Franz Reinhold Schwede (5 March 1888 – 19 October 1960) was a Nazi German politician, Oberbürgermeister (Lord Mayor) of Coburg and both Gauleiter and Oberpräsident of Pomerania. An early supporter of Adolf Hitler in Coburg, Schwede used intimidation and propaganda to help elect the first Nazi-majority local government in Germany. This contributed to a personality cult surrounding Schwede and he became known as "Franz Schwede-Coburg." During World War II he ordered secret executions of the infirm and mass deportations of Jews. He also played a key role in abandoning the Pomeranian civilian population to the advancing Red Army, while escaping their fate himself. In 1945 he was captured by the British Army and in 1948 he was tried and convicted of war crimes. Early years Franz Schwede was born in the small town of Drawöhnen near Memel, East Prussia (now Dreverna near Klaipėda, Lithuania) in 1888, when it was part of the German Empire. After attending volksschule, he worked briefly as a forester, then trained as a millwright and in 1907 joined the Imperial German Navy as a machinist in the Wilhelmshaven shipyard. He served throughout the First World War aboard many warships including the battleship SMS Prinzregent Luitpold and the light cruiser SMS Dresden. By the end of the war he had risen to the rank of technical deck officer (Deckoffizier) and had been awarded the Iron Cross 1st and 2nd class. After the Scuttling of the German fleet in Scapa Flow in 1919, Schwede wound up in British custody as a prisoner of war. Upon his release on 1 February 1920 he immediately joined the Reichsmarine and was assigned as an instructor at a naval school in Wilhelmshaven. However, he was discharged at the end of March 1921 when personnel limits imposed by the Versailles Treaty were reached. He then took a job as operations manager at a sawmill in Sankt Andreasberg in the Prussian Province of Hanover, before being hired as foreman at the Coburg Municipal Electrical Works in March 1922. During this period, Schwede became active in the Deutschvölkischer Schutz und Trutzbund, a "völkisch" anti-Semitic organization. Rise to power in Coburg In November 1922 Schwede joined the Nazi Party (membership number 1,581) and in April 1923 co-founded a Local Group () in Coburg, a historic city in northeastern Bavaria. Under Schwede's guidance, anti-Semitic demonstrations and street battles instigated by the Sturmabteilung became commonplace in the city.