SANDBERGER, MARTIN (1911–2010)
Martin Sandberger was a senior SS official and a Holocaust perpetrator. He oversaw Sonderkommando 1a of Einsatzgruppe A and was commander of the SiPo and SD in Estonia. Sandberger organized the murder of Jews in the Baltic States and the deportation of Italian Jews to Auschwitz.
Sandberger was born on August 17, 1911, in Charlottenburg, Berlin, the son of a manager working for I. G. Farben. After finishing high school with honors, he studied law at the Universities of Munich, Cologne, Freiburg, and Tübingen. In 1931, he joined the Nazi Party and the SA. During 1932 to 1933, he was a Nazi student leader in Tübingen, in an environment in which two of his student colleagues went on to command Sonderkommando 1b and Sonderkommando 4a respectively.
By 1935, Sandberger had obtained his doctorate in law. In 1936, he joined the SS in a unit headed by Gustav Adolf Scheel, and by 1938, he was an SS-Sturmbannführer and had made contact with Hans Frank, the incumbent president of the academy of German law and later governor-general of Poland.
Following the German invasion and occupation of Poland in September 1939, SS-Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler began implementing a program designed to drive out the native Polish population in certain areas and replace them with ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche) from outside the Reich. On October 13, 1939, Himmler appointed Sandberger to take charge of the Northeast Central Immigration Office, tasked with the “racial evaluation” of the arriving immigrants.
Sandberger was also responsible for German resettlement policies elsewhere. In mid-January 1940, 160 Jews from Schneidemühl (Pila) in western Prussia were deported to Lublin so that Baltic Germans could settle there. In May 1940, Sandberger was transferred to Alsace in France, along with his mentor Gustav Adolf Scheel, who had selected Sandberger as his aide.
In April 1941, Himmler ordered Sandberger to coordinate the removal of Slovenes from northeastern Slovenia, and in June 1941, he was appointed commander of Sonderkommando 1a of Einsatzgruppe A. During the first two weeks following the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, Sandberger traveled into the occupied territories with Franz Walter Stahlecker, the commander of Einsatzgruppe A, to learn of events firsthand.
Sandberger said that as early as the spring of 1941 and two weeks prior to Operation Barbarossa, he was informed about Adolf Hitler’s order to kill all Jews in the Soviet Union. He received this information, he said, from a speech by an RSHA official, Bruno Streckenbach, while attending Gestapo headquarters in Berlin.
Each of the four Einsatzgruppen followed the various armies of invasion, which had their own theaters of operation. For Einsatzgruppe A, the operation of Einsatzkommando 1a stretched from the Baltic States and Belarus to Leningrad. Sandberger commanded 105 men from various departments of the RSHA, including 18 men from the Gestapo, 11 from Kripo, and 8 from the SD. Estonia was Sonderkommando 1a’s main area of operation. Prior to World War II, out of a population of 1 million living in Estonia, 4,500 were Jews.
During Operation Barbarossa, Sandberger’s men, along with Einsatzkommando 2, entered Riga and incited local collaborators to destroy synagogues and liquidate Jews. After the alleged butchering of a German soldier by a Jew, 100 Jews were executed by way of reprisal, and such practices were continued in Estonia. On August 28, 1941, Sandberger and his unit moved into the capital, Tallinn. Many Estonians treated Germany as a liberator who would end the Soviet occupation. Due to the close cooperation of the Estonian police, a large German occupation force was unnecessary.
Antisemitism among the Estonian population never rose to the level where pogroms could erupt spontaneously. Many Jews had already fled Estonia prior to the German occupation (only about 1,000 remained), and immediately after the invasion, Estonian militias began arresting Jews. Sandberger took things a step further and ordered the arrest of all men and women fit for labor in Tallinn as well as Riga so that they could be employed as peat diggers. Sandberger also issued orders to wear the Star of David, along with an array of anti-Jewish measures of a kind prevailing for Jews in Germany.
On October 12, 1941, steps were taken to exterminate the entire Jewish population of Estonia. Sandberger became commander of the Security Police and SD on December 3, 1941. During the winter, at Sandberger’s command, Estonian Jews who had been deployed as forced labor were also murdered. In a report of July 1, 1942, Sandberger reported the death of 921 Jews, meaning he had successfully completed his mission and that Estonia was “free of Jews.”
In September 1943, Sandberger was transferred to Verona, Italy, as head of the Gestapo. During his time in Italy, the deportation of Jews in Rome was carried out in October 1943, with a total of 1,015 Jews deported to Auschwitz. Only 10 survived.
Sandberger returned to Berlin in early January 1944 and spent the rest of the war as head of the foreign agency branch of the SD in the RSHA, reporting to Walter Schellenberg. As Schellenberg’s assistant, he acted as liaison with Heinrich Himmler.
In 1945, Sandberger was promoted to SS-Standartenführer, but after the collapse of the Third Reich, he went into hiding in an alpine cabin in Austria. On May 25, 1945, he surrendered voluntarily to American officers in Kitzbühl, in the Tirol.
Due to his extensive knowledge of the German intelligence services, the Allies showed great interest in Sandberger. He tried to delay or avoid prosecution by disclosing what he knew under interrogation and to play down his responsibility for the crimes committed. Until internal reports of the Einsatzgruppen were discovered, Sandberger was able to convince British investigators that his activities in Tallinn had involved no criminal actions on his part. He could not ultimately escape prosecution, however. He was indicted, along with 23 others, during the Einstazgruppen Trial, which took place in Nuremberg between September 1947 and April 1948.
Hiding behind Hitler’s directives, Sandberger stated that the order to exterminate Jews was legitimate as Hitler was the supreme authority and his orders had to be obeyed. The tribunal, on the other hand, found that Sandberger willingly obeyed these commands, and he was found guilty on all counts. On April 10, 1948, Judge Michael Musmanno sentenced Martin Sandberger to death by hanging. Despite political pressures, General Lucius D. Clay confirmed Sandberger’s death sentence in 1949, but in 1951, the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. During the period of his trial, the Cold War had begun, and in many cases, pleas by West German politicians and clergymen not to execute their fellow countrymen were accepted.
Sandberger’s father also used his connections with the West German president, Theodor Heuss, who in turn contacted the U.S. ambassador, James B. Conant, with the request for a pardon. Numerous pleas for leniency were made by influential individuals, including Minister of Justice Wolfgang Haussmann and Bishop Martin Haug. The vice president of the West German Parliament, Carlo Schmid, expressed concern about Sandberger’s conditions in Landsberg Prison and spoke out in favor of a commutation. These and other well-connected people lobbied for Sandberger’s release.
By late 1957, there were only four war criminals still held in prison in West Germany. One of them was Sandberger, who was released from Landsberg on January 9, 1958.
In the years that followed, Martin Sandberger was the highest-ranking member of the SS known to be alive. He lived in the open, under his own name, in a Stuttgart retirement home, until he died on March 30, 2010, at the age of 98.
SCHEEL, GUSTAV ADOLF (1907–1979)
Gustav Scheel was a leader of both the National Socialist German Students’ League and the German Student Union. He became an Einsatzgruppe commander in occupied Alsace, and in 1940, he organized the deportation of the Jews of Karlsruhe (Baden-Württemberg). From November 1941 to May 1945, Scheel was a gauleiter and Reichsstatthalter (local governor) in Salzburg.
Gustav Adolphus Scheel was born on November 22, 1907, in Rosenberg, North Baden, into the family of a Protestant pastor. He was educated in Freiburg, Tauberbischofsheim, and Mannheim. While still a schoolboy at the end of World War I, he joined in with various German patriotic youth groups.
During the summer semester of 1928, Scheel began training at Tübingen University for the Protestant ministry, studying law, politics, economics, and theology. At the same time, he deepened his ties to right-wing student circles and, in the winter of 1928 to 1929, to the Verein Deutscher Studenten (VDSt), a support group for German student fraternities. Within a year, he was the group’s chairman.
In 1929, Scheel joined the National Socialist German Students’ League (Nationalsozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund, or NSDStB). On October 1, 1930, he joined the SA, followed by the Nazi Party on December 1, 1930. Scheel first began studying medicine at Tübingen University before returning to Heidelberg, where he continued his studies. At the University of Heidelberg, he was a Nazi spokesman, and as NSDStB college group leader (Hochschulgruppenführer), he led Nazi student rallies against a Jewish professor of mathematics and pacifist, Emil Julius Gumbel. Their agitation led to Gumbel’s removal in 1932.
In 1933, as chairman of the Heidelberg General Students’ Board and a member of the vice chancellor’s leadership staff, Scheel played a key role in influencing the university’s appointments and personnel policy. He fought to exclude “students of Jewish lineage” from the “benefits of social institutions at the university.” Following this line, in May 1933, Scheel was one of the main speakers at Heidelberg involved in the public burning of books proscribed by the Nazi regime.
In 1934, Scheel passed his state examination and graduated as a medical doctor. Later that same year in September, he became a member of the SS and began work full-time with the SD. Between 1935 and 1939, he ran the SD in Stuttgart. With his student activist background, he attracted to the SD many young Nazi academics who later went on to commit mass murder in the name of the Third Reich. Among them were Walter Stahlecker, Martin Sandberger, Erwin Weinmann, Albert Rapp, Erich Ehrlinger, and Eugen Steimle, all of whom went into various divisions of the RSHA to become leaders of murder squads with the Einsatzgruppen. In 1936, Scheel was appointed by Reich Education Minister Bernhard Rust as leader (Reichsstudentenführer) of the German Students’ Union.
In 1940, after the Battle of France, Scheel became the SiPo commandant in Alsace. In October 1940, he organized the deportation of thousands of the Jews of Karlsruhe (about 40 miles from Mannheim) to Gurs, France.
Scheel’s career continued to flourish. On May 1, 1941, he rose to the rank of SS-Brigadeführer and police major general for the Alpenland district in Austria. He was installed as gauleiter and Reichsstatthalter in Salzburg in November 1941. Upon learning of the existence of resistance groups in Salzburg, he organized a widespread wave of arrests, and as a result, several railway workers were put to death.
In 1944, Scheel took over from Walter Schultze as Reichsdozentenführer (Reich leader of university teachers). Schultze, who had served in this capacity since 1935, was also involved in the Aktion T-4 campaign and was responsible for the death of nearly 400 Germans with disabilities. Scheel was also appointed a member of the executive board of the Reich Research Council (Reichsforschungsrat, or RFR). In August 1944, he was elevated to the rank of SS-Obergruppenführer, while simultaneously holding numerous other offices.
With the onset of a possible defeat for Nazi Germany in 1944 to 1945, Scheel was given responsibility for organizing the Volkssturm (home guard) in Salzburg. When Adolf Hitler drew up his last will on April 29, 1945, he nominated Scheel to take over the portfolio of Reich minister for science, national education, and culture in the next cabinet.
At the end of the war, Scheel aided the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, to escape arrest by the Allies by providing him with a guide to take him across the border and to safety in Switzerland.
Ten days after Salzburg was occupied by the Americans on May 4, 1945, Scheel was arrested and interned. He spent a considerable period in custody but was finally released in time for Christmas on December 24, 1947. Soon after, however, he was again arrested and transferred to Heidelberg to face a denazification hearing. In 1948, he was sentenced to five years in a labor camp as a Hauptschuldiger, or major offender. He was again released on December 24, this time in 1948. After his release, Scheel first worked as on the docks at Hamburg before resuming his medical practice in the summer of 1949.
After an appeal proceeding in 1952, Scheel belonged to the neo-Nazi Naumann Circle, along with other former Nazi leaders, such as Werner Best and Werner Naumann. It was alleged that this group was attempting to infiltrate West German political parties, and as result, Scheel was arrested in January 1953 by British police, who suspected him of building up a secret organization. Handed across to German authorities, he faced a trial, which was suspended on December 3, 1954, for lack of evidence of wrongdoing.
