SS-Oberführer Ernst Boepple (30 November 1887 – 15 December 1950) was a Nazi official and SS officer, serving as deputy to Josef Bühler in occupied Poland during World War II and the Holocaust, who was executed for war crimes.

Life

Boepple earned his Abitur in 1905 at the Gymnasium in Reutlingen. Then he studied languages and history at several universities: University of Tübingen, University of Paris, University of Oxford, and the University of London and earned his PhD in 1915. —with the doctoral thesis: Frederick the Great's Relation to Württemberg. He fought in the First World War in the infantry and left the German Army with the rank of first lieutenant (Oberleutnant) in 1919.

Director of Nazi publishing enterprise

Boepple became a co-worker of the publisher Julius Friedrich Lehmann and was one of the founders of the German Workers' Party (DAP). In 1919 he took over the Deutsche Volksverlag publishing house, which had been established by Lehmann. There he published Anton Drexler's My Political Awakening. The Deutsche Volksverlag published a large section of the early formative Nazi literature including: In November 1923 Ernst Boepple took part in the Beer Hall Putsch.

World War II

When Hans Schemm died after an aircraft crash, Boepple became the Bavarian Minister for Culture until the invasion of Poland in 1939. In 1940 he again served in the military. On 1 September 1941 he was appointed the State Secretary of the General Government in occupied Poland, serving as deputy to Deputy Governor Josef Bühler. Boepple was deeply implicated in the Final Solution as the deputy to Bühler and also held rank in the SS, being an SS-Oberführer (senior colonel). Several months after Germany's surrender, Boepple was arrested by U.S. soldiers in Bavaria. He was extradited to Poland in 1947, where he was sentenced to death by a Polish court on 14 December 1949. Boepple was hanged on 15 December 1950.

Publications