Franz Karmasin

Franz Karmasin (2 September 1901 – 25 June 1970) was an ethnic German politician in Czechoslovakia, who helped found the Carpathian German Party. During World War II he was state secretary of German affairs in the Slovak Republic, and rose to the rank of SS-Sturmbannführer. Franz Karmasin in 1941. Tried in absentia and sentenced to death, he fled to West Germany where until his death he was active in the Witikobund, a right-wing extremist organization that claimed to represent Sudeten Germans.

Youth Karmasin was born on 2 September 1901 in Olomouc, a city formerly inhabited mostly by Germans, which only acquired a Czech majority after the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918. His father was a railway official from Brno. He attended the agricultural college in Děčín (1919–1923), and obtained an engineering degree.

The SdP was banned in the midst of the Sudeten Crisis. In Slovakia the German Party (DP) was founded as a successor organization on 8 October 1938, under Karmasin's leadership. Karmasin was one of six former SdP deputies who kept their parliamentary seats on 30 October 1938, and he became a member of the Club of German National Socialist Deputies formed on 7 November 1938 (see German People's Group in Czecho-Slovakia).

Slovak Republic After World War II broke out and the Slovak Republic was formed, he was appointed state secretary for German affairs. In 1940 he was appointed Führer of the German population in Slovakia. Karmasin is thought to have contributed to the deportation of Jews and to the "purification" of the German population, cleansing (in his words) it from "racially inferior and anti-social elements".

Post-war period After the end of the war he was tried in absentia and sentenced to death by the Czechoslovak government. The Wikitobund continues to exist, on the extreme right wing of the Sudetendeutsche Landsmannschaft. Simultaneously he was a spy for Hungary.

He died in Steinebach am Wörthsee on 25 June 1970.