From February 1954 to April 8, 1977, Scheel was the owner of a medical practice in Hamburg. He died there on March 25, 1979, aged 71.
SCHLEGELBERGER, FRANZ (1876–1970)
Louis Rudolph Franz Schlegelberger was state secretary in the German Reich Ministry of Justice and served as justice minister during the Third Reich. He was the highest-ranking defendant at the Judges’ Trial in Nuremberg.
Schlegelberger was born on October 23, 1876, into a pious Protestant family from Königsberg, where he attended gymnasium and sat his school-leaving examination in 1894. He began studying law in Königsberg in 1894, continuing his legal studies in Berlin from 1895 to 1896. In 1897, he passed the state legal examination. At the University of Königsberg (by some accounts, the University of Leipzig), he graduated as a doctor of law on December 1, 1899.
On December 9, 1901, Schlegelberger passed his state law examination. Two weeks later, he became an assessor at the Königsberg local court, and on March 17, 1902, he was made an assistant judge at the Königsberg State Court. On September 16, 1904, he became a judge at the State Court in Lyck (now Ełk, Poland). In early May 1908, he went to the Berlin State Court and in the same year was appointed assistant judge at the Berlin Court of Appeals (Kammergericht). In 1914, he was appointed to the Kammergericht Council (Kammergerichtsrat) in Berlin, where he stayed until 1918.
On April 1, 1918, Schlegelberger became an associate at the Reich Justice Office, receiving appointment later in the year to the Secret Government Court and Executive Council. In 1927, he took on the post as ministerial director in the German Ministry of Justice. From 1922, Schlegelberger also taught in the Faculty of Law at the University of Berlin as an honorary professor.
On October 10, 1931, Schlegelberger was appointed state secretary at the Ministry of Justice under Franz Gürtner and kept this job until Gürtner’s death in 1941.
After the Nazi Party came to power in 1933, Schlegelberger objected to a decree retroactively imposing the death penalty on those blamed for the Reichstag Fire, on the basis that decree was a violation of the ancient legal maxim nulla poena sine lege (“no punishment without law”). On January 30, 1938, following Adolf Hitler’s orders regarding judges in the Third Reich, Schlegelberger joined the Nazi Party.
In March 1940, Schlegelberger proposed that lawyers be expelled from their profession if they did not fully and without reservation support the National Socialist state. As minister of justice, he reiterated that call in a conference of German jurists and lawyers in April 1941. The first item on the conference agenda was the Nazi regime’s T-4 euthanasia program; Schlegelberger announced the Führer’s policies so that judges and public prosecutors understood that they may not use legal means to oppose the policy against the will of the Führer.
After Franz Gürtner’s death in 1941, Schlegelberger became provisional Reich minister of justice for the years 1941 and 1942, while still holding his post as state secretary. Otto Thierack was appointed after Schlegelberger’s acting position expired. During Schlegelberger’s period in office, the number of judicial death sentences rose sharply. He drafted the Poland Penal Law Provision (Polenstrafrechtsverordnung), under which Poles were executed for tearing down German wall posters and proclamations.
Schlegelberger’s work assisted the institutionalization of torture in the Third Reich. After defendants accused of political crimes started to show signs of torture, Schlegelberger’s justice ministry legalized such acts, to such an extent that the Reich Ministry of Justice even established a standard club to be used in beatings so that torture would at least be regularized.
In 1941, a police captain named Klinzmann was convicted of torture for beating an arson confession out of a Jewish farm laborer. When the German Supreme Court refused to hear Klinzmann’s appeal, Schlegelberger created a new procedure called “cancelation,” giving the Reich a means to end every trial independently of judicial decisions. Klinzmann was set free.
On October 24, 1941, Schlegelberger wrote to the chief of the Reich Chancellery, Hans Lammers, informing him that acting under the Führer Order of October 24, 1941, Schlegelberger had handed over to the Gestapo for execution a Jew named Markus Luftglass, sentenced by the Special Court (Sondergericht) in Katowice to two and a half years in prison for the crime of hoarding eggs. That was clearly a violation of the legal maxim “no punishment without law.”
In November 1941, Schlegelberger was among those whom Reinhard Heydrich invited to attend the Wannsee Conference. As things turned out, his subordinate, Roland Freisler, attended as Schlegelberger’s deputy. After the conference, Schlegelberger supported efforts to apply a more restrictive definition of the persons subjected to the Final Solution. In a letter dated April 5, 1942, to Lammers, he suggested that “mixed people” should be given a choice between “evacuation to the East” or sterilization, writing that “The measures for the final solution of the Jewish question should extend only to full Jews and descendants of mixed marriages of the first degree, but should not apply to descendants of mixed marriages of the second degree. . . . There is no national interest in dissolving the marriage between such half-Jews and a full-blooded German.”
Schlegelberger wrote several books on the law and at the time of his retirement was called the “Last of the German Jurists.” Some of those texts commenting upon German law were still of use and available for purchase in 2018. Upon his retirement as justice minister on August 24, 1942, Adolf Hitler thanked Schlegelberger with a huge financial endowment and permitted him to purchase an estate with the money, something outside the rules then in force; clearly, Hitler held Schlegelberger in high esteem.
After the war, Schlegelberger was one of the main accused indicted in the Nuremberg Judges’ Trial of in 1947. He was sentenced to life imprisonment for conspiracy to perpetrate war crimes and crimes against humanity. The judgment stated, in part,
Schlegelberger supported the pretension of Hitler in his assumption of power to deal with life and death in disregard of even the pretense of judicial process. By his exhortations and directives, Schlegelberger contributed to the destruction of judicial independence. It was his signature on the decree of 7 February 1942 which imposed upon the Ministry of Justice and the courts the burden of the prosecution, trial, and disposal of the victims of Hitler’s Night and Fog. For this he must be charged with primary responsibility.
In 1950, the 74-year-old Schlegelberger was released from prison on health grounds by the American high commissioner for Germany. He then lived in Flensburg until his death at the age of 93, on December 14, 1970.
Schlegelberger was perceived as a reluctant supporter of Hitler’s rule and given a lenient sentence. From the available records, it appears that Schlegelberger’s acutest regrets dealt with what he experienced rather than what he helped inflict on others. Given his record, he was the model for the character of Ernst Janning, the penitent German jurist portrayed by Burt Lancaster in the multi-award-winning motion picture Judgment at Nuremberg (Stanley Kramer, 1961), a depiction of the Judges’ Trial at Nuremberg.
SCHOLTZ-KLINK, GERTRUD (1902–1999)
Gertrud Scholtz-Klink was a Nazi Party member and leader of the National Socialist Women’s League (NS-Frauenschaft) during the period of the Third Reich.
She was born Gertrud Emma Treusch on February 9, 1902, into an antisemitic Christian family in Adelsheim, Baden, where her father was the district surveyor. Her father died when she was eight, leaving her mother to raise her and her two brothers. Leaving school in 1918, she worked as a nurse in Berlin during the last days of World War I. At the age of 18, she married an elementary school teacher, Eugen Klink, with whom she had six children, one of whom died in infancy. In the early 1920s, they joined the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP), and Eugen Klink became a Nazi district officer. In 1930, he died of a heart attack at a Nazi rally.
During their time together, Gertrud Klink saw her role as one of helping her husband in his party activities—looking after the organization of party kitchens during events, sewing, or organizing day care for the children of the party’s female members. In 1929, she became leader of the NSDAP women’s section in Baden.
In 1932, she married a country doctor, Günther Scholtz, taking the surname Scholtz-Klink. They divorced in 1938, because he did not share her passion for Nazi politics.
When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Adolf Hitler appointed Scholtz-Klink as Reichsführerin (Women’s Leader) and head of the National Socialist Women’s League (NS-Frauenschaft). She then established one of the largest women’s organizations in history, which was fundamentally concerned with issues relating to the family, particularly motherhood. A woman’s role in Nazi Germany was to be considered sacrosanct; it was a woman’s selfless duty to give birth to as many children as possible, to take care of her body to ensure maximum fertility, and to make a good German home for her husband and sons. Presenting a male child to the Führer was the greatest form of contribution a German woman could make to her Fatherland.
In July 1936, Scholtz-Klink was promoted as head of the Women’s Bureau in the German Labor Front (Deutsche Arbeitsfront), responsible for persuading women to work to the advantage of the Nazi government. In 1938, she argued that “the German woman must work and work, physically and mentally she must renounce luxury and pleasure.” Scholtz-Klink had the same impact over German women in the Nazi Party that Hitler had over Germany as a whole, and in this sense, she served Nazi needs perfectly.
Just as the SS under Heinrich Himmler oversaw the separation of Jews from mainstream German life, so Scholtz-Klink directed the disconnection between women and the daily life of Nazi-dominated male society. She spoke often against women participating in government or public life, saying that “Anyone who has seen the Communist and Social Democratic women scream on the street and in the parliament, will realize that such an activity is not something which is done by a true woman.” Elsewhere, she alerted her members that they had to “deny the Liberal-Jew-Bolshevik theory of ‘women’s equality,’” as any acceptance of it “dishonors them.”
Under the close supervision of Heinrich Himmler, Scholtz-Klink supervised the running of six-week training programs for young women known as “Nazi bride schools.” The course of instruction ensured that women learned how to become good wives in service to the Nazi state. An important part of the course saw to it that women acquired detailed knowledge of race and genetics, and instruction was also given on how young women could become perfect partners for SS soldiers.
The NS-Frauenschaft was thus the breeding ground for the master race. The private sphere of women became inextricably bound up with masculinist Nazi ideology. The Nazi state sought strict control over female reproduction, as women’s bodies provided the means for engineering racial purity. This was the front line of Nazi racial thinking transformed into action, in which, as she said in another of her speeches, “the mission of woman is to minister in the home and in her profession to the needs of life from the first to last moment of man’s existence.”
Many years later, American scholar Claudia Koonz interviewed Scholtz-Klink about the situation in Nazi Germany regarding the Jews. As this fitted into the male sphere, however, Scholtz-Klink denied any involvement. She knew that Jewish women were denied access to Frauenschaft activities, but she did not go out of her way to help any Jews seeking assistance because, she said, she “did not know any.” At the same time, she considered the treatment of Jews to be legal and therefore beyond the realm of judgment—particularly by women. This, Koonz suggested, was a case of “spectator guilt,” in which Scholtz-Klink and her enormous organizational machine saw to it that millions of German women could not intervene in any moral capacity against the barbarities of the Third Reich.
Scholtz-Klink led the NS-Frauenschaft from February 1934 to 1945. She divorced Günther Scholtz in 1938, and in 1940, she married her third husband, SS-Obergruppenführer August Heissmeyer. They combined their families. She had six children (one died in infancy); Heissmeyer had five from a previous marriage. Later, they had another child together. In 1944, the Nazi Party advertised Scholtz-Klink and her 11 children as a “fertility model” for the Third Reich. What it did not add was that Scholtz-Klink and Heissmeyer made frequent trips to visit prisoners in women’s concentration camps, such as at Moringen, Lichtenburg, and Ravensbrück, in line with Heissmeyer’s role as inspector of concentration camps.
