Gau Düsseldorf

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.[1] 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.[2]

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.[1][3]

The position of Gauleiter in Düsseldorf was held by Friedrich Karl Florian throughout the history of the Gau from 1930 to 1945.[4][2]

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.[5]

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. [6]

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.[7]

On 17 April 1945, Dusseldorf, the Gau's capital, was taken with the help of a local anti-Nazi resistance group led by Karl August Wiedenhofen which launched Aktion Rheinland.

Florian was sentenced to six years in prison after the war because of his rank in the Nazi Party and released in 1951. He remained a convinced Nazi after the war and maintained contact to former associates from the Nazi era.[8]

In late February 1945, the allies invaded the Gau, with Schwalmtal and Jüchen 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, further advance became possible, and allies finally occupied the entire Gau in mid-April.

A timeline of the allied advance is listed below.