Josef Antonius Heinrich Terboven was the Nazi-imposed commissioner for Norway during the German occupation of that country during World War II.
Of Dutch descent, Terboven was born on May 23, 1898, in Essen, Germany. In World War I, serving in the German field artillery and the newly created air force, Terboven was awarded the Iron Cross and rose to the rank of lieutenant.
On February 13, 1919, Terboven started studying law and political science at the University of Munich before moving to Freiburg, where he became involved in extremist politics. Without completing his studies, he dropped out of university. In 1923, he joined the NSDAP, but after he and others took part in the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich on November 8 to 9, 1923, the party was outlawed.
Terboven then worked as a bank clerk in Essen between February 1, 1923, and June 30, 1925, when he was laid off. On August 4, 1925, he rejoined the NSDAP and worked full-time for the Nazi Party as a member of the SA, helping set up the party in Essen. From 1927 until December 15, 1930, Terboven edited a National Socialist newspaper in Essen, but he was imprisoned for three months in 1929 for publication of a proscribed newspaper. He stood unsuccessfully for election in May 1928 but was appointed gauleiter (Nazi district chief) in Essen in 1928.
On June 29, 1934, Terboven married Ilse Stahl, the former secretary and mistress of Joseph Goebbels. Adolf Hitler was the guest of honor at the wedding; the next morning, Hitler flew south to direct the massacre of the SA leadership (the Röhm Putsch, or Night of the Long Knives), the plans for which had been drawn up during the wedding celebrations.
Terboven was made senior president of the Rhein province in 1935 and gained a reputation as a petty and ruthless despot.
On April 24, 1940, prior to the completion of Germany’s military invasion of Norway on June 7, Terboven was made Reichskommissar with supervisory authority over the civilian administration. He moved into the crown prince’s residence at Skaugum in September 1940 and made the Norwegian Parliament’s buildings his headquarters.
On September 17, 1941, Terboven decreed that SS and German police tribunals would be given authority over Norwegian citizens breaking the laws of the occupation authorities, and he introduced harsher and more repressive measures to combat sabotage and resistance. He arrested Norwegian teachers who had defied certain actions taken by the German High Command and used them to build fortifications. Terboven also established concentration camps in Norway, such as Falstad, near Levanger, and Bredtvet, in Oslo, in late 1941.
Day-to-day matters were initially administered by an acting Norwegian state cabinet, but the members of the governing commission were Terboven appointees working under his control. All proposed legislation had to be submitted to Terboven for approval. On February 1, 1942, a “national government” headed by Norwegian collaborator Vidkun Quisling was established, and Quisling was given the title of minister president. Effectively, however, he was given no real power. In September 1942, Quisling was informed that the final relationship between Germany and Norway could only be settled after the war.
Terboven’s relations with the SS and police were good, and he gave them freedom to implement their policies and activities. Despite the small size of Norway’s Jewish population (approximately 1,800 in total), Terboven and his administration persecuted them relentlessly. By 1944, some 770 had been deported, of which only 24 returned after the war. Other Jews numbering over 930 fled to sanctuary in Sweden. The main deportation action occurred on the night of November 25 to 26, 1942, when German police acting under Gestapo orders arrested Jewish women, children, and sick people, who were transported to Oslo Harbor and placed on the ship Donau, alongside of Jewish men from the Berg detention camp. These 532 Jews disembarked at Stettin and transferred to Auschwitz, arriving on December 1, 1942. On February 25, 1943, another 158 Jews interned at Bredtvet were deported aboard the Gotenland. A further 45 Jews left Oslo on the Monte Rosa on November 26, 1942. All were sent to Auschwitz. Earlier, in 1941 to 1942, 11 more Jews had been deported to concentration camps.
General Nikolaus von Falkenhorst, who commanded German military forces in Norway (sometimes as many as 400,000 men), attempted to reach an understanding with the Norwegian people; his troops were under his orders to treat Norwegians with courtesy. By contrast, Terboven commanded a force of 6,000, of which 800 were part of the secret police. From 1941, he focused on crushing the irregular military resistance against the Germans, declaring martial law in Trondheim in 1942, and ordering the destruction of the village of Telavåg in reprisal for a partisan attack on Nazi officers. The devastation that followed has been compared to similar events at Lidice in Czechoslovakia and Oradour-sur-Glane in France.