After World War II, Scholtz-Klink and Heissmeyer fled Berlin. Captured in the summer of 1945 and imprisoned in a Soviet prisoner-of-war camp near Magdeburg, they managed to escape soon after. In October 1945, a haven was provided for them by Princess Pauline of Württemberg, who, as director of the German Red Cross for the Rhineland, Hesse, Nassau, and Westphalia, had known Scholtz-Klink during the war. Princess Pauline and her nurse were both later indicted by a U.S. military government court for “having concealed two prominent Nazis.” Princess Pauline arranged for the couple to live quietly in the village of Bebenhausen, where Scholtz-Klink spent the next three years under the alias of Maria Stuckebrock. On February 28, 1948, however, she was identified and arrested. A French military court sentenced her to 18 months in prison on the charge of forging documents, and in May 1950, a reevaluation of her sentence penalized her with an additional 30 months.
After her release from prison in 1953, Scholtz-Klink settled back in Bebenhausen. In her 1978 book, Die Frau im Dritten Reich (The Woman in the Third Reich), she confirmed her ongoing support for Nazism, beliefs she held through to her death, at the age of 97, on March 24, 1999.
SCHÖNGARTH, KARL EBERHARD (1903–1946)
Karl Georg Eberhard Schöngarth was born on April 22, 1903, in Leipzig, Saxony. His father was a builder. After graduating from high school in 1920, he served in the Freikorps. In 1922, he joined the Nazi Party and earned his living as a bank employee. He served in the army in 1924 and then began studying law. His doctor of law was awarded in June 1929, and he worked as a university professor at Leibnitz University in Hanover. From June 1932, Schöngarth was a legal assessor in Magdeburg, Erfurt, and Torgau.
On March 1, 1933, he joined the SS, and in May, he rejoined the NSDAP, before joining the Gestapo in 1935. From November 1935 to 1936, he was assigned to the press section in the Berlin Gestapo, and during the first half of 1936, he also acted as a political lawyer. From May 1936 to 1937, Schöngarth oversaw the Gestapo office in Arnsberg. During 1937 to 1938, he ran the Gestapo offices in Bielefeld, Westphalia, Dortmund, and Münster.
In 1939, he became the chief government counsel to the SS and then, from October 1939 to March 1941, an inspector for the Sicherheitspolizei (Security Police, or SiPo) and the Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service, or SD) in Dresden. From January 30, 1941 (the day he was promoted to the rank of SS-Oberführer), to January 14, 1943, he commanded the SiPo and SD in the Generalgouvernement in Poland. A fanatical enemy of the Jews, Schöngarth believed their “extermination” necessary and wanted to toughen his SiPo-SD commanders with the necessary “steel hardness” to be able to carry out their murderous actions. During the execution of Jews in Lvov (Lviv), for example, he informed officers under his command that any SS officer failing to carry out an order of execution would himself be shot and that he would support any officer who shot his comrade for this failure.
Schöngarth was characterized by an outstandingly fast intellectual grasp, strong willpower, and an impressive appearance, which commanded respect and obedience. His experience and prominent position within the security services of the Generalgouvernement, together with his ideologically safe political approach, led to his chief of the RSHA, Reinhard Heydrich, inviting Schöngarth to attend the Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942, where he participated in the discussion of the Final Solution to the Jewish Question (Endlösing der Judenfrage).
Schöngarth was promoted to SS-Brigadeführer and police major general on January 30, 1943, and in July, he was transferred to the Fourth SS Police Division in Greece, where he served until early July 1944.
From early July 1944 until the end of the war, Schöngarth was the senior commander of the SiPo and SD in The Hague, Holland. After his immediate chief, Hanns-Albin Rauter, was wounded in 1945 in an ambush by Dutch resistance fighters, Schöngarth ordered the execution of 260 Dutch hostages in retribution. With the unsuccessful attempt on Rauter’s life, Schöngarth served in his place as higher SS and police leader in The Hague during March and April 1945.
In 1945, Schöngarth was captured by the British. Tried for war crimes, he was found guilty on February 11, 1946, and was sentenced to death by hanging. Schöngarth was executed on May 15 or 16, 1946, at Hameln Prison.
SEYSS-INQUART, ARTHUR (1892–1946)
Arthur Seyss-Inquart was a prominent Austrian SS official and Reich commissioner in the Netherlands, largely responsible for the persecution of Dutch Jews.
He was born on July 22, 1892, in Stonařov, Moravia (Austria-Hungary), the youngest of six children of the ethnic-Czech school principal Emil Zajtich and his German-speaking wife, Auguste Hyrenbach. The family moved to Vienna in 1907, where they changed the Czech Slavic name of Zajtich to the German Seyss-Inquart.
Seyss-Inquart studied law at the University of Vienna before enlisting in the Austro-Hungarian army in August 1914. During World War I, he saw action in Russia, Romania, and Italy and was badly wounded. He was awarded war medals for bravery, and in 1917, while on convalescent leave, he completed his final examinations for his degree.
In 1911, Seyss-Inquart met Gertrud Maschka; they married in 1916 and had three children. After the war, he became a lawyer in Vienna, where he developed right-wing views, and in 1921, he set up his own successful legal practice. He was a strong advocate of union with Germany (Anschluss) during the 1930s. Seyss-Inquart joined the cabinet of Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss in 1933, and after Dollfuss’s murder in 1934, he became a state councilor under Kurt Schuschnigg. In February 1938, to appease Adolf Hitler’s threats, Schuschnigg appointed Seyss-Inquart as his minister of the interior. Initially, Seyss-Inquart was not a member of the Austrian National Socialist Party, but by 1938, sympathetic to the party’s views, he became a respectable advocate for the Austrian Nazis.
On March 11, 1938, Schuschnigg was threatened with a German invasion aimed at preventing a plebiscite on the Anschluss issue; on the same day, Schuschnigg resigned as Austrian chancellor, and Seyss-Inquart was appointed in his place by Austrian president Wilhelm Miklas. Also on this day, Seyss-Inquart joined the National Socialist Party. The next day, German troops crossed the border at Seyss-Inquart’s invitation; shortly afterward, Hitler announced the union of Austria with Germany, basing his action on Seyss-Inquart’s revocation of the post–World War I Treaty of St. Germain.
Seyss-Inquart drafted the legislation reducing Austria to a province of Germany and signed it into law on March 13. With Hitler’s approval, he remained the Reich representative in the former Austria and received the honorary SS rank of Gruppenführer. In May 1939, he was made minister without portfolio in Hitler’s cabinet.
Following the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, Seyss-Inquart became administrative chief for southern Poland and then became a deputy to Governor-General Hans Frank. Seyss-Inquart was involved in the forcible transfer of Polish Jews into ghettos, in the seizure of strategic supplies, and in the “extraordinary pacification” of the resistance movement. Displeased with the atrocities committed by SS forces and unable to exert any influence over policies, he asked for a new appointment.
In May 1940, he duly became Reich commissioner of the newly occupied Netherlands, reporting to Hitler. Seeking to create a climate conducive to a program of Nazification, he found that Dutch Nazis, under local fascist leader Anton Adriaan Mussert, were not generally supported by the Dutch population. He therefore saw that had no alternative but to work in a moderate environment, among traditional elites.
An avowed antisemite, within a few months of his arrival in the Netherlands, Seyss-Inquart took measures to remove Jews from the government, the press, and leading positions in industry. There were two concentration camps in the Netherlands: Herzogenbusch, near Vught, and Kamp Amersfoort, near Amersfoort. In addition, there was a preexisting transit camp for Jews at Westerbork. Under Seyss-lnquart’s administration, around 140,000 Dutch Jews were registered, and a ghetto was established in Amsterdam. The first movement of Dutch Jews to Buchenwald started in February 1941. Later, many were sent directly to Auschwitz-Birkenau. By the end of the war, it is estimated that 110,000 Dutch Jews had been murdered.
In late 1941, political parties other than Mussert’s were banned, and many former government officials were imprisoned. Seyss-Inquart’s regime now engaged in a variety of activities. It oversaw the recruitment of Dutch workers to be relocated in the Reich, was wholly responsible for the deportation of scores of thousands of Dutch Jews to the extermination camps, and worked to ensure German exploitation of the Dutch economy.
When Hitler committed suicide in April 1945, Seyss-Inquart was appointed as foreign minister (replacing Joachim von Ribbentrop) in the new German government of Admiral Karl Dönitz. He was captured shortly before the end of hostilities, and the Dönitz government lasted mere days. He was charged with war crimes and tried at Nuremberg. Specifically, the charges against him cited his heavy-handed repression of Dutch resisters, the placement of thousands of Jews in the Amsterdam ghetto, and the deportation of some 110,000 Jews to death camps in the East, where all but 5,000 perished—leading to an overall loss of 75 percent of Dutch and foreign Jews between 1940 and 1945. Seyss-Inquart was found guilty and was hanged on October 16, 1946.
Franz Six was an SS-Brigadeführer who, after a career as a senior university academic in history and political science, became a Nazi official and leader of an Einsatzgruppe destined to operate in what would become occupied Britain.
Franz Alfred Six was born in Mannheim, Baden-Württemberg, on August 12, 1909. The son of a furniture dealer, he finished high school in 1930 and enrolled at the University of Heidelberg, where he studied sociology, journalism, and political science. He became an activist in the Heidelberg National Socialist German Students’ League (Nationalsozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund, or NSDStB). His doctoral studies were supervised by Professor Arnold Bergstraesser, who, owing to his Jewish ancestry, was dismissed from his university post under the Nazis and forced to flee to the United States.
Six earned his doctorate in 1934 and, in 1936, his habilitation, enabling him access to a university teaching career at the University of Königsberg. In 1937, Six became a professor of journalism there; in 1939, he took the chair of foreign political sciences at the University of Berlin, and the following year he became dean of the university’s Faculty of International Studies and head of the German Foreign Studies Institute.
A committed Nazi, Six built for himself a second career within the Nazi hierarchy. He joined the NSDAP in 1930 and the SA in 1932, where he served the party as a student organizer. In 1935, he joined the SS and became a member of the SD working as head of its press office in Berlin. The head of the SD, Reinhard Heydrich, noticed Six as a rising star and, in 1937, appointed him as head of Amt VII of the Reich Security Main Office—that is, the de facto head of the domestic security service involved with ideological and propaganda warfare. He would hold this position until 1943.
From this position, Six made a major contribution relative to Jewish and racial policy as well as antisemitic persecution by the SD. His role in this regard was largely suppressed after the war, with his subordinate, Adolf Eichmann, much more visible.
Six, together with the head of the Gestapo, Heinrich Müller, was given responsibility for organizing preparations for police activities prior to the attack on Poland in September 1939. As a key member of the SD, he was thoroughly apprised of the plans of Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler, as well as Heydrich, to liquidate the Polish elites and leadership cohorts.
On September 17, 1940, Six was appointed by Hitler to eliminate anti-Nazi elements in Britain following a successful Wehrmacht invasion. In such an event, a list (Sonderfahndungsliste G. B., or Special Search List Great Britain) of up to 2,800 of those to be wiped out had earlier been compiled by another senior SD officer, Walter Schellenberg. Not only were prominent British individuals to be captured; potentially subversive organizations were to be destroyed, the free media was to be shut down, much of the male population was to be enslaved, and Einsatzkommandos were to be sent out across Britain—to London, Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol, Liverpool, and either Edinburgh or Glasgow—to wipe out resisters and all Jews.
With the German defeat in the Battle of Britain, plans for Einsatzgruppe England were abandoned, and on June 20, 1941, immediately before Operation Barbarossa, Six was redeployed to Einsatzgruppe B under overall command of Arthur Nebe, directing Vorkommando Moscow (SK 7c), the Einsatzkommando tasked with weakening enemy resistance and destroying Jews. In dispatches to Berlin in July and August 1941, Six took responsibility for killing 144 people. He reported on the unit’s involvement in shooting operations in the Smolensk area, including the shooting of 38 “intellectual Jews, who tried to provoke dissatisfaction and unrest in the newly erected Smolensk ghetto.” As a reward for his “exceptional service,” Himmler promoted Six to SS-Oberführer on November 9, 1941.
