Germany neared the end of World War II and the US military approached the city, local Nazi leaders set out to blow up the coal mine vital to the city under the scorched earth tactic. importance. The population revolted against this: on 28-04-1945, under the leadership of the former Social Democratic mayor Hans Rummer, the incumbent Nazi mayor was deposed. Following this, Rummer and the other leaders of this uprising were executed without trial by a unit of werewolves in order to nip the riot in the bud. The next day, the US military arrived. In total, 16 people and 1 unborn child died in the Penzberg massacre: Michael Badlehner (shot dead) Gottlieb Belohlawek (hanged) Franz Biersack (hanged) Michael Boos (shot dead) Johann Dreher (shot dead) Agathe Fleissner (hanged) Franz Xaver Fleissner ( hanged) Albert Grauvogel (hanged) Rupert Höck (shot dead) Josef Kastl (shot dead) Ludwig März (shot dead) Hans Rummer (shot dead) Paul Schwertl (shot dead) Johann Summerdinger (hanged) Johann Zenk (hanged) Therese Zenk (hanged) Sebastian Tauschinger

  would also be hanged, but the rope broke and he escaped.

Giesler was an unquestioning follower of Hitler, ruling efficiently and with almost unlimited power in the last war years in Bavaria. Giesler’s death is documented in the papers of the Catholic parish of Berchtesgaden for the 08-05-1945. The information to Giesler’s circumstances of death are contradictory and uncertain: he should have made an suicide attempt with the help of pills on 01-05-1945 along with his wife and his mother-in-law, who was unsuccessful.

The following day, in any case, Giesler shot his wife in a wooded area near the city of Hintersee. A second suicide attempt failed as he shot himself in the head, Giesler was brought village Stanggaß, near Berchtesgaden in a military hospital in the Bischofswieser, where he died a few days later. On 08-05-1945, Nazi capitulation day, Giesler had commited suicide, fearing capture by American troops. A local doctor practicing in Stanggass at that time, Dr. Gottschalk, certified Giesler’s death and he was buried in the cemetery in Berchtesgaden on 10-05- 1945. His remains were later disinterred and reburied elsewhere. Giesler was an unquestioning follower of Hitler, who ruled with ruthless efficiency and almost unlimited power in the last war years in Bavaria.

His brother Hermann fugitive from Munich with him was for killing crimes by a US-military court in the KZ Mühldorf trial in Dachau in 1947 sentenced to life imprisonment. In 1952, he was discharged prematurely. Hermann remained a Nazi until the end of his life. Paul Giesler and his wive are buried on the Alten Friedhof (Old Cemetery) of Berchtesgaden, alas their gravestone is removed, but their rests remained. On this cemetery are also buried the Chief of the Reichskanzlei, Dr. Hans Lammers and Hitler’s mentor in the early years,   Johann “Dietrich” Eckart.

Giesler was buried on 10-05-1945 in the old cemetery in Berchtesgaden. A little later, Americans desecrated his grave to establish Giesler’s identity. During the exhumation they are said to have removed the medals and decorations from the dead Gauleiter. The couple’s tombstone (Department 0, Row 3, Grave 12) was removed in the post-war period.

A namesake, German soldier Paul Giesler, born 09-11-1916 fell during the fighting in Zaltbommel, the Netherlands, on 16-11-1944, age 28 and is buried in our country on the Deutscher Soldatenfriedhof Ysselsteyn, Ysselsteyn, Venray Municipality, Limburg, in SectionTD-2-17.

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