Ernst Boepple

Ernst Boepple
Ernst Boepple with Sonderdienst in Kraków, 1943
Birth name	Erwin Hermann Lambert
Born	November 30, 1887 Betzingen
Died	December 15, 1950 (1950-12-16) (aged 63)
Allegiance	Nazi Germany
Service/branch	Schutzstaffel
Rank	Unterscharführer, SS (Corporal)
Commands held	Headed construction of gas chambers during Action T4, and at Sobibor and Treblinka extermination camps during Operation Reinhard

SS-Oberführer Ernst Boepple (November 30, 1887, Betzingen – December 15, 1950) was a Nazi official, serving as deputy to Josef Bühler in occupied Poland during World War II and the Holocaust.

Boepple earned his Abitur in 1905 at the Gymnasium in Reutlingen. Then he studied languages and history at several universities: University of Tübingen, University of Paris, University of Oxford, and the University of London and earned his PhD in 1915.—with the doctoral thesis: Frederick the Great's Relation to Württemberg. He fought in the First World War in the infantry and left the German Army with the rank of first lieutenant (Oberleutnant) in 1919.

Boepple became a co-worker of the publisher Julius Friedrich Lehmann and was one of the founders of the German Workers' Party (DAP). In 1919 he took over the Deutsche Volksverlag publishing house, which had been established by Lehmann. There he e.g. published Anton Drexler's My Political Awakening. The Deutsche Volksverlag published a large section of the early formative National Socialist literature including:

In November 1923 Ernst Boepple took part in the Beer Hall Putsch.

When Hans Schemm died after an aircraft crash, Boepple became the Bavarian Minister for Culture until the invasion of Poland in 1939. In 1940 he again served in the military. On September 1, 1941, he was appointed the State Secretary of the General Government in occupied Poland, serving as deputy to Deputy Governor Josef Bühler. Boepple was deeply implicated in the Final Solution as the deputy to Bühler and also held rank in the SS, being an SS-Oberführer (senior colonel).