Six next became lead of the Cultural Policy Department in the Foreign Office in September 1942. Here, he worked closely on propaganda with the Press Department, in particular on matters justifying the persecution of the Jews. Six wrote extensively, and his pamphlets sold rapidly. He argued continually that the Jewish question had to be dealt with as a matter of urgency and “brought to a solution” internationally. Again, he was rewarded for his work, and on January 31, 1945, he was promoted SS-Brigadeführer.
Toward the end of war, Six went into hiding, first near Salzburg and then as farmhand Georg Becker in Hesse. He was arrested by the Americans in January 1946.
At the 1948, Einsatzgruppen trial, he was tried as a war criminal, although the tribunal could not link him directly to the mass murders for which he was charged. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison; this was later commuted to 10 years, and Six was released in October 1952 by the U.S. high commissioner for Germany, John J. McCloy.
In 1957, after his release from Landsberg Prison, Franz Six became head of advertising with the Porsche Motor Company. He maintained his writing as before and retained his title of professor before retiring on a full pension to Friedrichshafen in southern Germany.
Six was called as a defense witness during the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961; he testified but did not travel to Israel, for fear that he would have been arrested as a war criminal. Between 1963 and 1968, the Berlin prosecutor investigated Six for his involvement in the Final Solution, but no action was taken, as his attorneys claimed successfully that his poor health rendered him unfit to stand trial.
At the end of his life, Franz Six retired to a luxury house in Caldaro (Kaltern) in the Bolzano district of the South Tyrol. He died in his sleep on July 9, 1975.
Adolf Hitler’s chief architect, Albert Speer, served as Reich minister for armaments and war production for most of World War II. He used his organizational skills and the labor of millions of concentration camp prisoners, forced laborers, and prisoners of war to keep the military armed and fighting.
Berthold Konrad Hermann Albert Speer was born on March 19, 1905, the second of three sons of an upper-middle-class family in Mannheim. He became an architect, as his father and grandfather had before him. In 1918, the family moved permanently to their summer home, Villa Speer, on Schloss-Wolfsbrunnenweg, Heidelberg, where Speer took up skiing and mountaineering. Because his parents’ income was limited by the 1923 hyperinflation crisis, Speer began architectural studies at the University of Karlsruhe; when the crisis abated, he transferred to study at the Technical University of Munich. In 1925, he transferred again, to study under Heinrich Tessenow at the Technical University of Berlin. Passing his exams in 1927, Speer became Tessenow’s assistant, teaching some classes while continuing his graduate studies.
Speer, apolitical as a young man, attended a Berlin Nazi rally in December 1930 at the urging of some of his students, and he joined the Nazi Party on March 1, 1931. He found in Adolf Hitler not only an inspiring speaker but also the answer to his concern about communism and his belief that Germany needed to return to its past glory.
In 1931, Speer gave up his position as Tessenow’s assistant and moved back to Mannheim, where he managed his father’s properties. In July 1932, Nazi Party official Karl Hanke proposed to Joseph Goebbels that he use Speer to renovate the party’s Berlin headquarters. After completing this assignment and providing acceptable plans for the Nuremberg Party rally of 1933, Speer was in constant contact with Hitler, who appointed him the Nazi Party’s chief architect in early 1934. His projects included building the huge Nuremberg stadium designed to hold over 300,000 people and the German pavilion for the 1937 International Exposition in Paris. Soon, Speer was the inspector general of the Reich.
World War II prevented the realization of many of Speer’s architectural plans, including the rebuilding of Berlin. However, when Fritz Todt, Hitler’s minister for armaments and war production, died in an airplane accident on February 8, 1942, Speer’s proven efficiency and business skills made him ideal to take over as minister.
The German economy was not up to wartime production; Speer’s first task was to bring it up to that level. No fewer than five Supreme Authorities had jurisdiction over armament production, while the Ministry of Economic Affairs declared in November 1941 that conditions did not permit any increase in armament production. Moreover, few women worked in factories, which were running only one shift. Speer centralized power over the war economy in himself. Since so much of the German economy was based on military production, he found himself effectively in charge of the entire economy.
Speer’s results were impressive. By 1943, he had markedly increased tank and airplane production and had dramatically reduced the time required to bring a German submarine from planning to launch, despite Germany being the subject of massive Allied bombing.
In order to optimize the use of German and slave labor, Speer wanted Karl Hanke appointed as a labor leader. Instead, Hitler, under Martin Bormann’s influence, appointed Fritz Sauckel. Rather than increasing female participation and better organizing German labor, as Speer favored, Sauckel imported more slave labor from the occupied nations as workers for Speer’s armament factories. On December 10, 1943, Speer visited the underground Mittelwerk V-2 rocket factory that used concentration camp labor. He claimed, after the war, that he had been shocked by the conditions there.
By 1943, even as the Allies had gained air superiority over Germany, tank production more than doubled, production of planes increased by 80 percent, and production time for submarines was reduced from one year to two months. Output would continue to increase until the second half of 1944.
Because of Allied raids on aircraft factories, Hitler authorized the creation of a governmental task force composed of the Reich Aviation Ministry, Armaments Ministry, and SS personnel, the aim of which was to ensure the preservation and growth of fighter-aircraft production. This continued to improve until late 1944, with Allied bombing destroying just 9 percent of German fighter aircraft production, which more than doubled from 1943 to 1944.
In January 1944, Speer fell ill for three months with complications from an inflamed knee, resulting in his detachment from day-to-day operations. With Hitler’s support, he was able to fight off the efforts of others—including Bormann, Hermann Göring, and Heinrich Himmler—to take over some of his areas of responsibility.
Speer’s task force increased the exploitation of slave labor, especially in aviation manufacturing. The SS provided 64,000 prisoners for 20 separate projects at the peak of construction activities. A high mortality rate was associated with the underground construction projects, with the workforce involving 80,000 to 90,000 inmates from the subcamps of Mittelbau-Dora, Mauthausen-Gusen, Buchenwald, and other camps. On August 1, 1944, Speer reformed the task force into the Rüstungsstab (armament staff) and then operated with the same model of operation for all top-priority armament programs.
Speer’s formation of the Rüstungsstab now consolidated key arms-manufacturing projects for the three branches of the military under the authority of his ministry. The task force managed the development and production activities of the Volksjäger (people’s fighter), as part of the Emergency Fighter Program.
After Hitler’s death, Speer worked in the short-lived government of Karl Dönitz, Hitler’s successor, until arrested by the British. As he attained his success in greatly increasing Germany’s weaponry using forced labor (including millions of Jewish concentration camp prisoners and prisoners of war) in factories around the Reich, in horrid conditions that resulted in death for many of the workers, he was charged with planning and/or participating in a war of aggression, conspiring to plan a war of aggression, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. He was convicted on the last two charges. He stood trial as one of the defendants at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg.
During the trial, Speer was the only defendant who acknowledged responsibility for the crimes of the Reich and for his role in them. He contended that he knew nothing of the extermination of the Jews and that he plotted to kill Hitler in 1945—contentions that were and continue to be seriously doubted—but his was a unique response to the charges of the tribunal. Speer was sentenced to and served 20 years in Spandau Prison, from which he was released on October 1, 1966. He then authored three books, including Inside the Third Reich and Spandau: The Secret Diaries. Speer died in London on September 1, 1981.
STAHLECKER, FRANZ WALTER (1900–1942)
Franz Walter Stahlecker was commander of the SS security forces for the Reichskommissariat Ostland from 1941 to 1942, commanding Einsatzgruppe A, the most murderous of the four Einsatzgruppen active in German-occupied Eastern Europe.
Stahlecker was born on October 10, 1900, in Sternenfels, Baden-Württemberg. He was the second son of a wealthy Protestant pastor, Paul Stahlecker, and his wife Anna. His strict German nationalist family moved in 1905 to the university town of Tübingen, where Stahlecker’s father became headmaster of the girls’ secondary school there. On completing high school, Stahlecker served in the German military during World War I.
In 1919, after demobilization, he joined the antidemocratic, right-wing, and armed Tübingen student battalion, where he fought against the political left. He also participated in militant nationalist and antisemitic organizations, such as the German Volkschutz and Trutzbund, which gravitated toward the recently established National Socialist Party. In 1921, Stahlecker became a member of the NSDAP.
Stahlecker studied at the University of Tübingen, completing his law degree in 1924 and receiving his doctorate in law in 1927. There, he befriended Martin Sandberger, Erich Ehrlinger, and Eugen Steimle, who later became his accomplices in mass murder.
In 1927, Stahlecker joined the Württemberg state service, and by the fall of 1930, he took charge of an employment office as an administrator. In 1932, he married Luise-Gabriele von Gültlingen, who came from old Swabian imperial nobility.
In 1932, Stahlecker rejoined the Nazi Party and was appointed head of the Württemberg Gestapo in 1934. On August 20, 1938, he became head of the Central Agency for Jewish Emigration in Vienna, whose overall head was Adolf Eichmann. After this, he became the higher SS and police leader of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, reporting to Karl Hermann Frank.
In mid-October 1939, Eichmann and Stahlecker decided to begin implementation of the Nisko Plan, which called for the expulsion and resettlement of Poland’s Jews into the inaccessible corner of the territory of the Generalgouvernement bordering the cities of Lublin and Nisko. The plan was devised in September 1939, after the invasion of Poland, and was implemented between October 1939 and April 1940. It was the brainchild of Adolf Hitler, with help from Alfred Rosenberg and Heinrich Himmler and with added participation from Eichmann, Heinrich Müller, Hans Frank, and Arthur Seyss-Inquart. Odilo Globocnik, the SS and police leader of the new Lublin District, was put in charge of the reservation. In total, about 95,000 Jews were deported to the Lublin Reservation. The main camp of the entire complex was set up in Bełżec, and in March 1942, it became the first Nazi extermination camp of Aktion Reinhard.
A clash with Reinhard Heydrich caused Stahlecker to move to the Foreign Office, and in 1940, he was sent to Norway to serve as higher SS and police leader there. Stahlecker was highly ambitious and had strong organizational and intellectual skills. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, he became an SS-Brigadeführer, a major general in the police, and was appointed to command Einsatzgruppe A. The mission of Einsatzgruppe A was to hunt down and annihilate Jews, Roma, communists, and other “undesirables,” by following Army Group North as it overran the Baltic States and areas of Russia west of Leningrad.
Stahlecker founded the infamous extermination group called the Arājs Kommando. After the entry of Einsatzgruppe A into Riga, contact between Stahlecker and a local Latvian nationalist leader, Viktors Arājs, was established on July 1, 1941. Stahlecker instructed Arājs to set up a commando group, which came to be composed of far-right-wing students and former officers. All the members were volunteers and free to leave at any time. On July 2, 1941, Stahlecker told Arājs that his commando had to unleash a spontaneous-looking pogrom.
The Arājs Kommando thus collaborated in Nazi atrocities, including the killing of Jews, Roma, and mental patients, as well as civilian massacres along Latvia’s eastern border with the Soviet Union. It murdered the Jews of the Riga ghetto, and in the Rumbula massacre of November 30 and December 8, 1941, it murdered up to 26,000 Jews deported from Germany. Some of the Arājs Kommando’s men also served as guards at the Salaspils concentration camp. Contemporary Nazi newsreels prominently featured the Arājs Kommando in order to project the image that anti-Jewish activity in the Baltic States was local and not directed by Nazis. The unit numbered about 30 to 500 men during the period that it participated in the killing of the Latvian Jewish population and was disbanded in the final phases of the war.