Terboven became renowned for ordering retaliatory measures in a variety of other actions, leading him to develop a fearsome reputation throughout Norway.
On May 22, 1943, Terboven arrested Norwegian Protestant bishops who came to put to him their concerns about his harsh conduct. In November 1943, he ordered the arrest of students at the University of Oslo; the men were transferred to a special camp in Germany, and the women were dismissed from the University, required to return home under house arrest and report regularly to the police. Terboven was disliked not only by Norwegians but also by many Germans. Joseph Goebbels’s diary notes his annoyance at Terboven’s “bullying tactics,” as they turned the population against Germans. Notwithstanding, Terboven remained in ultimate charge of Norway until the end of the war in 1945. On December 18, 1944, von Falkenhorst was dismissed from his command for opposing certain of Terboven’s policies.
In October 1944, as Soviet troops advanced into northern Norway, Terboven implemented a scorched-earth policy that resulted in widespread destruction, and 50,000 people forcibly evacuated and relocated.
As the tide of war turned against Germany, Terboven’s personal aspiration was to organize a fortress Norway (Festung Norwegen) for the Nazi regime’s last stand. When Hitler’s successor, Admiral Karl Dönitz, ordered the political and military leaders of Norway to cooperate with Allied General Headquarters, Terboven demurred. As a result, on May 7, 1945, Dönitz dismissed Terboven from his post as Reichskommissar. A day later, with the announcement of Germany’s surrender, Terboven committed suicide.
Bruno Emil Tesch (not to be confused with anti-Nazi resister Bruno Guido Camillo Tesch) was a German chemist and businessman who supplied Zyklon B gas to the Nazis used for murdering masses of Jews in death camps during World War II.
Tesch was born on August 14, 1890, in Berlin. He studied mathematics and physics for one semester in 1910 at the University of Göttingen, before completing his degree in chemistry at the University of Berlin in 1914. He then worked at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute (KWI).
During World War I, Dr. Fritz Haber of KWI weaponized chlorine and other poisonous gases that were used during the Second Battle of Ypres. In 1919, Degesch (the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Schädlingsbekämpfung mbH) was established to explore the military use of hydrogen cyanide. Once developed, this was marketed as the pesticide Zyklon (cyclone), although it was banned after the war. In 1922, Degussa (Deutsche Gold- und Silber-Scheideanstalt, or German Gold and Silver Refinery) became sole owners of Degesch.
That year, chemists Walter Heerdt, Bruno Tesch, and Gerhard Peters, with the support of I. G. Farben (a German chemical and pharmaceutical conglomerate), researched the use of hydrogen cyanide as a fumigation agent. They invented and patented a process in which hydrogen cyanide could be manufactured and used in a solid form. Heerdt was named inventor of Zyklon B in the patent application, which was awarded to Dagesch, now a subsidiary of I. G. Farben, on December 27, 1926. The new product was labeled as Zyklon B to distinguish it from the earlier version. Heerdt was the only one of the inventors to receive patent rights. He set up the Heerdt-Lingler GmbH (Heli) of Frankfurt, to which Degesch gave the exclusive rights to distribute the insecticide Zyklon B west of the Elbe River.
Gerhard Peters joined Degesch and became its managing director during World War II. The company was designated by the German government to set the safety rules and standards for the use of Zyklon B, and it was given the authority to authorize shipments from the manufacturer to the customer after strict criteria were met.
In 1924, Tesch and Paul Stabenow, the sales representative for a Czech chemical company, cofounded Tesch & Stabenow (Testa), a pest-control company, in Hamburg. Testa did not manufacture Zyklon B or any other chemicals. It was primarily a pest-control company specializing in the fumigation of commercial properties, such as warehouses and freighters in the Port of Hamburg.
