Lutz Graf Schwerin von Krosigk

Biography

Johann Ludwig von Krosigk was born in 1887 at Rathmannsdorf in Anhalt, into an old untitled noble family; in 1925 he was adopted by a relative of his mother's family and took the name Graf Schwerin von Krosigk. He studied law and political science at Halle and Lausanne and then, as a Rhodes Scholar, at Oriel College, Oxford. In the First World War he served as an army lieutenant and won the Iron Cross, first class.

He made his career as a finance ministry official, becoming a senior civil servant in 1922 and head of the budget department in 1929. In June 1932 Franz von Papen made him Reich finance minister, and at Hindenburg's request he stayed on under Schleicher and then Hitler, serving without a break until 1945. A conservative without party ties, he accepted the Golden Party Badge in January 1937, which made him a member of the Nazi Party, and his ministry took part in the persecution of Jews, seizing their property and laundering the proceeds.

Hitler's testament named him finance minister in a Goebbels cabinet. After Goebbels's suicide, President Karl Dönitz made him Leading Minister and foreign minister of the Flensburg government on 2 May 1945; in a broadcast that day he spoke of an 'iron curtain' across Europe. The Allies dissolved the government and arrested its members on 23 May.

In the Ministries Trial at Nuremberg he was convicted in 1949 of laundering property stolen from Nazi victims and of financing the concentration camps, and sentenced to ten years. Released in an amnesty in 1951, he wrote on economic policy and published memoirs, and died in Essen in 1977.