Product Code Database
Johann Heinrich "Hans" Hinkel (22 June 1901 – 8 February 1960) was a journalist, Nazi Party official and politician in Nazi Germany. He mainly worked in the Reich Chamber of Culture and the Reich Ministry of Propaganda. He was involved in executing the policy of excluding Jews from German cultural life, and headed the Ministry's film division. He was also an SS- Gruppenführer, and was imprisoned in Poland for several years after the end of the Second World War.
In September 1926, Hinkel became the business manager of Gau Hesse-Nassau in Kassel. He formally was re-approved for membership in the Party on 20 December 1926 (membership number 48,945), after the ban on it had been lifted. In 1927 he was involved in setting up the Kampfverlag publishing house with the brothers Gregor Strasser and Otto Strasser in Berlin and became an editor there. In the 1930 German federal election, he was elected as a deputy of the Reichstag from the Nazi electoral list and he would continue to serve until the fall of the Nazi regime, representing electoral constituency 3 from 1932 onward (Potsdam II, reconfigured as Berlin-East in 1936). Hans Hinkel entry in the Reichstag database. Retrieved 7 July 2023. That year he also became the press chief for Gau Berlin, working for Gauleiter Joseph Goebbels. There he became editor of the Deutsche Kultur-Wacht and, from 1930 to 1932, editor for the Berlin edition of the Völkischer Beobachter, the main Nazi Party newspaper. He was also active in the völkisch and antisemitic Militant League for German Culture, founded by Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg, and would go one to become its Organisationsleiter (Organizational Leader). Hinkel joined the Schutzstaffel in 1931 (SS number 9,148). SS Seniority List, 1 December 1937, pp.18–19, #194 Retrieved 6 July 2023.
On 8 May 1935, Goebbels appointed Hinkel as business manager of the Reich Chamber of Culture and Reichskulturwalter (Reich Cultural Administrator) in the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda and, in 1938, he became the department head of the Ministry's Department II.A., the so-called "Jewish Department". In these positions, he continued to be responsible for the displacement of Jewish Germans from the cultural sector, in the process of Aryanization. This culminated in November 1938 when Jews were banned from attending German theaters, cinemas, concerts, lectures, exhibitions and all other cultural events. In 1940, Goebbels was making plans to make Berlin Judenfrei by deporting all 62,000 Jews still living there. Hinkel was involved in this action, reporting that they had already worked out a removal plan with the police and that all could be deported within four weeks of the anticipated end of the war. Hinkel was also given responsibility as Goebbels' Sonderbeauftragter (Special Representative) for cultural personalities, in charge of keeping such individuals under observation. In this capacity, Hinkel was the driving force behind the pressure exerted on the popular theater and film actor Joachim Gottschalk to divorce his Jewish wife. Upon his refusal, she was threatened with being sent to the Theresienstadt Ghetto, and he with the end of his acting career and conscription into the Wehrmacht. This resulted in their joint suicide along with their eight-year-old son on 6 November 1941.
Meanwhile, Hinkel's career continued to advance. In 1939, Göring appointed him a member of the Prussian State Council. In the Propaganda Ministry bureaucracy, he was promoted to Ministerialdirigent in October 1940 and rose to Ministerial Director and Generalsekretär (General Secretary) of the Reich Chamber of Culture in July 1941. As the hardships of the war mounted, Goebbels sought to improve public morale by introducing more entertaining material to German radio broadcasts. In February 1942, he gave Hinkel overall responsibility for artistic and entertainment programming on German radio, to mainly consist of light orchestral music. On 20 April 1943, Hinkel attained his last SS promotion to the rank of SS- Gruppenführer. In April 1944, he took charge of the Ministry's film department and was appointed Reichsfilmintendant (National Film Superintendent). In July, he was also made Vice President of the Reich Chamber of Culture. In his new posts he was charged with continuing the politicization of the film industry and keeping up wartime production of films into the last days of the war. Hinkel also organized test screenings of films before propaganda experts, institutions, and authorities. Since antisemitic film propaganda touched on one of Nazism's core issues, these test screenings served as a way to commit the whole propaganda apparatus to a common, radical line. He also had to ensure that during the final phase of the war more than half of the members of the German film industry fulfilled their duty to serve as soldiers in the Wehrmacht or in the Volkssturm, the Nazi Party militia.
| 15 September 1935 | SS- Sturmbannführer |
| 30 December 1935 | SS- Obersturmbannführer |
| 20 April 1936 | SS- Standartenführer |
| 30 January 1937 | SS- Oberführer |
| 9 November 1940 | SS- Brigadeführer |
| 20 April 1943 | SS- Gruppenführer |
|
|
