Gerhard Klopfer

Who was Gerhard Klopfer?

Gerhard Klopfer was an official of the Nazi Party and assistant to Martin Bormann in the Office of the Party Chancellery.

Klopfer was born in Schreibersdorf, Silesia, in 1905. He studied law and economics and in 1931 became a judge in Düsseldorf, Germany. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, he joined the Nazi Party and the SA along with the Gestapo the following year. In 1935, he became a member of Rudolf Hess's staff and the SS with the honorary SS rank of Oberführer. In 1938, he became responsible for the seizing of Jewish businesses for questions about mixed marriages between Gentile and Jewish Germans and general questions about occupation of foreign states.

As State Secretary of the Parteikanzlerei, Klopfer represented Bormann, who was head of the Parteikanzlei, at the Wannsee Conference on 20 January 1942 in which the details of the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question" were formalised, policies that culminated in the Holocaust. Along with Helmuth Friedrichs Klopfer was the highest-ranking bureaucrat behind Bormann in the Chancellery.