Dhe former Baden-Württemberg Prime Minister Hans Filbinger (CDU) apparently submitted an application for membership in the NSDAP shortly after Hitler assumed power in the summer of 1933. This was only not approved because of a freeze on admission. In the same year, Filbinger was also a member of the paramilitary NSDAP combat unit, the “Sturmabteilung” (SA).
Experts from the Stuttgart State Archive came to this conclusion after evaluating a previously untapped inventory of files. The file contains Filbinger’s study books and his registration for the first legal state examination in 1936. The “Badische Zeitung” was the first to evaluate the 98-page bundle of files.
Filbinger, who died in April 2007, had claimed during his lifetime that he had only joined the NSDAP in 1937 because otherwise it would not have been possible to advance professionally under the dictatorship. He had declared his SA membership with the transfer of the “Wehrsportverbund der Freiburg University” to the SA.
Hans Filbinger’s application for admission to the NSDAP
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Image: ddp
In his 1987 autobiography, Die blasphemous generation, Filbinger justified his NSDAP membership by denouncing a “Gaugruppenleiter” who described him as “politically unreliable”. “You had to do the required mandatory exercises to keep going,” Filbinger wrote. Consequently, in 1937 he applied for admission to the NSDAP.
The deputy director of the main state archive in Stuttgart, Albrecht Ernst, said that Filbinger’s behavior could also have been an expression of opportunism because he had hoped for advantages in terms of financing his studies. From the second semester on he received financial support for his studies. Filbinger was Prime Minister of Baden-Württemberg from 1966. In 1978 he resigned for having participated in several death sentences of soldiers as a naval judge, which he had denied.