By the winter of 1941, Stahlecker reported to Berlin that Einsatzgruppe A had murdered some 249,420 Jews and other Soviet citizens. In November 1941, he was made higher SS and police leader of the Ostland, comprising Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Belarus. In December 1941, he established Nazi concentration camp Jungfernhof, which operated near Riga.
Stahlecker was killed on March 23, 1942, in a clash with Soviet partisans near Krasnogvardeysk, Russia.
Franz Paul Stangl was an Austrian-born police officer who worked in the Aktion T-4 euthanasia program and was commandant of Sobibór and Treblinka extermination camps.
He was born in Altmunster, Austria, on March 26, 1908. His father, a night watchman who ruled his family with iron discipline, died in 1916. As a young man, Stangl played and taught the zither to support his family. He completed his public schooling in 1923 and then was apprenticed as weaver, qualifying as a master weaver in 1927. He moved to Innsbruck in 1930, applied to join the Austrian federal police, was accepted in early 1931, and trained for two years at the federal police academy in Linz, where he described his trainers as “sadists.”
Stangl became a member of the Austrian Nazi Party in 1931, membership of which was forbidden to Austrian police at that time. In 1935, he was made a detective in the town of Wels. After the Anschluss between Austria and Germany on March 12, 1938, Stangl was assigned to the Schutzpolizei (later called the Gestapo) in Linz, where he was posted to the Jewish Bureau. In May 1938, he joined the SS, reaching the rank of captain.
In 1940, Stangl was transferred back to Upper Silesia, where he became deputy to Christian Wirth, head of the entire Nazi euthanasia program. He became a superintendent of the T-4 euthanasia program at the Euthanasia Institute at Schloss Hartheim, where mentally and physically handicapped people were sent to be murdered.
Hartheim operated as a training center for the industrial murder of human beings. Stangl and many others who would later murder Jews during the Aktion Reinhard campaign received their technical and psychological training there. Staff from Aktion T-4 were deployed to work in the gas chamber and crematoria complexes in the death camps, where they implemented the Final Solution. After leaving Hartheim in 1942, Stangl was transferred to Poland and worked under the SS leader Odilo Globocnik. In Poland, Stangl was commandant of the death camp at Sobibór between March and September 1942.
Stangl was then transferred to manage Treblinka, the largest of the three Aktion Reinhard camps in occupied Poland, which he commanded from September 1942 through the camp’s closure in August 1943. He proved to be a highly efficient and dedicated organizer of mass murder, receiving an official commendation as the “best camp commander” in Poland. Always dressed in white riding clothes and carrying a whip, Stangl’s reputation was built on his skills as an administrator. He was not a sadist but took pride and pleasure in running the death camp like clockwork; he regarded his victims as “cargo to be dispatched.” Stangl was responsible for the murder of most of Treblinka’s approximately 900,000 Jewish victims.
Franz Stangl was commandant of the death camp at Sobibór between March and September 1942, and the related death camp at Treblinka, which he commanded from September 1942 until the camp’s closure in August 1943. Escaping immediate justice after the war, he was eventually tracked down and extradited to West Germany in 1967, where he was tried and found guilty of complicity in the mass murder of 900,000 Jews at Treblinka. On June 28, 1971, he suffered a heart attack and died in prison in Düsseldorf. (ullstein bild via Getty Images)
In August 1943, along with Globocnik, Stangl was transferred to Trieste, where he helped organize the campaign against Yugoslav partisans and local Jews. Due to illness, he returned to Vienna in early 1945.
At the end of the war in 1945, Stangl was captured by the Americans and briefly imprisoned as a member of the SS who had been involved in antipartisan activities in Yugoslavia and Italy. His earlier service in Poland was not known at this time. In late 1947, Stangl was handed over to the Austrians in connection with his involvement in the euthanasia program at Schloss Hartheim, and he was transferred to an open, civilian prison in Linz. On May 30, 1948, Stangl walked out of the prison with his Austrian colleague from Sobibór, SS Sergeant Gustav Wagner. Austrian Roman Catholic Bishop Alois Hudal, a Nazi sympathizer, helped Stangl and Wagner escape through a ratline and reach Syria using a Red Cross passport.
Arriving in Damascus, Stangl was joined by his wife and family. He worked there for three years as a mechanical engineer in a textile mill. In 1951, the Stangl family emigrated to Brazil, and in 1959, after working in a variety of jobs, Stangl became an engineer at a Volkswagen factory in São Bernardo do Campo, still using his own name.
Although Stangl’s responsibility for the mass murder of men, women, and children was known to the Austrian authorities, it took until 1961 for his name to appear on the official Austrian list of wanted criminals and a warrant to be issued for his arrest. As he never used an assumed name, it is not clear why it took so long to apprehend him. It then took another six years, through February 28, 1967, before Stangl was tracked down by Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal and arrested by Brazilian federal police.
After extradition to West Germany, he was tried for coresponsibility in the mass murder of 900,000 Jews at Treblinka. Stangl admitted to these killings but argued, “My conscience is clear. I was simply doing my duty.” He was sentenced to life imprisonment on October 22, 1970. In prison, British journalist Gitta Sereny questioned Stangl across 70 hours of interviews, attempting to understand him in the role as a mass murderer. He again claimed that his conscience was clear, and in his last interview with Sereny, he stated that he “never intentionally hurt anyone . . . But I was there [and] in reality I share the guilt.”
On June 28, 1971, the day after Sereny completed the last of her interviews, Stangl suffered a heart attack and died in Dusseldorf Prison.
Eduard Strauch was an SS-Obersturmbannführer, commander of Einsatzkommando 2, and chief of two Nazi organizations, the SiPo and the SD, first in Belarus and then in Belgium. In October 1944, he was transferred to the Waffen-SS.
Strauch was born on August 17, 1906, in Essen. His father was a factory foreman. After World War I, his parents lost money because of hyperinflation, and, as schoolboys, Strauch and his brother worked to augment the family’s income. Strauch was radicalized and joined the right-wing Young German Order, to which he belonged until the end of 1927.
After he began studying theology at the universities of Erlangen (Erlangen-Nuremberg) and Münster, he changed direction and instead studied law. He graduated with a degree in jurisprudence.
On August 1, 1931, Strauch joined the Nazi Party and the SA. On December 1, 1931, he became a member of the SS, and in 1934, he began working for the SD. He remained there until the outbreak of war in September 1939.
With the start of Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, Strauch assumed command of Einsatzkommando 2, which was part of Einsatzgruppe A, whose assigned territory was the Baltic region and northern Russia. From November 4, 1941, Einsatzgruppe A was under the command of Franz Walter Stahlecker. The higher SS and police leader (Höherer SS-und Polizeiführer, or HSSPF) covering the same territory was Friedrich Jeckeln. On November 27, 1941, the Jews of the Riga ghetto were informed they would be deported farther east. Three days later, on November 30, Strauch and 20 men under his command, together with Latvian SS units led by Victors Arājs, took part in the murder of some 15,000 Jews in the Rumbula forest near the city. On December 8, 1941, another 10,000 went to their deaths. After disrobing and handing over their valuables, the Jews were murdered by both Latvian and German Sonderkommandos. As a reward for this service, Strauch was promoted to commander of the SiPo and the SD and transferred to Belarus.
In the spring of 1942, many children in the Minsk ghetto were caught in the streets and thrown into gas vans. On March 2, 1942, alone, the Germans killed 200 to 300 children in a kindergarten, along with medical staff and educators. By the end of July 1942, Strauch organized a major massacre at Minsk, and the first victims were those unable to work. Soon, mass pogroms were organized. In the entire period dating from the German occupation of Minsk by the end of August 1941 (before Strauch’s arrival) right up to July 28, 1942, 71,000 Jews from the Minsk ghetto were killed. On October 21 to 23, 1943, another 22,000 from other parts of Europe were brought in to be killed. All in all, of the 100,000 Jews in the Minsk ghetto, only 2 to 3 percent survived.
Strauch was also in charge of the Maly Trostenets camp; in this small village, 12 kilometers southeast of Minsk, between 60,000 and 65,000 people, mostly Jewish, were exterminated between May 1942 and June 1944. In the forest area Blagovshchina, near Maly Trostenets, Strauch had nearly 16,000 Jews from the “Old Reich” and the occupied German territories shot or asphyxiated in gas vans.
The small Belarusian city of Slutsk had been occupied on June 26, 1941, and Jews had formed a majority before the war. Soon after the occupation, a ghetto was established. After that, thousands were murdered in October 1941 by the Gestapo and Lithuanian militias. On February 5, 1943, Strauch assembled several dozen SS officers and men, as well as the regular security police, and together with a company of Latvian military volunteers, they took part in the extermination of the ghetto’s Jews. The number of Jewish victims murdered during the existence of the ghetto was about 18,000; overall, it is estimated that a total of 30,000 civilians were killed in and around Slutsk during the war.
In July 1943, the Nazi general commissioner for White Russia, Wilhelm Kube, reported on his discussion with Strauch and referred to him as the particularly adept leader of the SD who had just affected the murder of tens of thousands of Jews in the past 10 weeks.
Despite such reports, Strauch had personal issues within the SS. He was sometimes exposed to criticism because of his alcoholism, and his activities were, it was said, “predominantly instinctual,” especially “under the deterrent effect of alcohol.” SS-Obergruppenführer Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, who was HSSPF in the Minsk area, described Strauch as “the worst human I ever met in my life.” A possible promotion of Strauch to Standartenführer was denied owing to negative evaluations like Bach-Zelewski’s.
On April 5, 1944, Strauch was appointed SiPo and SD commander for Belgium and northern France. Stationed in Brussels, he was tasked with eliminating the Belgian resistance movement. By the time of his arrival, the Belgian Jews had already been deported. In October, Strauch was transferred into the Waffen-SS.
At the Einsatzgruppen trial in Nuremberg, Strauch was found guilty of crimes against humanity and was sentenced to death. Unlike his codefendants Otto Ohlendorf and Paul Blobel, Strauch was not hanged, however, but extradited to Belgium. In Liège, he was charged with shooting prisoners of war, and in 1949, he was again sentenced to death. The sentence was never carried out, owing to the defendant’s mental illness. Strauch died in a sanatorium in Uccle, Belgium, in custody, on September 15, 1955.
STRECKENBACH, BRUNO (1907–1977)
Bruno Streckenbach was an SS-Gruppenführer. In Kraków, during May 1940, he led mass arrests and the death of the members of the Polish intelligentsia, and from 1941, he was responsible for the murder of thousands of Jews as an SS Einsatzgruppen leader.
Bruno Heinrich Streckenbach was born on February 7, 1902, in Hamburg, the son of a customs official. He served in the final year of World War I, and in 1919, aged 17, he joined a local Freikorps. In 1920, he started working in business, and in 1930, he joined the NSDAP, becoming a member of the SS in September 1931.
In December 1933, Streckenbach was appointed head of the Hamburg Gestapo until, in 1938, SS-Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler promoted him to Security Police inspector in the 10th Military District. There, he was also the head of the Munich Gestapo. He developed a reputation for exceptional brutality. In Munich, there was a high death rate among prisoners; on Streckenbach’s orders, their bodies were immediately cremated, without any forensic examination.
When Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the Sicherheitsdienst, created five Einsatzgruppen to follow in the wake of the German military. They were later reinforced by members of the Ordnungspolizei (Orpo) and Waffen-SS men coming from the Totenkopfverbände (“Death’s Head Units”) employed in the concentration camps. Streckenbach commanded Einsatzgruppe I from August 1939 to November 1939, serving in the Neutitschen, Bielsko, and Rzeszów areas, where he was responsible for the murders of thousands of Jews. After November 1939, personnel from this Einsatzgruppe were assigned to SS and SD units in Kraków.