In 1925, Testa received from Dagesch the exclusive rights to distribute Zyklon B east of the Elbe River. Stabenow left Testa in 1927, after which Tesch held a 45 percent share of the firm and Degesch held 55 percent, on the basis that Tesch would resume sole ownership in 1942. Karl Weinbacher, a German manager, worked at Degesch until 1924 and then at Testa, where he became manager in 1927 after Stabenow left. From 1928, Testa established itself as the largest distributor of Zyklon B.
In 1930, Degussa relinquished 42.5 percent ownership of Degesch to I. G. Farben and 15 percent to Th. Goldschmidt AG of Essen, in exchange for the right to market pesticide products of those two major companies through Degesch. Degussa retained managerial control of Degesch.
While Degesch owned the rights to the brand name Zyklon and the patent on the packaging system, the chemical formula was owned by Degussa. Schlempe GmbH, which was 52 percent owned by Degussa, owned the rights to a process to extract hydrogen cyanide from waste products of sugar-beet processing. This process was performed under license by two companies, Dessauer Werke and Kaliwerke Kolin, which also combined the resulting hydrogen cyanide with stabilizer from I. G. Farben and a cautionary agent from Schering AG to form the final product, which was packaged using equipment, labels, and canisters provided by Degesch.
The finished goods were sent to Degesch, who forwarded the product to two companies acting as distributors: Heli of Frankfurt and Testa of Hamburg. Their territory was split along the Elbe, with Heli handling clients to the west and south and Testa handling those to the east. Degesch owned 51 percent of the shares of Heli, and until 1942, it owned 55 percent of Testa. The company did not actually produce Zyklon B or other gases widely used for disinfection.
Testa oversaw shipping of the product and equipment to the SS and Wehrmacht, instructing the personnel about use on lice, the main carriers of typhus. When asked for advice on mass extermination of Jews by the Nazi state, Bruno Tesch suggested treating them like vermin by spraying prussic acid, the active ingredient in Zyklon B, into a sealed space. According to court testimony of his company’s various employees, Tesch proceeded to share the know-how in a hands-on manner. By 1943, Karl Weinbacher, the company manager who received a percentage of the sales proceeds of Zyklon B, often acted as CEO with full authority on all business activities whenever Tesch was absent.
With the end of World War II, Weinbacher, Tesch, and Joachim Hans Drosihn, the firm’s first gassing technician, were arrested on September 3, 1945. They were tried by a British military tribunal in Hamburg from March 1 to 8, 1946, also called the Testa Trial or the Zyklon B Trial.
Tesch, Weinbacher, and Drosihn were charged with having knowingly supplied the Zyklon B used in German concentration camps for the purpose of mass murder. Evidence was provided that 79,069 kilograms of Zyklon B were required in 1942 alone, 9,132 of which was slated specifically to kill humans at Sachsenhausen, Neuengamme, and Auschwitz. In 1943, the demand rose to 12,174 kilograms, and by early 1944, nearly two tons arrived at Auschwitz monthly.
Tesch and Weinbacher were charged for knowingly selling poison gas to the SS, between January 1, 1941, and March 31, 1945, that would be used in violation of Article 46 of The Hague Convention of 1907. One witness for the prosecution was SS-Rottenführer Pery Broad, who had worked at Auschwitz.
Tesch and Weinbacher were convicted, condemned to death, and hanged on May 16, 1946, in Hameln Prison. Drosihn was acquitted, because he had no knowledge of corporate policy.
Dr. Gerhard Peters, director of Degesch, implicated himself during the I. G. Farben trial, saying that SS-Obersturmführer Kurt Gerstein, who was deeply involved in the gassing process, had told him that the German army needed Zyklon B without the additives whose smell warned people of its poisonous nature. In 1949, Peters was charged with murder, convicted, and sentenced to five years’ imprisonment. In 1952, his conviction was confirmed on appeal and his sentence increased to six years. He was acquitted in a further appeal in 1953. He died on May 2, 1974. Walter Heerdt was reappointed as CEO of Degesch after the war and held this position until his death on February 2, 1957.
