Walther Funk (18 August 1890 – 31 May 1960) was a German economist and Nazi official who served as Reich Minister for Economic Affairs (1938–1945) and president of Reichsbank (1939–1945). During his incumbency, he oversaw the mobilization of the German economy for rearmament and arrangement of forced labor in concentration camps. After the war he was tried and convicted as a major war criminal by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. Sentenced to life in prison, he remained incarcerated until he was released on health grounds in 1957. He died three years later.
Early life
Funk was born into a merchant family in 1890 in Danzkehmen (present-day Sosnowka in the Nesterovsky District of the Russian Kaliningrad Oblast) near Trakehnen in East Prussia. He was the only one of the Nuremberg defendants who was born in the former eastern territories of Germany. He was the son of Wiesenbaumeister Walther Funk the elder and his wife Sophie (née Urbschat). He studied law, economics, and philosophy at the University of Berlin and the University of Leipzig. In World War I, he joined the infantry, but was wounded and subsequently discharged as medically unfit for service in 1916. Following the end of the war, he worked as a journalist, and in 1924 he became the editor of the centre-right financial newspaper the Berliner Börsenzeitung. In 1920, Funk married Luise Schmidt-Sieben.
Political life
Funk, who was a nationalist and anti-Marxist, resigned from the newspaper in the summer of 1931 and joined the Nazi Party, becoming close to Gregor Strasser, who arranged his first meeting with Adolf Hitler. Partially because of his interest in economic policy, he was elected a Reichstag deputy in July 1932, and within the party, he was made chairman of the Committee on Economic Policy in December 1932, a post that he did not hold for long. After the Nazi Party came to power, he stepped down from his Reichstag position and was made Reich Chief Press Officer, a post which involved censorship of anything deemed critical of Nazi policies. His boss was Joseph Goebbels.
Nazi Germany
In March 1933, Funk was appointed as a State Secretary (Staatssekretär) at the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda (Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda). In the summer of 1936 when Hitler commissioned Albert Speer for the rebuilding of central Berlin, it was Funk who proposed his new title of "Inspector-General of Buildings for the Renovation of the Reich Capital".
On 5 February 1938, Funk became General Plenipotentiary for Economics (Generalbevollmächtigter für die Wirtschaft), as well as Reichsminister of Economics (Reichswirtschaftsminister) permanently replacing Hjalmar Schacht, who had resigned on 26 November 1937. Funk also succeeded Schacht as Prussian Minister of Economics and Labor (Prußischer Minister für Wirtschaft und Arbeit) and as an ex officio member of the Prussian State Council. He would hold all these posts until the fall of the Nazi regime. Schacht had been engaged in a power struggle with Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, who wanted to tie the ministry more closely to his Four Year Plan Office and who briefly served as Schacht's immediate successor between November 1937 and January 1938.
Between April 1938 and March 1939 Funk was also a Director of the Swiss-based multi-national Bank of International Settlements, and in January 1939, Hitler appointed Funk as President of the Reichsbank. Funk recorded that by 1938 the German state had confiscated Jewish property worth two million marks, using decrees from Hitler and other top Nazis to force German Jews to leave their property and assets to the State if they emigrated, such as the Reich Flight Tax.