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.
Life
Provenance and early years
Paul Friedrich Mußgay was born into humble circumstances at Ludwigsburg, a prosperous mid-sized town set in the hills north of Stuttgart. Georg Friedrich Mußgay (1847-1919), his father, was employed as a caretaker. His paternal grandfather, like his father before him, had been a rural butcher. His mother, born Karoline Bay, also came from a family of countryfolk. Mußgay was born a Protestant, though records indicate that he resigned his church membership on 22 August 1941.
After attending lower and middle schools (which was compulsory) he moved on to attend senior school. After that he undertook military service for a year during 1913 as a "one-year volunteer", before progressing to an administrative traineeship for a career in regional government service. The traineeship lasted for five years, between 1913 and 1917, but it did not pass uninterrupted. It started with work as a local government administrative assistant, posted successively to Esslingen, Ellwangen and Mergentheim between July 1913 and April 1914. He also attended courses at the Administration College (" Verwaltungsfachschule") at which he made the acquaintance of his near contemporary Robert Scholl, who by a savage twist of irony became father to Hans and Sophie Scholl, known to historians of the period as high-profile resistance activists during the later Hitler years. This would not be the last time Mußgay and Scholl came across each other.
War broke out in July 1914. Between August 1914 and December 1918 Mußgay served in the army. He concluded his army career as a First Lieutenant in the army reserve, having won the Iron Cross - both 2nd Class and 1st Class, along with various other lesser marks of commendation.
Police service
Although it appears probably that the focus of his activity continued to focus on his military service until the war ended, in May 1917 Mußgay's five-year stint as an administrative trainee came to an end: he was appointed a member of the police service, to be based at police headquarters in Stuttgart. His activities during the turbulent immediate aftermath of the war are unknown, but on 26 August 1920 he was appointed to a position in the police service as "Verwaltungssekretär" (administrative secretary) with retrospective effect, the appointment being formally backdated to April 1920. Just a year later he was promoted to the position of "police commissar".