On February 2, 1934, the Nazis in Germany, pursuing their ideal of a completely Jew-free society, began unveiling a new, Aryan version of the Bible. The first offering in this project was a rewritten Book of Psalms that eliminated all references to Jews, reworking the psalms in order to purge them of their “Jewish taint.”
The updated version appeared in a hymnbook written by an eccentric author named Wilhelm Teudt. Born in 1860, Teudt, who studied theology and worked as a pastor from 1885 to 1908, was an amateur archaeologist who spent much of his time searching for an ancient Germanic civilization. In 1921, he joined the German National People’s Party, and in 1933, at the age of 73, he moved on to the National Socialists, which, on January 30 that year, had come into office under Adolf Hitler.
Teudt’s version had 75 psalms rather than the original 150. As an example of his efforts, his version of the 87th Psalm read as follows:
The Lord loveth the height of Germany more than all the dwellings abroad.
The Lord loveth the yew tree of the Odenwald and the oak of the Baltic.
I will make mention of the vulgar Euphrates and the Ganges, where our forefathers ruled.
Behold the lands of the Goths, the Longobards, and Andalusians: it shall be said our brothers were born and died there;
But on Osning the Lord shall count those sprung from blood of the sons of Mannus: Ingo, Istu, and Ermin.
Osning is part of the Teutoberger Forest. Ingo, Istu, and Ermin were ancient Germanic gods.
His foundation is in the holy mountains.
The Lord loveth the gates of Zion more than all the dwellings of Jacob.
Glorious things are spoken of thee, O city of God. Selah.
I will make mention of Rahab and Babylon to them that know me: behold Philistia, and Tyre, with Ethiopia; this man was born there.
And of Zion it shall be said, This and that man was born in her: and the highest himself shall establish her.
The Lord shall count, when he writeth up the people, that this man was born there. Selah.
As well the singers as the players on instruments shall be there: all my springs are in thee.
Teudt maintained in his book’s foreword that Jesus was of pure Aryan blood and that “His whole spirituality” was “foreign to Jews.” He could not delete the whole of the Old Testament from Christian scripture, but he stated that many features of it were obnoxious and had to be pruned.
American readers knew of Teudt’s removal of all references to Jews as he worked through the Old Testament. They read about it in the pages of their newspapers and discussed the issue in their churches. Of course, as with most things the Nazis began, Teudt’s initiative did not stop there. Hitler’s ultimate intention was gradually to “Nazify” the Church, beginning with the scriptural underpinnings upon which it rested. In 1939, he authorized the creation of what today would be called a think tank to rewrite the Bible completely; its charge was to remove all references to Jews and Judeo-Christian notions of compassion. Those appointed to work on this thoroughly Nazi version of the Bible had the brief of “cleansing” church texts “of all non-Aryan influences.”
In addition to his work redrafting the psalms, Teudt’s beliefs in German völkisch culture led him to develop theories that, even among his peers, were considered outlandish. Believing in an ancient, highly developed Germanic civilization, Teudt developed an interest in the 1920s in what he called “Germanic archaeology” through an investigation of Germanic pagan sacred sites. He held that he possessed a paranormal ability to pick up the vibrations of his Germanic ancestors, which provided him with the capacity to visualize ancient sites as he was excavating them.
His work studying ancient Saxon shrines attracted the interest of senior Nazis, who were obsessed with locating the spiritual elements of Aryanism. Developing an ever-deeper fascination with Saxon culture as the seedbed of all that Germanic culture would become, he viewed the conversion of the Germanic tribes to Christianity before the turn of the first millennium as the greatest catastrophe ever faced by Aryan civilization.
After Teudt joined the Nazi Party, Adolf Hitler appointed him to a professorial position. He founded or became a member of a number of esoteric research organizations, and his work garnered prizes and honors from the Nazis.
Wilhelm Teudt died on January 5, 1942, in Detmold, Lippe.
Otto Thierack was a Nazi jurist and politician who was the Reich minister of justice under Adolf Hitler between August 20, 1942, and April 30, 1945.
