Heinz Buckliger

Heinz Buckliger was the fourth Führer of the Greater German Reich, and the youngest ever selected. He was serving as the Minister of Heavy Industry in 2010, when he was chosen to succeed the late Kurt Haldweim. Buckliger was reform-minded, using the various contradictory notions intrinsic to Nazism to criticize the system and its history while at the same time praising the Reich's founding fathers. His first act upon his rise was to give a speech to prominent Party leaders at Nuremberg. While the text was kept from the German people, rumors quickly circulated that Buckliger had denounced certain of the Reich's past actions as criminal.

Buckliger seized upon the democratic ideas offered by the First Edition of Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf to reintroduce the notion of representative government to the empire. In his first televised speech, Buckliger eschewed a Party uniform in favor of a plain gray suit. He lamented the dependence of the German economy upon the annual monetary tributes levied against occupied and annexed territory, and took steps to remedy this problem. Buckliger recalled one division of German troops back from the United States. He consulted Heinrich Gimpel, the American analyst in the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, about reducing the tribute the U.S. paid to Germany, and agreed with Gimpel's recommendations. (Gimpel, secretly a Jew, gained a small measure of unwanted fame as a consequence of the this meeting).

Naturally, Buckliger faced opposition. While Buckliger toured Scandinavia in 2011, Reichsführer-SS Lothar Prützmann, the head of the SS, acted behind the scenes to discredit Buckliger by ordering the publication of an op-ed piece entitled Enough is Enough. Alternatively, Rolf Stolle, the Gauleiter of Berlin, gave a speech that at once complimented Buckliger for his planned reforms, and attacked him for not being ambitious enough.

Buckliger took both of these attacks in stride, meeting them in moderate tones, and exhorting the people to continue on the path he'd set them on. Shortly after he returned from abroad, Buckliger gave a speech at Friedrich Wilhelm University, where he proclaimed the Reichstag a mere rubber-stamp for the Reich, that there would be free and fair elections to be held on July 10, 2011.

Events came to a head when Prützmann (under the guise of the Committee for the Salvation of the Greater German Reich) initiated a putsch in 2011. Buckliger and his wife, Erna were placed under house-arrest in Croatia. The Wehrmacht sided with Buckliger, and helped put down the putsch. However, Rolf Stolle became a national hero as he fearlessly and bombastically refused to be arrested. Upon his return, Buckliger's relationship with Stolle changed. The Führer no longer had the stature in the eyes of the people, and Stolle had more legitimacy.

Although he was a reform-minded Nazi, Buckliger was still a German Nazi first. His calls for reforms did not express any atonement for the destruction of the Jews and other "sub-humans".