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.
Völkisch Activist Beckerle was born in Frankfurt am Main, the son of a post office official. Beckerle was educated at the elementary school and at the Realgymnasium (the type of high school that prepares one for university in Germany) in Frankfurt from 1908 to 1921. In March 1921, he passed the Abitur (university entrance exam). From 1921 to 1927, he attended the University of Frankfurt, where he graduated with a degree in economics in 1927. While at university, he joined a fraternity, the Coburger Convent. In 1921–1922, he served in the Reichswehr as a reserve officer. As a student, he also became active in several völkisch groups on campus, joining the Viking League in 1922. On 29 August 1922, he joined the NSDAP, but dropped out shortly afterwards. Beckerle broke off his studies several times, serving in May 1925 – June 1926 as an officer candidate with the Prussian police.
Beckerle made regular trips to South America in the 1920s which he regarded as a backward continent full of backward people that might one day be colonised by Germany. Beckerle's only book was an autobiographical adventure novel set in South America whose hero was a thinly disguised version of himself. 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. 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. German immigrants to South America are depicted in the most positive terms as a people who bring order and prosperity to wherever they go. 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". Though the book was published in 1942, much of the book had been written in the 1920s during Beckerle's visits to South America. The choice of the pseudonym Edelmann ("noble person") revealed much about Beckerle's desire for social advancement. Reflecting the völkisch concept that art, politics, culture and race were all one and the same, Beckerle saw himself as a Führungspersönlichkeit (a "political leader"), a natural leader of men and an artist who was just as comfortable writing a poem as he was fighting in a street brawl.
On 1 September 1928, he rejoined the NSDAP while also joining the SA. On 1 April 1929, he became the leader of the SA detachment in Frankfurt. 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. From July 1931 to April 1932, he served as the leader of the SA group Hessen-Nassau South. On 24 April 1932, he was elected to the Landtag of Prussia as a Nazi. On 31 July 1932, he was elected to the Reichstag on the Nazi ticket from electoral constituency 19 (Hesse-Nassau) and retained this seat until the fall of the Nazi regime in May 1945.Adolf-Heinz Beckerle entry in the Reichstag Members Database
Under the Third Reich On 1 March 1933, he was promoted to the rank of Gruppenführer. From 1 July 1933 to 31 January 1942, he was in charge of the SA detachment in Hesse. On 14 September 1933, he was appointed acting police chief of Frankfurt and in February 1934 was appointed full-time police chief. Beckerle was one of the SA leaders scheduled for execution by the SS during the Night of Long Knives and only narrowly escaped execution due to the personal intervention of Adolf Hitler himself. Hitler's intervention in 1934 guaranteed Beckerle's unflinching loyalty towards der Führer that lasted for the rest of his life. On 27 February 1935, he married the actress Silke Edelmann. In 1937, he was promoted to the rank of SA-Obergruppenführer. As police chief of Frankfurt and SA leader, Beckerle played a major role in the Kristallnacht pogrom in Frankfurt, organising the burning of all the synagogues in Frankfurt.
After Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, Beckerle served as the police chief of Łódź, Poland from September 1939 to November 1939 where he was noted for his harsh treatment of the Polish, Jewish and Romany communities in Łódź. 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". Beckerle wrote about how much he hated the Orthodox Jewish men of Łódź in their long breads and "draped in dirty caftans" and the "insolent Jewish women". A leitmotiv of his report was linking the Ashkenazim (Yiddish-speaking Jews) with dirt and filth. From November 1939 – June 1940, Beckerle served in the Wehrmacht.
Minister in Sofia In January 1941, long-standing rivalries between the Auswärtiges Amt (Foreign Office) and the SS exploded with the attempted coup d'état 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. In the aftermath of the coup, the Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop made an effort to club the power of the SS to conduct a foreign policy independent of the Auswärtiges Amt. 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. The SA leader Viktor Lutze was asked by Martin Luther for a list of SA officers suitable to serve as diplomats and Beckerle was one of the names on the list. The role of the SA ambassadors was that of "quasi-Reich governors" as they aggressively supervised the internal affairs of the nations they were stationed in, making them very much unlike traditional ambassadors. The German historian Daniel Siemans wrote that it was significant that four of the five SA ambassadors had served as policemen in their careers, suggesting it was their ability to impose their will on others as police chiefs that led to them being appointed as ambassadors.
The role of the SA ambassadors were conceived of as being an essentially colonial role whose task was to impose the power the German state onto "the natives" rather than that of a traditional diplomat, whose role was to conduct relations between theoretically equal nations. 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. From the viewpoint of Berlin, southeast Europe was viewed as the ergänzungsraum ("complementary space") to the lebensraum ("living space") in Eastern Europe. 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". Because the states in the ergänzungsraum were not to be colonised, the role of these states were seen as essentially protectorates of Germany that would be allowed a nominal independence as long as they played their role in the "New Order in Europe". The nations marked out as being in Germany's lebensraum such as Poland and the Soviet Union were often described by Hitler and the other Nazi leaders as the "wild East", which like the "wild West" in the 19th century was to be conquered with the indigenous peoples displaced. By contrast, the model for the states in the ergänzungsraum were the princely states of the Raj. In just in the same way that Indian maharajahs of the Princely states were allowed a nominal independence, but the real power rested with the British "resident" stationed to monitor the maharajah, Hitler emulated this practice starting with the Protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia as the German media quite explicitly compared the relationship between the Reich Protector, Baron Neurath who provided "avuncular guidance" to President Hácha to that of a British "resident" and an Indian maharajah. 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" 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.
On 28 June 1941, he arrived in Sofia, Bulgaria as the German minister-plenipotentiary (ambassador). Beckerle was so crude and vulgar in his manners that King Boris III almost refused to allow him to present his credentials at the Vrana Palace. The king much preferred that Beckerle's predecessor, Herbert von Richthofen, stay on. 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. The Russo-Ottoman war of 1877–1878, which saw the Imperial Russian Army expel the Ottomans from Bulgaria led the Russians to be viewed as liberators in Bulgaria, and Boris was highly concerned about being forced to make an unpopular declaration of war. However, Bulgaria's biggest export was tobacco with some 80% of the tobacco harvest going to Germany by 1940, giving the Reich a powerful form of economic leverage over Bulgaria.
Beckerle saw his duty in Bulgaria to "represent National Socialism in its entirety". His overbearing, arrogant and bullying manner did not impress either the king or the Bulgarian elite in general. At least part of the reason for Beckerle's appointment in Sofia was the perception in Berlin that the anti-Semitic laws in Bulgaria, most notably the Law for Protection of the Nation passed in December 1940, were not being enforced with sufficient vigor and it was believed that his background as a tough police chief would motivate a more aggressive enforcement of the laws. Beckerle's presence did yield results as over the next 18 months a series of decrees were passed to ensure that the Law for Protection of the Nation would be enforced while the definition of Jewishness was changed from being religious to racial and a 20% surtax was applied to all Jewish businesses. During the course of the years 1940–44, the Jewish community in Bulgaria was systematically impoverished with some 95% of Bulgarian Jews living in poverty by 1942. As harvesting and refining tobacco was the biggest industry in Bulgaria and many Bulgarian Jews were involved in the tobacco business, a host of German businessmen descended upon Bulgaria looking to buy on the cheap the businesses formally owned by the Jews. As a minister-plenipotentiary, Beckerle supported the efforts of German businessmen to play a larger role in the Bulgarian economy.