After Theirack assumed office on August 20, 1942, one of his first steps as justice minister was to direct the president of the People’s Court that in criminal proceedings against the Jews, the decisive factor must always be their Jewishness rather than their culpability. Thierack not only made penal prosecution of all unpopular persons and groups harsher; he waived any pretense of legality and simply began handing “antisocial” prisoners (usually Jews, Poles, Russians, and Roma) over to the SS. Thierack came to an understanding with Heinrich Himmler that certain categories of prisoners were to be, to use their words, “annihilated through work.” As Reich minister, Thierack ensured the reduction of clemency proceedings for those sentenced to death.
Otto Georg Thierack was born in Wurzen, Saxony, on April 19, 1889. His father was a merchant. In 1910, he commenced the study of law at the University of Marburg and received his doctorate in 1914 from the University of Leipzig. In World War I, he served as a volunteer in the German army, reaching the rank of lieutenant. He suffered a facial injury and was decorated with the Iron Cross Second Class.
After the war, he resumed his law studies, graduating in 1920 with his assessor (junior lawyer) examination. He then entered the judicial service of Saxony, and in 1921, he was appointed as a public prosecutor at the district court in Leipzig. In 1926, he became a prosecutor at the Supreme Court of Dresden.
In 1932, Thierack joined the Nazi Party and became the leader of the National Socialist Jurists’ Organization (the Rechtswahrerbund), which led to his career as a leading Nazi judge. In 1933, after the Nazi assumption of power in Germany, he became the Saxon minister of justice. In 1935, he was appointed vice president of the Reich Court in Leipzig. At the same time, he represented the minister of justice in coordinating the integration of Nazi jurisdiction in the Reich.
On May 1, 1936, Thierack was appointed president of the People’s Court (Volksgerichtshof), where he concentrated on tightening its jurisdiction. This court prosecuted people accused of crimes against the Third Reich in closed sessions and without the right of appeal. He held the position of president of the People’s Court, interrupted by two periods in the German army in World War II, until 1942, when he was succeeded as president by Roland Freisler.
On April 23 to 24, 1941, Thierack was a participant in the meeting of judicial officers about the “destruction of life unworthy of life,” in the context of Aktion T-4 medical murders.
On September 9, 1942, now as justice minister, Thierack gave directions to the president of the People’s Court that “in criminal proceedings against the Jews, the decisive factor is their Jewishness, rather than their culpability.” The following month, he introduced monthly legal briefs that presented model rulings—decisions, with names left out—upon which German jurisprudence was to be based. He also introduced Vorschauen (previews) and Nachschauen (reviews), which required Presidents of the Higher State Courts to discuss with the Public Prosecutor’s Office and the state court president how a case was to be judged before the court’s decision; the state court president then had to pass this on to the responsible criminal courts. This was to be done at least once every two weeks.
One year later, the Third Reich changed the laws again, this time removing Jews from the jurisdiction of the court altogether and leaving their fate in the hands of the police or the SS. This legalized the sending of “asocials” as well as certain foreign prisoners or forced laborers—Jews, Poles, Gypsies, Russians, and Ukrainians—directly to the SS and on to concentration camps in the East, where they would be “exterminated through work.”
After Hitler’s intervention, Thierack ordered that death sentences were to be enforced immediately. In the opinions of the trial court, the prosecutors, the attorney general, and other bodies, petitions for mercy were in principle no longer necessary.
In December 1942, at Thierack’s instigation, the execution shed at Plötzensee Prison in Berlin was outfitted with eight iron hooks so that several people could be put to death at once by hanging (there had already been a guillotine there for some time). When a number of mass executions began on September 7, 1943, it also happened that some prisoners were hanged “by mistake.” Thierack simply covered up these mistakes and demanded that the hangings continue. He was recognized to be ruthless in the furthering of his career, power hungry, and ambitious. His support staff described him as hardworking and resilient but also high handed and autocratic.