On October 31, 1939, Streckenbach informed Hans Frank, governor-general of Poland, about Himmler’s intention to deport all Jews who lived in the regions of Poland that were now part of the Reich and to replace them with 1 million Poles “of good origin” who could be considered racially acceptable for Germanization.
In November 1939, Streckenbach was appointed commander of the Security Police and the SD for the Generalgouvernement. Under a decree dated November 28, 1939, the Nazi-appointed Jewish Council (Judenrat) was placed under the control of the civilian authorities, and at a meeting in Kraków two days later, Streckenbach—together with Hans Frank, Friedrich- Wilhelm Krüger, Otto von Wächter, and others—informed the meeting that the Security Police were “very interested” in the Jewish question and that “sooner or later all questions pertaining to Jewish matters would have to be referred to the Security Police,” regardless of whatever else happened. It was later agreed that the civilian authorities would cooperate with Streckenbach’s forces.
Streckenbach was also involved in Generalplan Ost, the Nazi plan for the expulsion of more than 50 million non-Germanized Slavs of Eastern Europe beyond the Ural Mountains and into Siberia. In their place, up to 10 million Germans would be settled in an expanded living space, or lebensraum. As part of this, Streckenbach oversaw the expulsion and relocation of approximately 88,000 Poles from the former western Polish provinces into the Generalgouvernement.
As a senior SS officer, Bruno Streckenbach was involved in Generalplan Ost, the Nazi plan for the expulsion of the Slavs of Eastern Europe. They, in turn, would be replaced by millions of Germans who would be settled in response to the Nazi demands for lebensraum (“living space”). In May 1940 he led mass arrests of members of the Polish intelligentsia in Kraków and was later responsible for the murder of thousands of Jews as a leader of SS Einsatzgruppe I. Streckenbach escaped punishment after the war, and lived freely until October 28, 1977, when he died in Hamburg at 75 years of age. (Fetzer/ullstein bild via Getty Images)
The Reich’s military planning committee planned the A-B Aktion (Ausserordentliche Befriedungsaktion, or Extraordinary Pacification Operation) during February and March 1940, and Hans Frank ordered its commencement for May 16, 1940. This was directed against the Polish intelligentsia. Streckenbach oversaw the arrest and murder of 3,500 Polish intellectuals, who were mostly murdered in the forest near Palmiry, not far from Warsaw.
In June 1940, SD chief Reinhard Heydrich ordered Streckenbach’s transfer from Kraków. He was sent to Berlin as the head of Amt I, the staff department of the Reich Main Security Office.
Just prior to the German invasion of the Soviet Union, in May 1941, Streckenbach received top-secret orders to proceed to the police barracks at Pretzsch on the Elbe. He replaced Werner Best in training future Einsatzgruppen commanders and was required to give a three-week training course for handpicked members of the SD, Gestapo, Waffen-SS, and Orpo, who were to be instructed for Einsatzgruppen service. Veterans of earlier German atrocities in Poland now became members of one of four newly constituted Einsatzgruppen destined for Soviet Russia as part of Operation Barbarossa.
Streckenbach detailed the mission of the Einsatzgruppen: They were to seize and destroy all political and racial enemy groups, such as Bolsheviks, Roma (“Gypsies”), partisans, and Jews. In addition, they were to report on and evaluate material seized during the campaign and to gather information from agents among the Soviet population. Streckenbach ordered that all enemies of the Reich were to be deported to concentration camps and executed. Jews were especially singled out for Sonderbehandlung (special treatment), meaning extermination. A follow-up meeting took place on June 17, 1941, in Heydrich’s office in Berlin, and on July 2, the Einzsatzgruppen and their constituent Einsatzkommando groups received their written instructions.
On November 9, 1941, Streckenbach was promoted to SS-Gruppenführer and police general and was placed in charge of security forces operating behind the front lines of Army Group North. With Reinhard Heydrich’s death on June 4, 1942, Streckenbach had assumed that he would be promoted to the post of head of the Security Police and SD; instead, Ernst Kaltenbrunner took the position.
That September, Streckenbach requested transfer to a frontline unit, and accordingly, he took command of 8th SS Cavalry Division Florian Geyer, with the rank of SS-Obersturmführer. By April 1943, Streckenbach was in command of the division’s antitank battalion. In the autumn of 1943, he replaced Hermann Fegelein as a divisional commander and was promoted to SS-Oberführer on January 30, 1944. From April 1944 to May 8, 1945, Streckenbach had command of the 19th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (2nd Latvian), and in November 1944, he became an SS-Gruppenführer. He was heavily decorated for his military service.
In May 1945, Streckenbach was taken prisoner in the Soviet Union, and in 1952, he was sentenced to serve 25 years in prison. He was released on October 10, 1955, as part of the post-Stalin thaw, which resulted in the release of Germans from Soviet prisoner-of-war camps and gulags.
West German attempts in 1972 to bring him to justice failed. He faced trial in 1973, but the case was dismissed due to his ill health; heart disease did not guarantee that he would survive until the end of the trial. In addition, the court counted his imprisonment in Soviet captivity as time served.
Bruno Streckenbach escaped punishment for his crimes against humanity and lived free and unconstrained until October 28, 1977, when he died in Hamburg, aged 75.
Julius Streicher was a rabidly antisemitic German politician and prominent member of the Nazi Party prior to World War II. He founded and published the anti-Jewish newspaper Der Stürmer, which became a central element of the Nazi propaganda machine.
He was born on February 12, 1885, in Fleinhausen, Bavaria, one of nine children of elementary teacher Friedrich Streicher and his wife Anna. He followed his father and also became an elementary teacher, and in 1909, he moved on to the administration of a secondary school in Nuremberg. In 1913, Streicher married Kunigunde Roth, a baker’s daughter, who died in 1943, after 30 years of marriage. They had two children. Streicher joined the German army in 1914, and during World War I, he won the Iron Cross First and Second Class for bravery. By the time of the Armistice in November 1918, he had attained the rank of lieutenant.
With the end of the war, Streicher was demobilized and returned to Nuremberg. He resumed teaching, but by 1919, he became involved in right-wing politics. In 1920, in response to the failed communist revolution of 1918, Streicher founded the Nuremberg chapter of the German Socialist Party, which, far from being socialist, was a strongly antisemitic, anti-Catholic, and intensely nationalistic entity, which considered that Jews had conspired with Bolshevik traitors in trying to subject Germany to communist rule.
Streicher sought to move the German Socialists toward greater levels of antisemitism, which aroused so much opposition that he left the group and in 1921 joined the German Workers’ Party. In 1921, he heard Adolf Hitler speak, identified him as a mentor, and in 1922 joined the Nazi Party. He merged his personal following with Hitler’s, almost doubling the party membership and making him one of Adolf Hitler’s earliest political associates.
In May 1923, Streicher founded and began publishing Der Stürmer (The Stormer), an antisemitic newspaper that served as a useful tool for Nazi propaganda and that reinforced the party’s racial policies. A weekly, it produced violent, obscene, and pornographic stories and cartoons about “Jewish perfidy.” Der Stürmer often published caricatures of Jews depicting them as ugly characters with exaggerated facial features and misshapen bodies. It ran accusations of blood libel, such as that Jews killed children, sacrificed them, and drank their blood. It also included sexually explicit, anti-Catholic, anticommunist, and antimonarchist propaganda. Streicher described Jews as sex offenders who violated the innocent and carried out bizarre sex crimes. He also frequently reported attempts of Jewish child molestation.
Der Stürmer never lacked details about sex, names, and crimes to keep readers aroused and entertained. The accusations were for the most part wildly inaccurate and were rarely investigated. Through the adaptation and amalgamation of almost every existing antisemitic stereotype, myth, and tradition, Der Stürmer’s virulent attacks were aimed at the dehumanization and demonization of Jews. The paper was not an official publication of the Nazi Party; as it was published privately by Streicher, it did not display the swastika in its logo. It provided Streicher with a lucrative income and made him a multimillionaire.
Streicher participated in Hitler’s failed Beer Hall Putsch on November 8 to 9, 1923, marching with Hitler in the front row of the demonstrators and braving the bullets of the Munich police. His loyalty earned him Hitler’s lifelong trust and protection, and Streicher became one of Hitler’s few intimates. Streicher was elected in 1924 to the Bavarian legislature (Landtag), a position he held until 1932, which gave him a modicum of parliamentary immunity that helped him resist efforts to silence his racist message.
Streicher’s early campaigns against Jews made extreme claims that came just short of violating a law that might get the paper shut down. Der Stürmer alleged that the Jews had caused the unemployment and inflation Germany suffered during the 1920s. When the Nazi Party was legalized again in 1925, after having been suppressed owing to the putsch, Hitler appointed Streicher as gauleiter of the Bavarian region of Franconia, including Nuremberg.
Streicher was fired from his teaching position in 1923 for his involvement in the putsch, enabling him to focus on his newspaper. He managed to substantially increase its readership while engaging in illicit right-wing political activities.
After Hitler came to power in January 1933, Nazi control of the German state apparatus gave the gauleiters enormous power, which Streicher wielded happily in Nuremberg. In 1933, he organized the April 1 one-day boycott of Jewish businesses, which was used as a model for other antisemitic commercial measures. In 1935, he helped create the political environment leading to the creation of the Nuremberg Laws on race. In the meantime, his newspaper and other publishing ventures reached the pinnacle of success. Hitler declared that Der Stürmer was his favorite newspaper and saw to it that each weekly issue was posted for public reading in every town and village in special glassed-in display cases known as Stürmerkasten. The newspaper reached a peak circulation of 600,000 in 1935.
Streicher’s excesses, however, brought condemnation even from other Nazis. His outrageous personal behavior included unconcealed adultery, several furious verbal attacks on other gauleiters, and striding through the streets of Nuremberg cracking a bullwhip. He was viewed by many Nazi leaders as a loose cannon—narcissistic, volatile, and greedy. He was accused of keeping Jewish property seized after Kristallnacht in November 1938. His political downfall came in 1939, after an incident in which he tried publicly to humiliate Hermann Göring. The Supreme Nazi Party Court pronounced Streicher “unfit for leadership” and stripped him of his party posts, effectively banishing him from the inner echelons of the Nazi Party. He was forbidden to issue any public statements, and by 1940, he had been stripped of his rank and other offices. Streicher was permitted to continue publishing Der Stürmer, however, which he did until early 1945.
When Germany surrendered to the Allies in May 1945, Streicher said he was suicidal; instead, he married his former secretary, Adele Tappe. On May 23, 1945, Allied troops captured Streicher in Waidring, Austria; although he first attempted to hide his true name, he soon admitted his identity.
Streicher was taken into custody, charged with crimes against humanity, and tried by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. His publishing and speaking activities were a major part of the evidence presented against him. The prosecutors argued that Streicher’s role in provoking Germans to kill Jews made him an accessory to murder, as much to blame as those who carried out the killing. Evidence was given that Streicher continued to publish his provocative articles and speeches when he knew that Jews were being slaughtered.
Streicher was convicted of crimes against humanity and sentenced to death on October 1, 1946. He was hanged, along with the other condemned, at Nuremberg, on October 16, 1946.
Arnold Strippel was an SS-Obersturmführer and member of the SS-Totenkopfverbände who operated the Nazi concentration camps. While assigned to the camp at Neuengamme in 1945, he was given the task of murdering the child victims of a tuberculosis medical experiment conducted by the SS doctor Kurt Heissmeyer.
Arnold Strippel was born on June 2, 1911, in Unshausen, north Hesse. Between the ages of 6 and 14, he attended elementary school in Unshausen. He completed three years training in his uncle’s construction company and then worked there as a carpenter. Later, he worked on his parents’ farm. In May 1940, at age 28, Strippel married; a son was born from the marriage.
