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Franz Oppenhoff (August 18, 1902 - March 25, 1945) was a German lawyer who was appointed Mayor of the city of Aachen by Allied forces and subsequently murdered on the order of Heinrich Himmler. ==Biography== Born in 1902, Franz Oppenhoff received a law degree from Cologne University, and worked as a lawyer until World War II. Oppenhoff was an expert on Nazi law, had been legal representative for the Bishop of Aachen, Johannes Joseph van der Velden, and had defended some cases for Jewish companies. Knowing that the Gestapo was interested in him, he had taken refuge in Eupen, across the border in Belgium, in September 1944, was taking his wife and three daughters with him. Following the occupation of Aachen after the Battle of Aachen, in October 1944, Allied officials wanted to appoint a non-Nazi to take over administration of the city. Assisted by the Bishop of Aachen, officials managed to make contact with a group of local business people, one of whom was willing to become the first German mayor under American rule. This was Franz Oppenhoff, who was then 42 years old. When Oppenhoff was sworn into office on October 31, 1944 no press photos were permitted and his name was not divulged, the reason being that he still had relatives in Nazi Germany who might be liable to reprisals from the Nazi regime. Also, earlier in October the SS newspaper, Das Schwarze Korps, had written that there would be no German administration under the occupation because any official who collaborated with the enemy could count on being dead within a month.〔Press and Information Office, The Federal Republic of Germany, ''The Bulletin'', May 12, 1970〕 In December 1944 a group of officers belonging to the US Army's Psychological Warfare Division, coordinated by historian Saul K. Padover, arrived in Aachen to assess the German population's political views and their attitude to the Nazis and the local situation. In January 1945 Padover claimed that he had discovered a "wholesale political conspiracy" in the city, centering around Oppenhoff, whose purpose was to keep the Left out. Padover reported to his superiors that the Aachen city administration "...is shrewd, strongwilled, and aggressive... Its leader is Oberbürgermeister Oppenhoff...behind Oppenhoff is the bishop of Aachen, a powerful figure with a subtlety of his own... All of these men managed to stay out of the Nazi party, most of them were directly connected with the town's leading war industries, (and Talbot )..These men are not democratically minded... They are planning the future in terms of an authoritarian highly bureaucratic state...Politically it is conceived as small-state Clericalism...". To make matters "worse", Oppenhoff and his associates had displayed what was seen as leniency in accepting ex-Nazis for jobs in the city administration.〔 Padover saw to it that his story was leaked to the press so as to create sufficient uproar in the American public, and a purge of the city administration resulted, to expel former Nazis. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Franz Oppenhoff」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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