At the end of the war, Thierack was arrested by the Allies and imprisoned at the prisoner-of-war camp at Eselheide in 1945. He committed suicide in jail on November 22, 1946, before he could be put on trial at Nuremberg.
Richard Thomalla was an SS officer who headed the SS Central Building Administration at the Lublin reservation in occupied Poland. He was responsible for the construction of Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka, all three of the Aktion Reinhard death camps.
Thomalla was born on October 23, 1903, in Sabine-bei-Annahof, Upper Silesia. A builder by trade, he was bilingual in German and Polish. He enlisted in the SS on July 1, 1932, and joined the Nazi Party a month later. His SS service took in Wohlau (Wołów) and Breslau (Wrocław) in Lower Silesia.
On September 6, 1940, Thomalla was transferred to the General Government, where he was a member of the SS-Hilfspolizei (auxiliary police) in Częstochowa and Radom. On August 22, 1940, he was transferred by Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger, based in Kraków, to serve under SS-Brigadeführer Odilo Globocnik, in charge of police at Lublin. From August to October 1940, Thomalla was a section leader of the SS Border Defense Construction Service (SS-Grenzschutz Baudienst) in Bełżc, which stood on the line between the General Government and Soviet-occupied Galicia. Thomalla was tasked initially to build a construction depot in Zamość, about 40 kilometers north of Bełżec, for the Waffen-SS and police.
After Operation Barbarossa on June 22, 1941, Thomalla was also in charge of constructing SS bases (SS-Stutzpunkte) in Zwiahel (Novohrád-Volýns’kyj) and Kiev, in Ukraine. On November 1, 1941, construction began of the first Aktion Reinhard death camp, Bełżec, and Globocnik recalled Thomalla to Lublin in late 1941 (by some accounts, early 1942) to take over supervision of the project. Bełżec was completed in March 1942. At first, Polish workers were used, but these were later replaced by Jews from surrounding ghettos.
Thomalla then oversaw the construction of the other Aktion Reinhard camps at Sobibór and Treblinka and was the senior SS officer at each site until the respective camps became operational.
Thomalla proceeded to design and supervise the construction of Sobibór in March 1942, employing local inhabitants from the nearby towns and villages as construction workers. Special groups called Sonderkommandos, comprised of up to 80 Jews, were also taken from nearby ghettos to assist as slave labor. Thomalla served as commander of the Sobibór Sonderkommando during the construction phase, supervised by a Ukrainian guard unit trained at the concentration camp Trawniki. Upon the completion of Sobibór, the Jews of the Sonderkommando were killed. Thomalla’s work over, he was replaced by a permanent commandant, Franz Stangl, in April 1942.
In late April to early May 1942, an SS team arrived in the Treblinka area and chose the site on which to build another of the Aktion Reinhard camps. The architecture was almost identical to that at Sobibór with some modifications, and building started around late May and early June 1942. Thomalla managed the construction, which was undertaken by the German construction firms Schönbronn of Leipzig and Schmidt-Münstermann of Warsaw. Thomalla remained at Treblinka for several weeks during construction, before Irmfried Eberl arrived as commandant.
In 1943, Thomalla ran the Waffen-SS construction offices in Riga and Mogilev. Then during 1943 to 1944, he took part in the SS subjugation Aktion in the Zamość district of Poland. He was last seen in Zamość in June 1944, a few weeks before the entry of the Red Army the following month.
Just before the end of the war, Thomalla was arrested by Soviet forces and imprisoned near the Czech city of Jičín (Titschein), northeast of Prague. He was killed there on May 12, 1945, apparently at the hands of Soviet security forces.
Max Thomas was a German psychiatrist who served as an SS-Gruppenführer and police lieutenant general. He commanded Einsatzgruppe C in the occupied Soviet Union and later worked as the higher SS and police leader (Höherer SS- und Polizeiführer, or HSSPF) in the Black Sea area.
Max Thomas was born on August 4, 1891, in Düsseldorf. At the beginning of World War I, he volunteered for service in the German army, became an officer, and was awarded the Iron Cross First and Second Class. After the war, he studied law and medicine until 1922, going on to earn a doctorate in medicine before commencing practice as a specialist in psychiatry.
