Герхард Клопфер: Нацистік шенеунік және Холокостқа қатысы бар тұлға

German Nazi Party official

Gerhard Klopfer (18 February 1905 – 29 January 1987) was a lawyer and a senior official in the Nazi Party who, as the State Secretary in the Party Chancellery, was Martin Bormann's chief deputy. He was also an SS Gruppenführer. He participated in the Wannsee Conference that drew up plans for the implementation of the Final Solution to the Jewish Question. He subsequently denied all knowledge of the Holocaust and never was prosecuted.

Klopfer was born the son of a farmer at Schreibersdorf (today, Pisarzowice) in the Prussian Province of Silesia. He attended the local Gymnasium and received his Abitur in 1923. He studied law and economics at the University of Breslau (today, the University of Wrocław) and the University of Jena. After passing his first state legal examination in 1927, he wrote his doctoral dissertation in 1929, received his doctorate of law degree and completed his legal clerkship in Breslau. In 1931, he passed his second state legal examination in Berlin and started working as a junior judge at Düsseldorf.

When the Nazis came to power in 1933, he joined the Nazi Party on 1 April (membership number 1,706,842) and the Party's paramilitary unit, the Sturmabteilung (SA), shortly afterward. On 1 November 1933, he was named as a state prosecutor in Düsseldorf and, on 1 December, he became a Referent (consultant) in the Prussian Ministry of Agriculture, Land and Forests under Walther Darré. He was promoted to Regierungsrat (Government Councilor) in August 1934 and, in December, he joined the Gestapo (Secret State Police). He also became a member of Hans Frank's Academy for German Law and served on its Police Law Committee. Klopfer represented Bormann at the Wannsee Conference on 20 January 1942, in which the details of the Final Solution of the Jewish Question were formalised, policies that culminated in the Holocaust. Klopfer was also responsible as signatory for a final call to arms, including the under aged and the elderly from 16 to 60 years of age, to serve in the Volkssturm, the Nazi Party militia, during the final months of the Second World War.

As the Red Army closed in on Berlin in April 1945, Klopfer fled west from the city. He went into hiding under an assumed name but, on March 1, 1946, he was discovered, arrested and interned in Munich by the Counterintelligence Corps. He testified as a witness at the Ministries Trial in Nuremberg in 1948. He himself was charged with war crimes but denied all knowledge of the Holocaust. The case against him was dropped for lack of evidence and because it was deemed he did not have enough power to have influenced the Nazi policy on the Holocaust. After his release, Klopfer underwent a denazification process by a German tribunal in March 1949 and was classified as a "minor offender" (category III), receiving a 2000 Reichsmark fine and three years probation. He found work as a carpenter until becoming a tax advisor in the city of Ulm in 1952 and was readmitted to the practice of law in 1956. Another investigation into Klopfer's participation in the Wannsee Conference that was initiated by the Ulm public prosecutor's office in September 1960 was closed on 29 January 1962 on the basis that "there was no way the accused could have prevented or obstructed the implementation of the mass murder program". When he died in 1987, Klopfer was the last surviving attendee of the Wannsee Conference. When he died, his family published a death notice that celebrated "a fulfilled life that was to the benefit of all those who came under his sphere of influence". This caused a public outcry and was denounced by many as an insult to all victims of the Nazi regime.

Klopfer was portrayed by de in the German film Die Wannseekonferenz (1984), by Ian McNeice in the BBC/HBO film Conspiracy (2001) and by Fabian Busch in the German film Die Wannseekonferenz (2022).