Artur Axmann (18 February 1913 – 24 October 1996) was the GermanNazi national leader (Reichsjugendführer) of the Hitler Youth (Hitlerjugend) from 1940 to 1945, when the war ended. He was the last living Nazi with a rank equivalent to Reichsleiter.
Early life and career
Axmann was born in Hagen, Westphalia, the son of an insurance clerk.[1] In 1916, his family moved to Berlin-Wedding, where his father died two years later. The young Axmann was a good student and received a scholarship to attend secondary school. He joined the Hitler Youth in November 1928 after he had heard Nazi GauleiterJoseph Goebbels speak. Axmann became leader of the local cell in the Wedding district.[2]
In September 1931, Axmann joined the Nazi Party and the next year he was called to the NSDAP Reichsjugendführung[1] to carry out a reorganisation of Hitler Youth factory and vocational school cells. After the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, he rose to a regional leader and became Chief of the Social Office of the Reich Youth Leadership.[2]
Axmann directed the Hitler Youth in state vocational training and succeeded in raising the status of Hitler Youth agricultural work. He was also a member of Hans Frank's Academy for German Law and the chairman of its Committee on Youth Law.[3] In November 1934, he was appointed Hitler Youth leader of Berlin and from 1936, presided at the annual Reichsberufswettkampf competitions. On 30 January 1939 he was awarded the Golden Party Badge. On 1 May 1940, he was appointed deputy to Nazi ReichsjugendführerBaldur von Schirach, whom he succeeded three months later on 8 August 1940.[2] In October 1941, Axmann became a member of the Reichstag from electoral constituency 1, East Prussia.
In early 1943, Axmann proposed the formation of the 12th SS Panzer Division Hitlerjugend to Heinrich Himmler, with servicemen drawn from the Hitler Youth.[4] Hitler approved the plan for the combat division to be made up of Hitler Youth members born in 1926, and recruitment and training began.[4] In the last weeks of the war in Europe, Axmann commanded units of the Hitler Youth, which had been incorporated into the Home Guard (Volkssturm). His units consisted mostly of children and adolescents and fought in the Battle of Seelow Heights and the Battle in Berlin.[2]
Berlin, 1945
During Hitler's last days in Berlin, Axmann was among those present in the Führerbunker.[1] Meanwhile, it was announced in the German press that Axmann had been awarded the German Order, the highest decoration that the Nazi Party could bestow on an individual for his services to the Reich.[5] He and one other recipient, Konstantin Hierl, were the only holders of the award to survive the war and its consequences. All other recipients were either awarded it posthumously or were killed during the war or its aftermath.[5]
On 30 April 1945, just a few hours before committing suicide, Hitler signed the order to allow a breakout. According to a report made to his Soviet captors by GruppenführerHans Rattenhuber, the head of Hitler's RSD bodyguard, Axmann took the Walther PP pistol that had been removed from Hitler's sitting room in the Führerbunker by Heinz Linge, Hitler's valet, which Hitler had used to commit suicide and said that he would "hide it for better times".[6]
Leaving the rest of their group, Bormann, Stumpfegger, and Axmann walked along railway tracks to Lehrter railway station. Bormann and Stumpfegger followed the railway tracks towards Stettiner station. Axmann decided to go in the opposite direction of his two companions.[9] When he encountered a Red Army patrol, Axmann doubled back. He saw two bodies, which he later identified as Bormann and Stumpfegger, on the Invalidenstraße bridge near the railway switching yard (Lehrter Bahnhof), the moonlight clearly illuminating their faces.[9][10] He did not have time to check the bodies thoroughly and so he did not know how they died.[11] His statements were confirmed by the discovery of Bormann's and Stumpfegger's remains in 1972.[12]
Post-war
Interrogation of Axmann in Nuremberg, 16 October 1947
Axmann avoided capture by Soviet troops[13] and lived under the alias of "Erich Siewert" for several months. In December 1945, Axmann was arrested in Lübeck when a Nazi underground movement, which he had been organising, was uncovered by a US Army counterintelligence operation.[13]
Axmann uniquely saw blood dripping from both of Hitler's temples; he told US officials that he interpreted this as secondary damage from a gunshot through the mouth, due to the mouth hanging loosely.[14] Axmann stood by this interpretation in his 1955 testimony, but court experts pointed out that the relevant caliber, 7.65 mm, travels under the velocity able to produce such a hydrodynamic expulsion.[15] The two other key witnesses to survive the war were Linge and Günsche. Linge recalled only one temple wound–usually as being on Hitler's right side. Günsche reportedly told the Soviets that he did not see the wound himself, but in his 1956 testimony and later interviews stated that he also saw an entry wound to the right temple.[16][17][18][19][20][21] In 1995, German historian Anton Joachimsthaler theorized that after Hitler shot himself, the bullet passed through one temple and became lodged inside the other, rupturing in a hematoma that looked like the exit wound described by "several witnesses", although Axmann's version is evidently singular.[22] Joachimsthaler cites a 1925 German study concluding that, based upon 47 cases of 7.65-mm gunshots to living bodies, it is not uncommon for a bullet to become lodged or shatter within; he does not mention that the two 7.65-mm shots fired through the temples at contact range both resulted in an exit.[23][24]
Axmann asserted that Hitler's corpse was never identified because the gunshot destroyed his dental work.[14] Similarly, SS-Rottenführer Harry Mengershausen claimed that Hitler's jawbones would have been broken due to the gunshot's effect on air pressure.[25] For the first two decades after the war, Western historians generally regarded Hitler's mandible as being wholly recovered by the Soviets, as opposed to only a fragment with teeth.[26][27] These dental remains were novelly detailed in a 1968 Soviet book[28] which in turn supported the Western conclusion that only the dental remains of Hitler and Eva Braun were found intact.[29]
In May 1949, a Nurembergdenazification court sentenced Axmann to a prison sentence of three years and three months as a "major offender".[13] He was not found guilty of war crimes.[13]
On 19 August 1958, a West Berlin court fined the former Hitler Youth leader 35,000 marks (approximately £3,000 or US$8,300, equivalent to €87,937 in 2021), about half the value of his property in Berlin. The court found him guilty of indoctrinating German youth with National Socialism until the end of the war in Europe but concluded that he was not guilty of war crimes.[13]
After his release from custody, Axmann worked as a businessman with varying success. From 1971 he left Germany for a number of years and lived on the Spanish island of Gran Canaria.[13] Axmann returned to Berlin in 1976, where he died on 24 October 1996, aged 83. His cause of death and details of his surviving family members were not disclosed.[30]
Klee, Ernst (2007). Das Personenlexikon zum Dritten Reich. Wer war was vor und nach 1945. Frankfurt-am-Main: Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag. ISBN978-3-596-16048-8.
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