The Gau Düsseldorf was an administrative division of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945 in the Düsseldorf region of the Prussian Rhine Province. Before that, from 1930 to 1933, it was the regional subdivision of the Nazi Party in that area.
History Establishment and government
The Nazi Gau (plural Gaue) system was originally established in a party conference on 22 May 1926, in order to improve administration of the party structure. From 1933 onward, after the Nazi seizure of power, the Gaue increasingly replaced the German states as administrative subdivisions in Germany. The region had originally belonged to the Gau Ruhr, initially led by Joseph Goebbels, became part of the Gau Westphalia in 1928 before becoming its own Gau in August 1930.
At the head of each Gau stood a Gauleiter, a position which became increasingly more powerful, especially after the outbreak of the Second World War, with little interference from above. Local Gauleiters often held government positions as well as party ones and were in charge of, among other things, propaganda and surveillance and, from September 1944 onward, the Volkssturm and the defense of the Gau.
Interwar period The position of Gauleiter in Düsseldorf was held by Friedrich Karl Florian throughout the history of the Gau from 1930 to 1945.
On 10 November 1938, Florian played an active part in the Kristallnacht pogrom in Düsseldorf, leading SA and Hitler Youth in attacking the home of the Regierungspräsident Carl Christian Schmid, whose wife was Jewish. In the city-wide attacks on Jewish homes and businesses, five persons were killed and hundreds were injured or left homeless.
World War II
On 16 November 1942, Florian was named Reich Defense Commissioner for his Gau and in October 1944 he was made head of the Düsseldorf Volkssturm contingent.
Throughout the war, the Gau's capital Düsseldorf was heavily destroyed by allied aerial bombardment. The most severe attack occurred on 12 June 1943, when a firestorm was ignited through targeted bombing by the British Royal Air Force, largely destroying the historical city center, downtown, and other adjacent neighborhoods.
At the end of February 1945, the allies invaded the Gau, with Schwalmtal and Jüchen, in the south of the Gau, being among the first settlements occupied. In early March, the allies occupied all the Gau's territories of west of the Rhine, though the river served as a natural defensive boundary and stalled further allied advance into the Gau for several weeks. After the allies secured a new bridgehead in the Battle of Remagen (7–25 March 1945), further advance became possible.
On 23 March 1945, Florian and two other Gauleiters from the industrial Ruhr area (Albert Hoffmann and Fritz Schlessmann) met with Reichsminister of Armaments and War Production Albert Speer. Speer tried to convince them to ignore Adolf Hitler’s Nero Decree mandating a scorched earth policy ahead of the Allied armies’ advance. A rabid Nazi, Florian alone argued in favor of the policy. He read aloud a proclamation he intended to issue ordering the evacuation of the population of Düsseldorf and setting fire to all buildings, leaving the Allies a burned-out, deserted city. However, in the end, he did not issue the proclamation and was unable to implement these drastic actions before the Allies captured the city.
The German-held territory inside the Gau would become surrounded by the allies on 1 April and form the Ruhr pocket. Initially encompassing areas from not only Gau Düsseldorf but also Gau Cologne-Aachen, Gau Westphalia-South, Gau Westphalia-North, and Gau Essen, the Ruhr pocket underwent a significant reduction over the next weeks due to the allied advance. Eventually, by 15 April, the pocket had contracted to include only Gau Düsseldorf. On 18 April 1945, Düsseldorf, the Gau's capital, was taken with the help of a local anti-Nazi resistance group led by which launched Aktion Rheinland, and the last resistance in the pocket was finally eliminated that same day.
A timeline of the allied advance is listed below. +Date of captureLocationReference28 February 1945SchwalmtalHans Kaiser: Vom Rathaus aus den GIs entgegen. In: Rheinische Post (Lokalteil Viersen), 21. Februar 2015, Seite C6. Ihr Vormarsch war Teil der Operation Grenade.28 February 1945Jüchen28 February to early March 1945Grevenbroich1 March 1945Kaldenkirchen1 March 1945Mönchengladbach1 March 1945Brüggen1 March 1945Viersen1 March 19451 March 1945AnrathDie letzten Kämpfe in der RegionU.S. Library of Congress March 1, 1945: HQ Twelfth Army Group situation map1 March 1945Kaarst2 March 1945Kempen2 March 1945Grefrath2 March 1945Neuss2 March 1945Krefeld3 March 1945Rommerskirchen5 March 1945Dormagen14 April 1945Leverkusen14 April 1945Wermelskirchen15-16 April 1945Wuppertal16 April 1945Mettmann16 April 1945Langenberg16 April 1945Neviges16-17 April 1945Solingen17 April 1945Heiligenhaus17 April 1945Velbert17 April 1945Ratingen18 April 1945Düsseldorf
Aftermath
Geography and demographics The Gau had a size of 2,700 km2 (2,741 sq mi) and a population of 2,200,000, which placed it in mid-table for size and population in the list of Gaue.
References
Sources
External links Illustrated list of Gauleiter