Friedrich Mußgay

Friedrich Mußgay (3 January 1892 – 3 September 1946) was an ambitious regional administrator who found his way into the police service. Between 1917 and 1933 he achieved rapid promotion. After 1933, through a combination of ability, ambition, and a certain amount of good luck, he benefitted from a succession of reconfigurations of homeland security to occupy a series of senior positions, serving as a "Kriminalrat" (Senior Officer of the Criminal Police department) from 1935, Officer in Charge of the Stuttgart State Police Headquarters complex from 1939 and an Obersturmbannführer from 1943. Through most of his police career, which lasted from 1917 until 1945, he was based in Stuttgart which was home city, but after the return of war in 1939 there were also postings abroad, notably, in 1938, to occupied Czechoslovakia. During the 1940s he was implicated in a range of Holocaust actions, but his suicide in 1946 ensured that the nature and extent of his involvement could never be properly presented and assessed before a court.

Commentators and, subsequently, historians have found Mußgay's character and contribution hard to pin down. According to the historian Friedemann Rincke, some saw his as a Rumpelstiltskin figure, while for others he was simply a "quiet professional". Among senior police officers, he was unusual in having left it until the last possible moment to join "the party", becoming a member only three months after the Hitler government took power. Nevertheless, as far as the new régime was concerned, there could be no doubt that he performed his duties efficiently and effectively, according to Sarah Stewart, another commentator-historian. Provided by Wikipedia