In the spring of 1934, Strippel applied to work with the SS. He began his service in October 1934 as a security guard in the Sachsenburg concentration camp. From 1937, Strippel was employed at Buchenwald; there, he soon became a SS-Rapportführer (rapport leader), overseeing morning and evening roll call, camp discipline, and training for junior SS personnel. An SS-Rapportführer was usually a midlevel noncommissioned officer (often an Oberscharführer or Hauptscharführer) specific to the Totenkopfverbände.
From March to October 1941, Strippel worked as an SS-Scharführer at the Natzweiler concentration camp in France and, from October 1941, as an SS-Untersturmführer at Majdanek in Poland.
After a brief time working in the main camp at Ravensbrück, in June 1943, he was set to the Ravensbrück subcamp of Karlshagen II, a scientific experimental site where the V2 rocket would later be produced. From October 1943, Strippel was stationed at KZ Herzogenbusch, in the Netherlands.
From May 1944, SS-Obersturmführer Strippel was deployed at Neuengamme concentration camp, and from December 1944 to early May 1945, he managed all of Neuengamme’s subcamps in the Hamburg region.
Strippel was known to be cruel and impulsive. During six tours of duty in various concentration camps, he became adept at torture. His favorite methods included simple beatings with his fists and feet or with various whips and clubs. He frequently indulged in tree hanging, where prisoners were suspended by their arms, which were bound behind them.
Karl Heissmayer, a physician who had close personal Nazi connections (his uncle was SS General August Heissmeyer, and his close acquaintance was SS General Oswald Pohl), was given permission to conduct human experiments to test body responses to tuberculosis injections. While he had initially asked for the trials to be held at Ravensbrück, the experiments eventually took place at Strippel’s Neuengamme.
In 1944, Heissmeyer initially experimented on adult prisoners, but by November 1944, he found that the experiments had not delivered the results for which he had hoped. He then ordered 20 Jewish children, 10 boys and 10 girls, all between the ages of five and twelve, transferred from Auschwitz to test his thesis. Heissmeyer began his experiments just as Allied forces were crossing the Rhine.
As the children grew weaker, Heissmeyer sought advice as to what should be done. On April 20, 1945, when the British were less than three miles from the camp, Rudolf Hoess, commandant of Auschwitz, determined that the children should be eliminated by poison. Strippel agreed. Lacking poison, as directed by Berlin, he improvised.
Two years earlier, the Hamburg SS had taken over Bullenhuser Damm, a bombed-out school, and converted it into a satellite camp of Neuengamme. Strippel delegated SS-Unterscharführer (and Rapportführer) Wilhelm Dreiman to attach four ropes to ceiling pipes at Bullenhuser Damm. The children’s French physicians, Gabriel Florence and René Quenouille, and their Dutch caretakers, Anton Hölzel and Dirk Deutekom, were hanged. So were six Russian prisoners from Neuengamme. Another guard, Johann Frahm, told the 20 children to get undressed; they were going to be vaccinated against typhus. Instead, each of the children received an injection of morphine, and most fell asleep. The six who remained awake were given a second injection.
Frahm lifted the weakest child, Georges Kohn, and brought him into an adjacent room, where two nooses hung from hooks on the wall. Frahm placed the boy into one of the nooses, but he was so frail that the noose would not tighten. Frahm placed the child in a bear hug and pulled down, causing the noose to close. Two at a time, the children were brought into the boiler room and hanged in the same manner. Strippel and other officers supervised the murders; following this, 18 more Russian prisoners were hanged.
Strippel then took the initiative for disposing of the bodies. The next night, he returned to Bullenhuser Damm, in the same truck that had originally transported the children. The corpses were loaded and returned to Neuengamme, where they were cremated under the direction of SS-Unterscharführer Wilhelm Brake. The war in Europe ended 17 days later.
Most of those involved in the murders, including Johann Frahm, were captured soon after the war ended. Once tried, all were executed by hanging in October 1946. Others escaped capture and punishment. One, Hans Petersen, fled to Denmark, where he served a short prison sentence in 1946 for his membership in the SS and died in Sonderburg in December 1967. Another, Hans Klein, was not pursued; he became an instructor of forensic medicine at the University of Heidelberg.
After the massacre at Bullenhuser Damm, Arnold Strippel also went into hiding, working as a farmhand in Hesse. In 1948, he presented himself at the American internment camp in Darmstadt and was dismissed after receiving proper documentation. In mid-December 1948, however, he was recognized in Frankfurt by a former Buchenwald torture victim. Police were summoned, and Strippel was arrested.
The first trial against Strippel began on May 31, 1949, in Frankfurt. He was charged with murdering 21 Jewish prisoners at Buchenwald and of torturing others. On June 1, 1949, he was sentenced to 21 life terms plus an additional 10 years. Strippel began his detention in Butzbach prison, where he was given a privileged post in the prison hospital.
In 1969, lawyers arranged for the arrest order against Strippel to be rescinded, and he left Butzbach on April 21, 1969. In October 1969, a new trial, lasting five months, began. The court upheld that while Strippel had participated in the murders of 21 Jews in Buchenwald, he had not actually fired any fatal shots. He was sentenced to time served in Butzbach and received 121,500 deutsche marks in compensation. Strippel moved to Frankfurt-Kalbach, where he worked as an accountant, purchased a home, and lived quietly until 1975, when he was accused of complicity in the murder of 41 inmates at Majdanek. Found guilty, he was ordered not to leave Germany.
On December 12, 1983, the Hamburg public prosecutor filed charges against Strippel for the murders of the children at Bullenhuser Damm and 22 Neuengamme inmates. After three years of additional legal wrangling, Strippel was deemed unfit to stand trial. He disappeared from public view and died on May 1, 1994, in Frankfurt-Kalbach.
Jürgen Stroop was an SS general during World War II. He was in command of Nazi troops during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 and wrote the Stroop Report, a book-length account of the operation.
He was born Josef Stroop on September 26, 1895, in Detmold, in the state of Lippe, Germany. His father, Konrad Stroop, was Lippe’s chief of police; his mother, Katherine Stroop, was a devoutly religious woman who allegedly subjected her son to childhood physical abuse. After an elementary education, he was apprenticed with the land registry in Detmold. During World War I, he served in several infantry regiments on the Western Front. Wounded in action in October 1914, he returned after eight months’ leave and fought in Russian Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Austrian Galicia, and Romania. He was awarded the Iron Cross Second Class on December 2, 1915.
After demobilization, Stroop returned to the land registry. He joined the National Socialist Party and SS in 1932, and, in 1933, he was appointed leader of the state auxiliary police. Later he worked for the SS in Münster and Hamburg.
In September 1938, Stroop was promoted to the rank of colonel, initially serving in the Sudetenland. After Germany’s invasion of Poland in September 1939, he commanded the SS section in Gnesen (Gniezno). He was then transferred to nearby Posen (Poznań) to head the so-called self-defense group of local ethnic Germans.
In May 1941, Stroop changed his name from Josef to Jürgen in honor of his dead infant son. From July 7 to September 15, 1941, he served with the SS on the Eastern Front and received further military awards.
On September 16, 1942, he was promoted to SS general and posted as an inspector of the SiPo and SD of the higher SS as well as police leader for Russia. In this position, he worked to help secure a key logistical route for German forces on the Eastern Front. From October 1942, Stroop commanded an SS garrison at Kherson, before becoming the SS and police leader (SSPF) for Lvov (Lviv) in February 1943.
Stroop is notorious for his role in the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. SS-Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler sent him to Warsaw on April 17, 1943, to crush the revolt. Stroop was put in charge of 2 Waffen-SS battalions, 100 infantry troops, units of local police, and local Security Police. It was the function of the latter to accompany SS units in groups of six or eight, as guides and experts in ghetto matters.
Stroop ordered the entire ghetto to be systematically burned down and blown up, building by building. Except for a few Jewish fighters who made it to the Aryan side of Warsaw via the sewers, nearly all of the survivors—including men, women, and children—were either killed on the spot or deported to extermination camps.
Stroop expressed bewilderment that the ghetto’s Jewish combatants, whom he viewed as “subhumans,” had fought so tenaciously against his men. After the uprising was suppressed, he ordered that Warsaw’s Great Synagogue be blown up and destroyed, as a symbol of Nazi victory and the total subjugation of the Jews. He then formally assumed the position of SS and police leader of Warsaw, and on June 18, 1943, he was presented with the Iron Cross First Class for the Warsaw ghetto “action.”
Stroop created a detailed 75-page report with 69 pictures, along with communiqués relevant to the suppression of the uprising. The report covered the period April 24, 1943, to May 24, 1943. Bound in black leather and entitled The Jewish Quarter of Warsaw Is No More! the report was intended as a souvenir album for Heinrich Himmler and Stroop’s immediate superior, Friedrich Jeckeln.
Stroop was subsequently placed in charge of the SS and police in Greece on September 8, 1943. The local civilian administration found his methods and behavior unacceptable and withdrew cooperation, forbidding the local Order Police from having anything to do with him. This made his position untenable, and he was consequently removed. On November 9, 1943, he was appointed commander of the SS in Wiesbaden, serving there until the end of the war.
Stroop was involved in the purge of anti-Nazi Germans that followed the failure of the July 20, 1944, bomb plot against the life of Adolf Hitler. For his involvement, Stroop claimed to have offered Field Marshal Günther von Kluge a choice between suicide and a show trial before notorious judge of the People’s Court, Roland Freisler. Kluge demanded his day in court, and Stroop personally shot Kluge in the head. Himmler announced that the field marshal had committed suicide.
Between October 1944 and March 1945, nine men of the U.S. Army Air Corps were summarily executed after being shot down and captured in Stroop’s district.
On May 10, 1945, carrying forged discharge papers, Stroop surrendered to the American forces in the village of Rottau, Bavaria. It was two months before he admitted to his actual identity on July 2, 1945. He was then prosecuted during the Dachau Trials. He pretended no knowledge of the killings of the American servicemen, even though as senior commander of the SS and police, he would have given the orders for their execution. After an eight-week trial, Stroop was convicted on March 21, 1947, for shooting the American POWs and sentenced to death by hanging. In November 1947, however, before the sentence was carried out, he was extradited to Poland.
Stroop’s trial in Poland began on July 18, 1951, at the Warsaw Criminal District Court. It lasted for just three days. He was convicted on July 23, 1951, and on the evening on March 6, 1952, he was hanged at Mokotów Prison for crimes against humanity.
Wilhelm Stuckart was a Nazi Party lawyer who cowrote the Nuremberg race laws in 1935 and a follow-up commentary in 1936. His notoriety also emanated from his attendance at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, which was called to settle procedural, jurisdictional, and legal questions regarding the mass murder of Europe’s Jews.
Stuckart was born on November 16, 1902, in Wiesbaden. The son of a railway employee, he had a Christian upbringing. In 1919, he joined the far-right Freikorps to resist Allied occupation in the Rhineland, centering on the French in the Ruhr Valley. He began his studies of law and political economy in 1922 at the University of Munich. He joined the Nazi Party in December 1922 and remained a member until the party was banned after the failed Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. To support his parents, Stuckart had to defer his studies temporarily, only completing his degree in 1928.
Passing the bar examination in 1930, Stuckart served as a district court judge. There he renewed his association with the Nazi Party and provided party comrades with legal counseling. As judges were prohibited from being politically active, Stuckart’s mother joined the party on his behalf.
From 1932 to 1933, Stuckart was a member of the SA, working as the movement’s lawyer in Stettin. On the recommendation of Heinrich Himmler, he joined the SS on December 16, 1933; eventually, by 1944, he had reached the rank of SS-Obergruppenführer.
