Josef Bühler

Josef Bühler (16 February 1904 – 22 August 1948) was a state secretary and deputy governor to the Nazi Germany-controlled General Government in Kraków during World War II.

Bühler did not take up membership of the NSDAP until 1 April 1933, shortly after the Nazi rise to power.

Hans Frank was appointed Minister of Justice for Bavaria in 1933.

Bühler became a member of the Nazi Party on 1 April 1933, according to his own testimony at the Nuremberg Trials, and was appointed administrator of the Court of Munich.

In 1935 he became district chief attorney.

In 1938 Hans Frank, now Reich Minister without portfolio, put him in charge of his cabinet office.

After the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany in September 1939, Frank was appointed Governor-General for the occupied Polish territories and Bühler accompanied him to Kraków to take up the post of State Secretary of the General Government, also serving as Frank's deputy.

He was given the honorary rank of SS-Brigadeführer by Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler around this time.

He participated in the January 1942 Wannsee Conference, at which the genocidal Final Solution to the Jewish Question was planned.

Bühler was born in Bad Waldsee into a Catholic family.

His father was a baker.

After obtaining his degree in law, he received an appointment to work under Hans Frank, a legal advisor to Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party.

Bühler attended the Wannsee Conference on 20 January 1942 as the representative from the Governor General's office.

During this conference, which discussed the imposition of the 'Final Solution of the Jewish Question in the German Sphere of Influence in Europe', Bühler stated to the other conference attendees the importance of solving 'the Jewish Question in the General Government as quickly as possible'.

After the war, Bühler testified on Frank's behalf at the Nuremberg Trials.

He was later extradited to Poland and tried before the Supreme National Tribunal of Poland for crimes against humanity.

Bühler was found guilty, sentenced to death, and ordered to forfeit all of his property on 10 July 1948.

He was executed by hanging on 22 August at Montelupich Prison in Kraków.

The novel's protagonist investigates Bühler's murder in 1964, which is part of a Gestapo effort to conceal the (by then completed) Final Solution.

Bühler's death is the inciting incident in the 1992 alternate history novel Fatherland by Robert Harris.

The novel postulates a long war between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, and a cold war with the United States.

In the 2001 HBO film Conspiracy, which portrayed the Wannsee Conference, Bühler was played by the British actor Ben Daniels.