Gerhard Klopfer Represented the Brown Eminence

NSDAP in the Third Reich was not nearly as powerful as Bolshevist Party in the USSR; however, it was a power to be reckoned with. Especially in “Jewish matters”.

In January of 1942, Adolf Hitler (officially Der F;hrer of NSDAP) was so preoccupied with military matters as Commander-in-Chief of Wehrmacht that the Party was de-facto under control of Chief of Party Chancellery Martin Bormann (nicknamed “Brown Eminence” because he was, indeed, “grey eminence” in German government system).

Being a fanatical anti-Semite, Bormann wanted to be a part of the “Final Solution” and was powerful enough… so Heydrich had no other choice but to invite to Wannsee Conference the representative of “Brown Eminence”.

Enter Gerhard Klopfer, the State Secretary in the Party Chancellery, Martin Bormann’s chief deputy, and (very conveniently for Heydrich), SS-Gruppenf;hrer (.

In the otherwise excellent BBC movie “Conspiracy” (2001) Klopfer is portrayed as seriously obese and displaying a lack of tact foul enough to make even the other Nazis uncomfortable, yet in real life Gerhard Klopfer was slim-built, and his co-workers remembered him as a calm and usually very polite man.

He studied law and economics at the University of Breslau (today, the University of Wroc;aw) and the University of Jena. In 1929, he received his doctorate of law degree and in 1931 started working as a junior judge at D;sseldorf.

He joined NSDAP on April 1, 1933 (which made him a “March violet”) and two years later joined the staff of Deputy F;hrer Rudolf Hess at the Party headquarters in Munich. Prior to that appointment, he worked for Gestapo, so, not surprisingly, he headed the department overseeing the Reich Interior Ministry. In 1938, he became responsible for the seizing of Jewish businesses in the Aryanization process.

By April 1941, he had advanced to the rank of Ministerialdirektor and headed Department III that oversaw coordination between the Party and all state agencies. He became a close confidant of Martin Bormann who, on 12 May 1941, became head of the Party Chancellery, the successor organization to Hess’ office so he was a natural choice for representing Bormann at Wannsee Conference.

After the war, he was arrested and made to testify at the Ministries Trial in Nuremberg in 1948. He was charged with war crimes but denied all knowledge of the Holocaust. The case against him was dropped for lack of evidence. When he died peacefully in 1987 in Ulm from natural causes, Klopfer was the last surviving attendee of the Wannsee Conference.