Stuckart’s quick rise in the German state administration was unusual for a person of modest background and would have been impossible without his long dedication to the National Socialist cause. Having been a party member since December 1922—that is, before the Beer Hall Putsch—he held the coveted Gold Party Badge (Goldenes Parteiabzeichen), a special award given to all Nazi Party members with low registration numbers and unbroken Party membership).
On April 4, 1933, he became mayor and state commissioner in Stettin; he was also elected to the Prussian Council of State. On May 15, 1933, he was appointed ministerial director of the Prussian Ministry of Education and the Arts, and on June 30, 1933, he was made a state secretary.
In 1934, Stuckart was intimately involved in the dubious acquisition, by the Prussian State under its prime minister Hermann Göring, of the Guelph Treasure of Brunswick. A unique collection of early medieval, religious, precious metalwork and one of the most important church treasuries to have survived from medieval Germany, the treasure was at that time in the hands of several German-Jewish art dealers from Frankfurt. Disagreements with his superior led Stuckart to leave the ministry and move to Darmstadt, where he worked for a few weeks as president of the superior district court.
On March 7, 1935, he began serving in the Reich Ministry of Interior, with responsibility for constitutional law, citizenship, and racial laws. In this role, on September 13, 1935, he, together with Bernhard Lösener and Franz Albrecht Medicus, was given the task of cowriting the antisemitic Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor and the Reich Citizenship Law. Together, these are better known as the Nuremberg Laws, which enacted the legal basis of Nazi racial policy, removing Jewish participation in Aryan society. The laws deprived Jews of citizenship, prohibited Jewish households from having German maids under the age of 45, prohibited any non-Jewish German from marrying a Jew, and outlawed sexual relations between Jews and Germans. Drafted in two days, the laws were imposed by the Reichstag on September 15, 1935.
In 1936, Stuckart, as the chairman of the Reich Committee for the Protection of German Blood, coauthored, with Hans Globke, the Nazi government’s official Commentary on German Racial Legislation in elaboration of the Reich Citizenship and Blood Protection Laws. The commentary explains the basis of these laws on the concept of Volksgemeinschaft (people’s community), to which every German was bound by common blood. The individual was not a member of society (a concept viewed by the Nazi legal theorists as Marxist) but a born member of the German Volk, through which he or she acquired rights. The interests of the Volk were to always override those of the individual. People born outside of the Volk were seen to possess no rights and, in fact, to represent a danger to the purity of the people’s community. As such, antimiscegenation legislation was justified, even necessary.
On August 18, 1939, Stuckart signed a confidential decree regarding the Reporting Obligations of Deformed Newborns, which became the basis for the Nazi regime’s euthanasia of children.
In October 1939, Stuckart was given the task of investigating the comprehensive rationalization of the state administrative structure by decentralization and simplification. He proposed that the state and party should effectively be combined in an overarching concept of the Reich and cooperate at the highest levels of power so that ground-level friction between the institutions could be solved by referencing upward. The transformation of the state administration from a technical apparatus for the application of norms to a means of political leadership was the central idea in Stuckart’s model. The ideal Nazi civil servant was not to be a passive lawyer of the bygone “liberal constitutional state” but a “pioneer of culture, colonizer and political and economic creator.” The administrative structure of the Reichsgaue (district), where the party and state authorities were combined and the gauleiter, or district head, fielded almost dictatorial powers over his domain, reflected Stuckart’s theorization.
In 1940, he participated in the preparatory measures designed to deprive Jews of their German citizenship, and by 1941, he had worked out a proposal that Jews inside the German Reich should wear distinguishing marks.
At the Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942, which discussed the imposition of the Final Solution of the Jewish Question (Endlösung der Judenfrage), Stuckart represented Wilhelm Frick, then interior minister. According to the conference minutes, Stuckart objected to the SS ignoring the Nuremberg Laws in fulfilling the Final Solution and pointed out the bureaucratic problems of such a radical course of action, insisting that mandatory sterilization for persons of “mixed blood” (Mischlinge) instead of evacuation (extermination) would preserve the spirit of the Nuremberg Laws.
However, Reinhard Heydrich, chairing the meeting, informed Stuckart that the decision to exterminate the Jews had been made by Adolf Hitler and that according to the Führerprinzip, Hitler’s word was above all written law. Stuckart and several others at the conference recognized that Hitler had not given (or must give) this order in writing.
Heydrich called a follow-up conference on March 6, 1942, which further discussed the problems of “mixed blood” individuals and mixed-marriage couples. At this meeting, Stuckart argued that only first-degree Mischlinge (persons with two Jewish grandparents) should be sterilized by force, after which they should be allowed to remain in Germany and undergo a “natural extinction.” He was also concerned about causing distress to German spouses and children of interracial couples.
In May 1945, Stuckart served briefly as interior minister in Karl Dönitz’s Flensburg government, the three-week-long government of Nazi Germany following Hitler’s suicide on April 30. With the end of the war, he was arrested and tried by the Allies in the Ministries Trial for his role in formulating and carrying out anti-Jewish laws. The court characterized him as an ardent Jew-hater who pursued his antisemitic campaign from the safety of his ministerial office. Former colleague Bernhard Lösener testified that Stuckart had been aware of the murder of the Jews even before the Wannsee Conference. The defense argued that his support for the forced sterilization of Mischlinge was in order to prevent or delay even more drastic measures. Unable to resolve the question, the court sentenced him in April 1949 to 3 years and 10 months imprisonment, which, because of his preceding detention, was counted as having been served.
In 1951, he was tried in a denazification court and classified as a “fellow traveler” (Mitläufer) of the Nazis. For this, he was fined 500 deutsche marks in 1952.
Stuckart was killed on November 15, 1953, near Hanover, West Germany, in a car accident one day before his 51st birthday. Ever since, there has been speculation that the accident was set up by persons hunting down Nazi war criminals still at liberty.
Ferenc Szálasi was the leader of the infamous pro-Nazi Arrow Cross Party and headed the Hungarian government for the final six months of Hungary’s involvement in World War II, after Germany occupied Hungary and removed Miklós Horthy. During his brief rule, Szálasi’s men murdered between 10,000 and 15,000 Jews.
Ferenc Szálasi was the leader of Hungary’s pro-Nazi Arrow Cross Party (or Nyilas) during World War II, and head of the government from October 1944 until the country was occupied by Soviet forces. Prior to and during the short six months of Szálasi’s regime, over 500,000 Jews died from maltreatment or were murdered. Szálasi fled Hungary but was captured, tried in a Hungarian court in Budapest, and hanged on March 12, 1946. (UtCon Collection/Alamy Stock Photo)
Szálasi was born on January 6, 1897, in Kassa, Hungary (now Košice, Slovakia), into a strict family. His father, also named Ferenc Szálasi, was a soldier, and his mother, Erzsébet, was very religious. Szálasi completed his military training in the Theresian Military Academy of Wiener Neustadt and was promoted to lieutenant in 1915. Serving in the Austro-Hungarian army during World War I, he was on the front line for 36 months. He was promoted to captain in 1924, appointed to the general staff in 1925, and was a major by 1933.
The Treaty of Trianon in 1920 severely decreased the size of Hungary’s territory and population. With his own ideological program for the country’s restoration, in 1930, Szálasi joined the right-wing Hungarian Life League, a “race-protecting” organization, and published his Plan for the Construction of the Hungarian State.
Szálasi resigned from the military in 1934. In 1935, he founded the fascist Party of National Will and, in 1937, the Hungarian National Socialist Party. Both parties focused on patriotism, anticommunism, and antisemitism, and both were banned for being too extreme. Szálasi was jailed for treason.
In 1939, Szálasi founded the Arrow Cross Party (Nyilas), which won 25 percent of the votes in the Hungarian Parliament that year; it was banned by Hungarian Regent Admiral Miklós Horthy when World War II broke out. Nyilas diverged from Nazism in its goal of creating Greater Hungary rather than a Nazi-dominated Europe and in its policy of Jewish emigration rather than extermination. With time, this would change.
The Hungarian army suffered huge losses at Stalingrad in 1942 and 1943, and Horthy and Prime Minister Miklós Kállay identified that Germany could be defeated. At this time, most of the Jews of the rest of Europe had been murdered by Einsatzgruppen and deportations to death camps. As the Hungarian government had consistently rejected Nazi demands for implementation of the Final Solution, only the large Hungarian Jewish community remained almost intact. With Horthy’s tacit approval, Kállay began looking into the possibility of negotiating a separate armistice with the Western Allies.
To forestall this, Germany occupied Hungary on March 19, 1944. Horthy remained as regent; Kállay was dismissed, and Germany appointed General Döme Sztójay as prime minister. Sztójay, who had earlier been Hungarian minister to Berlin, was fervently pro-German and pledged Hungary to continue the war and collaborate with the Germans in deporting the Hungarian Jews.
In April 1944, Jews living outside Budapest (roughly 500,000) were concentrated in regional areas, from which they were rounded up by Hungarian paramilitary police and dispatched to hastily improvised ghettos located in towns. In some of these, Jews had to live outdoors without shelter or sanitary facilities; food and water was totally inadequate, and medical care nonexistent. They were forbidden to leave these ghettos and were watched over by police. None of these places existed for more than a few weeks, and many were closed within days.
In mid-May 1944, the Hungarians, together with the German SD under Adolf Eichmann’s control, began methodically to deport the Jews. The Hungarian paramilitary police rounded them up and forced them onto deportation trains. Within two months, nearly 440,000 Jews had been deported in 145 trains, mostly to Auschwitz. By the end of July 1944, the only major Jewish community left in Hungary was that in Budapest.
Because of the deteriorating military situation and threats of war crimes trials from Allied leaders, Horthy halted the deportations on July 7, 1944. In August, he dismissed the Sztójay government and resumed efforts to negotiate for an armistice with the Soviet Union, whose army was now close to invading. By the middle of October 1944, Horthy was finalizing negotiations with the Soviets when the Germans orchestrated a coup d’état that saw Horthy arrested. The antisemitic Szálasi was appointed prime minister.
Under Szálasi’s regime, deportations of Jews resumed; attention was now directed to the previously untouched community in Budapest. Arrow Cross gangs produced a rule of random terror; the Jews were transferred to “yellow star” houses, making them defenseless to Arrow Cross gang members. Jews were marched to the banks of the Danube and shot into the river, while many others died from the brutal conditions of forced labor to which the Arrow Cross subjected them.
In November 1944, a ghetto was established for about 70,000 of Budapest’s Jews. Assisting Eichmann, Szálasi ordered that about 25,000 Jewish men and 10,000 Jewish women be marched out of the city to build anti-Soviet fortifications. In addition, also beginning in November 1944, Szálasi ordered that a further 80,000 Jews be mobilized and marched toward the Austrian border on additional building projects. Many who were too weak to continue marching in the bitter cold were shot along the way.
In January 1945, with the Soviets already in Pest, Hungary signed an armistice. Buda was liberated on February 13, 1945, and Soviet troops pushed the last German units and their Arrow Cross collaborators out of western Hungary by early April 1945.
Of the approximately 825,000 Jews living in Hungary in 1941, about 63,000 died or were killed before the German occupation of March 1944. Prior to and during the short six months of Szálasi’s government, over 500,000 Jews died from maltreatment or were murdered. Some 255,000 Jews, less than one-third of those who had lived within enlarged Hungary in March 1944, survived the Holocaust.
Ferenc Szálasi fled Hungary but was captured and returned by American troops in May 1945. He was tried in a Hungarian court in Budapest, found guilty of war crimes and high treason, and was hanged on March 12, 1946.