Nazi Party and SS career
Michel von Tüßling joined the SS (Motorized Unit 2) in Munich in April 1933, shortly after the Nazi Party (NSDAP) seized national power. In summer 1933 he was transferred to the 1st SS-Standarte in Munich, that was commanded by Viktor Brack, who was also chief of staff to the Reich Secretary of the NSDAP, Reichsleiter Philipp Bouhler. In August 1934, Bouhler became police chairman of Munich, and only a month later, he was appointed chief of Adolf Hitler's Chancellery. In 1935 Bouhler summoned Michel von Tüssling to Berlin, where he became a commissioned officer, rising to the rank of Untersturmführer. He served in Hitler's Chancellery (KdF) and also became a staff officer to the Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler. Shortly after its foundation in December 1935, Michel von Tüßling became a member of the SS organization Lebensborn.
In 1936, he was promoted to Obersturmführer and became Bouhler's personal adjutant. Brack was appointed chief of Main Office 2 (Hauptamt II). Bouhler's office was responsible for all correspondences for Hitler which included private and internal communications, appeals from party courts, official judgments, and clemency petitions. In 1937, he also became a staff officer at the SS Main Office, and was promoted to Hauptsturmführer in 1938. Michel von Tüßling continued his service in Hitler's Chancellery and the SS, and remained the personal adjutant of Bouhler throughout the Aktion T4, the programme of involuntary euthanasia, that ran officially from September 1939 to August 1941, killing more than 70,000 people. On 30 January 1941, Michel von Tüßling was promoted to Sturmbannführer.
In 1941, Bouhler and Himmler initiated Aktion 14f13. Bouhler instructed the head of the Hauptamt II, Viktor Brack who had already been in charge of the various front operations of T4, to implement this order. Aktion 14f13 killed 15,000–20,000 concentration camp prisoners. Many KdF employees who participated in T4 later joined Operation Reinhard, the Nazi plan under Odilo Globocnik to exterminate Polish Jews in the General Government district of German-occupied Poland, that was executed from October 1941 till November 1943.
In the 1943 and 1944 SS Officers list (Dienstalterslisten der SS), Michel von Tüßling was listed under the number '2007', serving as a staff officer in the SS-Hauptamt. The SS-Hauptamt maintained for other branches of the SS, the "paper trail" for such activities as the Einsatzgruppen, Final Solution and the commission of the Holocaust. Later on 10 May 1945, Bouhler was captured and arrested by American troops. He committed suicide on 19 May 1945 while in the U.S. internment camp at Zell am See in Austria.
Michel von Tüßling was interned at Regensburg Internment Camp, from where he provided an affidavit in defence of Viktor Brack in 1947. In this affidavit he also describes their (Brack, Bouhler, Michel von Tüßling) relation to Adolf Hitler's private secretary Martin Bormann; (excerpt):
Brack was an outspoken opponent of Bormann's policy, especially of the NSDAP totality demands advocated by Bormann. I know this very definitely, because Brack repeatedly asked me to use my personal influence to induce Reichsleiter Bouhler to adopt a more active attitude against Bormann's efforts. Bouhler certainly shared Brack's and my opinion of Bormann, but in spite of our remonstrances did not alter his passive attitude to Bormann. ... I am convinced that he [Brack] did not regard the SS as an organisation for the perpetration of crimes. His attitude to the Jewish question did not correspond to the usual SS conception. He was on good terms with several Jews of mixed descent and in his official capacity repeatedly acted on behalf of Jews who applied to him for assistance.
During the Nuremberg "Doctors' trial", Brack was accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity: Nazi human experimentation, mass murder under the guise of euthanasia, his relation to Aktion 14f13, and his involvement to the implementation of the Final Solution. Brack was found guilty and executed at Landsberg Prison in 1948.
Michel von Tüßling was able to conceal his wartime KdF- and SS-activity from the American prosecutors. At the Nuremberg Doctors trial, he affirmed an affidavit that in September 1939 he was drafted into the Luftwaffe, where he served until the end of the war. After his release from the detention center in 1948, he returned to Tüßling and worked as a farmer. Along with Brack and Bouhler, one of his close Nazi Party friends was the former Minister of Armaments and War Production Albert Speer, who regularly visited him on his estate following his release from Spandau Prison in 1966. Michel von Tüßling died at Tüßling Castle in 1991.
