Friedrich Mußgay (3 January 1892 – 3 September 1946) was an ambitious regional administrator who found his way into the police service. Between 1917 and 1933 he achieved rapid promotion. After 1933, through a combination of ability, ambition, and a certain amount of good luck, he benefitted from a succession of reconfigurations of homeland security to occupy a series of senior positions, serving as a "Kriminalrat" (Senior Officer of the Criminal Police department) from 1935, Officer in Charge of the Stuttgart State Police Headquarters complex from 1939 and an Obersturmbannführer from 1943. Through most of his police career, which lasted from 1917 until 1945, he was based in Stuttgart which was home city, but after the return of war in 1939 there were also postings abroad, notably, in 1938, to occupied Czechoslovakia. During the 1940s he was implicated in a range of Holocaust actions, but his suicide in 1946 ensured that the nature and extent of his involvement could never be properly presented and assessed before a court.
Commentators and, subsequently, historians have found Mußgay's character and contribution hard to pin down. According to the historian Friedemann Rincke, some saw his as a Rumpelstiltskin figure, while for others he was simply a "quiet professional". Among senior police officers, he was unusual in having left it until the last possible moment to join "the party", becoming a member only three months after the Hitler government took power. Nevertheless, as far as the new régime was concerned, there could be no doubt that he performed his duties efficiently and effectively, according to Sarah Stewart, another commentator-historian.
Life Provenance and early years Paul Friedrich Mußgay was born into humble circumstances at Ludwigsburg, a prosperous mid-sized town set in the hills north of Stuttgart. Georg Friedrich Mußgay (1847–1919), his father, was employed as a caretaker. His paternal grandfather, like his father before him, had been a rural butcher. His mother, born Karoline Bay, also came from a family of countryfolk. Mußgay was born a Protestant, though records indicate that he resigned his church membership on 22 August 1941.
After attending lower and middle schools (which was compulsory) he moved on to attend senior school. After that he undertook military service for a year during 1913 as a "one-year volunteer", before progressing to an administrative traineeship for a career in regional government service. The traineeship lasted for five years, between 1913 and 1917, but it did not pass uninterrupted. It started with work as a local government administrative assistant, posted successively to Esslingen, Ellwangen and Mergentheim between July 1913 and April 1914. He also attended courses at the Administration College (" Verwaltungsfachschule") at which he made the acquaintance of his near contemporary Robert Scholl, who by a savage twist of irony became father to Hans and Sophie Scholl, known to historians of the period as high-profile resistance activists during the later Hitler years. This would not be the last time Mußgay and Scholl came across each other.
War broke out in July 1914. Between August 1914 and December 1918 Mußgay served in the army. He concluded his army career as a First Lieutenant in the army reserve, having won the Iron Cross — both 2nd Class and 1st Class, along with various other lesser marks of commendation.
Police service Although it appears probably that the focus of his activity continued to focus on his military service until the war ended, in May 1917 Mußgay's five-year stint as an administrative trainee came to an end: he was appointed a member of the police service, to be based at police headquarters in Stuttgart. His activities during the turbulent immediate aftermath of the war are unknown, but on 26 August 1920 he was appointed to a position in the police service as "Verwaltungssekretär" (administrative secretary) with retrospective effect, the appointment being formally backdated to April 1920. Just a year later he was promoted to the position of "police commissar".
During 1923 a number of responsibilities and duties that had traditionally been undertaken by the Regional Police Service were reassigned, becoming the direct responsibility of the Stuttgart police service. A parallel development at the city's main police station was the establishment of a Political Police department. Both these changes were helpful in the progression of Mußgay's career, and a succession of promotions followed. In the Autumn/Fall of 1923 he became a "Kriminaloberinspektor" (loosely, "senior criminal officer"). Almost at once he involved himself in the activities of the Political Police department. By 1925 he was heading up two sub-departments within it: "Department N" ("Police Intelligence Service") and "Department V" ("Meetings and Associations"). The focus of his work now was to confront "enemies of the constitution". For Mußgay this became an almost personal crusade against the political left. Colleagues took to identifying him as the "Kommunistenjäger" ("communist catcher").
