Josef Grohé

Grohé was born in Gemünden im Hunsrück as the son of a shopkeeper.[1] He finished secondary school in 1919 and worked as a clerk in the hardware industry.[1]

Grohé was already active in anti-democratic and racist organizations as an adolescent. He joined the anti-Semitic Deutschvölkischer Schutz und Trutzbund and the Nazi Party in 1922.[1] He was co-founder of the Nazi organization in Cologne in 1922 and founder of its newspaper, the Westdeutscher Beobachter.[1] On 1 June 1931 he was appointed Gauleiter (regional party leader) of the newly formed Gau Cologne-Aachen. In April 1932 he was elected to the Prussian Staatsrat. In November 1933 he was elected to the Reichstag from electoral constituency 20, Cologne-Aachen.[1] Unlike most all other Gauleiters, Grohé did not belong to the SA or the SS; however, from 30 January 1939 he was an Obergruppenführer in the National Socialist Motor Corps (Nationalsozialistisches Kraftfahrerkorps or NSKK). On 16 November 1942, he was appointed the Reich Defense Commissioner for his Gau.[2]

On 18 July 1944, in addition to these posts, Grohé was made the Reichskommissar of the newly created civilian administration in German-occupied Belgium and Northern France.[1] From September 1944, however, the territory's liberation by the Allies had begun. In 1945, he organized the Cologne Volkssturm and ordered the demolition of five large bridges over the Rhine.[1] On 6 March 1945, he fled Cologne across the Rhine ahead of advancing US forces. On 8 April he dissolved his Gau organization and fled toward the Ore Mountains where he stayed until the end of the war before returning to western Germany.[3]

After surviving a suicide attempt, he worked as a farm laborer under an assumed name in Heringhausen and managed to evade capture until he was arrested by the British occupation authorities on 22 August 1946.[4] Grohé remained dedicated to the Nazi cause for the rest of his life and showed no remorse.[1] In 1950, he was sentenced to a four and a half years imprisonment (time served) by a court in Bielefeld for being a part of the political leadership of the Nazi party.[5] He had known of the Holocaust, but the court was not able to prove his involvement in atrocities.[5] After being released from imprisonment, he continued his professional career as a sales representative for German toy manufacturers.[5] He died on 27 December 1987 in Brück, Cologne.[5]

• Birte Klarzyk: Vom NSDAP-Gauleiter zum bundesdeutschen Biedermann: der Fall Josef Grohé. in: Jost Dülffer, Margit Szöllösi-Janze (Hg.): Schlagschatten auf das "braune Köln". Die NS-Zeit und danach (= Veröffentlichungen des Kölnischen Geschichtsvereins e. V., Bd. 49) SH-Verlag, Köln 2010, ISBN 3-89498-202-0, S. 307–326.
• Ernst Klee, Das Personen-lexikon zum Dritten Reich (Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt-am-Main, 2005), 202
• Daniel Meis: Josef Grohé (1902 - 1987) - ein politisches Leben? wvb, Berlin 2020, ISBN 978-3-96138-217-0.
• Gauleiter: The Regional Leaders Of The Nazi Party And Their Deputies, 1925-1945 (Herbert Albrecht-H. Wilhelm Huttmann)-Volume 1 by Michael D. Miller and Andreas Schulz R. James Bender Publishing, 2012.
• Helge Jonas Pösche: Josef Grohé – ein Gauleiter als Held der Familie. In: Geschichte in Köln, Bd. 58, 2011, S. 123–156.
• Horst Wallraff: Josef Grohé (1902–1987), Gauleiter der NSDAP. Portal Rheinische Geschichte des Landschaftsverband Rheinland (mit Bildern) vom 6. Mai 2011; abgerufen am 10. November 2019.
• Rolf Zerlett: Josef Grohé. In: Rheinische Lebensbilder 17 (1997), S. 247–276.

• Newspaper clippings about Josef Grohé in the 20th Century Press Archives of the ZBW