Günther Altenburg

Günther Altenburg (5 June 1894 – 23 October 1984) was a Nazi German diplomat and civil official.

Günther Altenburg
Altenburg after being arrested for war crimes in 1945
Reich plenipotentiary for Greece
De facto co-head of state of the Hellenic State
In office
April 28, 1941 – November 3, 1943
Serving with Pellegrino Ghigi (Italian plenipotentiary)
Prime MinisterGeorgios Tsolakoglou (1941–1942)
Konstantinos Logothetopoulos (1942–1943)
Ioannis Rallis (1943)
Preceded byVacant
Succeeded byHermann Neubacher
Reich plenipotentiary for Serbia
In office
April, 1941 – April 28, 1941
Preceded byPosition established
Succeeded byPosition abolished
Helmuth Förster (as military commander)
Personal details
Born5 June 1894
Königsberg, East Prussia, German Empire
Died23 October 1984 (aged 90)
Bonn, North Rhine-Westphalia, West Germany
Political partyNSDAP

His first diplomatic assignments took him to postings at Rome, Vienna and Bucharest, and he remained involved with southeastern Europe throughout his career. In 1934, he was serving in Vienna during the failed July Putsch, and probably involved in its preparation. Thereafter he was recalled to Berlin, where he worked in the section dealing with Austria and Czechoslovakia.

Altenburg joined the Nazi Party in 1935, and was given a position in the secretariat of Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. After the invasion of Yugoslavia in April 1941, he was initially slated to become plenipotentiary for Serbia, but on 28 April 1941 he was named Reich plenipotentiary for Greece.[1][2] As the highest-ranking German civil official in occupied Greece, Altenburg functioned as the overseer of the Greek puppet government along with his Italian counterpart Pellegrino Ghigi, and was directly involved in the deportation of the Jewish population of Thessaloniki in spring 1943.[3] He was removed from his post on 3 November 1943, after the Italian capitulation and the complete occupation of Greece by the Germans, which led to a complete restructuring of the German administration under the new Military Governor of Greece, Alexander Löhr.

After the war, he testified at the Nuremberg trials, and served as the secretary general of the Deutsche Gruppe der Internationalen Handelskammer ("German Group of the International Chamber of Commerce") industrial lobby.

References
  1. Papastratis, Procopis (March 1984). British Policy Towards Greece During the Second World War 1941-1944. Cambridge University Press. p. 113. ISBN 978-0-521-24342-1.
  2. Kroener, Bernhard R. (1990). Germany and the Second World War. Clarendon Press. p. 43. ISBN 978-0-19-820873-0.
  3. Apostolou, A. (1 February 2000). ""The Exception of Salonika": Bystanders and collaborators in Northern Greece". Holocaust and Genocide Studies. 14 (2): 165–196. doi:10.1093/hgs/14.2.165. ISSN 8756-6583.


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