After dropping out of law school, Josef Terboven (1898-1945) had completed a bank apprenticeship and was unemployed from 1925. He had joined the NSDAP as early as 1923 and had participated in the Hitler-Ludendorff Putsch in November of that year. He would become leader of the SA in Essen and founded a local branch of the NSDAP there in 1925. From 1928, he served as Gauleiter [district leader] of Essen. In addition to the city itself, the Essen district comprised the western Ruhr area, including the cities of Duisburg, Oberhausen and Mühlheim, as well as some rural communities on the Lower Rhine. Until Hitler’s rise to power, however, the NSDAP was unable to achieve any significant electoral success here, as the industrial Ruhr area was strongly influenced by the labor movement and the rural, Catholic constituencies on the Lower Rhine predominantly voted for the Catholic Center Party. Nonetheless, Terboven was elected to the Reichstag in 1930. After the Nazis came to power, he continued his career within the Nazi regime and during the Second World War became Reichskommissar of occupied Norway, where he established a ruthless system of economic exploitation and political repression.

This photograph, taken in July 1926, shows Terboven (front row, in civilian clothes) with members of the Essen SA on the way to the NSDAP Reich Party Congress in Weimar. This was the second party conference of the Nazis and the first large gathering of the NSDAP since Hitler’s early release from prison in December 1924 and the reestablishment of the party in February 1925. It took place in Weimar from July 3-4, 1926. Since Hitler was still banned from public speaking in Bavaria at the time, the conference was moved to Weimar in Thuringia.