Régime change The early 1930s were characterised by intensifying polarisation which spilled over onto the streets and led, in Germany, to parliamentary deadlock followed, in January 1933, by régime change and a rapid switch from democracy to one-party dictatorship. In this age of political renewal, Mußgay's reputation within and beyond the police service as a "communist catcher" was a career bonus. There is no indication that he had, up to this point, involved himself directly in party politics. On 1 April 1933, however, his membership came through of the "Schutzstaffel" (SS), the paramilitary wing of the now dominant National Socialist Party (NSDAP). Exactly a month after that he became a member of the NSDAP itself. That same month he made the switch to the "Württemberg Political Police" department in the newly reconstituted Regional Police Service (still based in the centre of Stuttgart, albeit in a different building).
Further promotions followed. He continued to head up the Police Intelligence department under the new organisational structure, though events over the next decade suggest that the responsibilities in question were not always clearly delineated. The criminal side of his growing palette of responsibilities received a boost in November 1935 when he was appointed to the post of "Kriminalrat". In 1937 he became head of the Gestapo Executive Department II. It is thought that the focus of his duties remained, as before, surveillance of government opponents, supervision and administering the gathering of reports along with involvement in the interrogation of those arrested, employing the conventional tactics of threats and other coercive measures.
Another round of organisational restructuring was undertaken after 1935, bringing policing in Württemberg into closer alignment with government thinking. Police officers involved in security service operations were taken into the SS, within which they were assigned to the "SD" (security service). Accordingly, Mußgay's name appears on the SS rankings list for 1938. He is classified as an "SS-Hauptsturmführer", assigned to the Stuttgart main office of the "SD" section.
Sudetenland During the first half of the nineteenth century nationalist elements in Germany took to calling the border region of what became Czechoslovakia as the Sudetenland. The entire region was ethnically diverse before the ethnic cleansing of 1945, and though sources differ over precise ethnic mix in the affected territories, it was widely accepted that in terms of language and self-defined ethnicity, the population of the Sudetenland was predominantly German. Between March 1938 and March 1939 the German government used this as a justification for the progressive annexation not just of the Sudetenland, but of virtually the whole of what had been Czechoslovakia. Although German-speakers from the regions might welcome the development, most Czechoslovaks did not. The occupation of Czechoslovakia was costly both to the occupiers and to the occupied in human terms and in terms of other resources. Friedrich Mußgay was one of those sent to Brünn (as the city was known to German speakers before 1945) to help, probably during 1938. Between March 1939 and July 1939, still based in Brünn, he was a divisional chief with the Gestapo in the region. Sources are imprecise on his activities in Czechoslovakia, but it appears that during the latter part of 1938 Mußgay was involved in setting up the Gestapo organisation in Brünn, presumably as part of a larger "Einsatzkommando" ("Gestapo task force"), and probably in some sort of a leadership role. In December 1939 he received a medal for his contributions. Between 1939 and 1941 Mußgay was probably serving at least for part of the time, as a senior Gestapo officer, helping to establish an effective presence for the German security services in occupied western Poland and eastern France. No further details are available.
Stuttgart police chief Till 2 May 1940 SS-Sturmbannführer Dr Rudolf Erwin Lange (1910–1945) served as Deputy Chief of Police for Stuttgart. He was then permanently seconded to Berlin. Friedrich Mußgay, by then aged 48, took over his responsibilities. Under peace time circumstances Mußgay might have been considered a little old for such a promotion, but he was evidently regarded as politically reliable and competent. Colleagues half a generation younger who might, under more normal circumstances, have been promoted ahead of him were already away from home, having volunteered for army service. At this time the Stuttgart police chief was SS-Sturmbannführer Dr.Joachim Boës (1899–1941). Boës was drafted into the army in June 1941 and died in Bucharest just over a month later. Mußgay took over as Gestapo chief, and in effect chief of police for Stuttgart and the region administered from it. He resigned his church membership at the same time. He was confirmed in office in January 1942, and remained in post as Stuttgart's chief of police until 20 April 1945, just before the war ended. With Mußgay in charge the organisational structure of Stuttgart's policing and security administration quickly came to reflect closely the principles of the "Reichssicherheitshauptamt" (loosely, "National Security Main Office"), which under the direction of Heinrich Himmler had come to supplant the existing structures since its formation in 1939.
Executions of forced labourers