After the Nazi seizure of power in January 1933, Thomas joined the NSDAP on May 1, 1933, and in July, he became an officer in the SS. He then became councilor of the city of Fritzlar, Hesse, and took control of the management of a branch office of the SD. In 1939, as an SS-Oberführer, Thomas was appointed SiPo commander in a region of the Rhineland.
In 1940, Thomas moved to head Section IVB in charge of police intelligence within the RSHA—a subdepartment of which was IVB4, dealing with Jewish questions under the leadership of SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann.
On June 14, 1940, Reinhard Heydrich, head of the SD, dispatched Thomas to Paris to liaise with the military governor, General Otto von Stulpnagel, who loathed Thomas over the fact that he had sent 250 SD undercover operatives to Paris over his head. As military police, these men should have come under military control, not SD direction.
On July 27, 1940, Thomas was summoned back to RSHA headquarters in Berlin, where Heydrich had called together the heads of all the SD departments. They then traveled to Brussels to organize SD activities in Belgium. Thomas was given the twin tasks of establishing the SD in Brussels and serving as the higher representative of the SS for that city and Paris. Thus from June 1940 to the fall of 1941, he served as commander of the Security Police and the SD in Belgium and northern France.
In October 1940, a Special Command SS-Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler was set up under Thomas, who then transferred his headquarters to Paris. Otto von Stulpnagel, together with the senior SD and SiPo officer in Paris, Helmut Knochen, managed to have Thomas removed on the charge that he preferred Paris nightlife to setting up intelligence networks for the SS. Himmler was reported to have not been impressed with Thomas’s attitude.
In October 1941, Thomas was promoted to SS-Brigadeführer and was transferred by Himmler to Kiev, Ukraine, where he succeeded SS-Brigadeführer Otto Rasch as the leader of Einsatzgruppe C, deployed near Army Group South in northern and central Ukraine. Nazi estimates recorded that Einsatzgruppe C had killed 26,000 people by the end of 1941, and with its alteration into a stationary unit in March 1942, Thomas, based in Kiev, took command of the liquidation of the Ukrainian Jewish ghettos. At least 300,000 Jews were killed in the Aktion that followed.
On November 9, 1942, Thomas was promoted to SS-Gruppenführer. He disagreed with SS-Standartenführer Paul Blobel, the leader of Aktion 1005, about the method of eradicating the mass graves as traces of the Einsatzgruppen.
Thomas, who was an active commander, had by now suffered a number of injuries while in the USSR, and he was discharged from leadership of Einsatzgruppe C on health grounds during the summer of 1943. In August 1943, he was appointed as HSSPF of the Black Sea operational area, but in December 1943, he was in a plane crash, and after a long period of hospitalization, he was assigned to a reserve unit in April 1944. Until November 1944, he had a desk assignment in the SS Personnel Office in Berlin.
Thomas disappeared at the end of the war but was located working as Dr. Karl Brandenburg in the town of Kleinostheim, Bavaria. On December 6, 1945, he attempted suicide and died at the Würzburg Luitpold Hospital. Because of this, he did not get to appear in the Einsatzgruppen trial at Nuremberg that took place between September 29, 1947, and April 10, 1948, and thus never stood trial for his crimes.
Jozef Tiso was a Roman Catholic priest and Nazi collaborator who governed the satellite Slovak Republic from 1939 to 1945.
He was born on October 13, 1887, at Vel’ká Bytča, Slovakia (then Austria-Hungary). During his schooling, Tiso spoke Hungarian and studied several languages, including Hebrew and German. He was ordained a Roman Catholic priest in 1910 and worked to combat local poverty and alcoholism in his community. In 1915, he became director of the Theological Seminary of Nitra, while also teaching at a local high school.
After the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the creation of Czechoslovakia, Tiso became a Slovak nationalist and career politician, with a political philosophy that was avidly pro-Slovak and antisemitic. In 1918, he helped found the Slovak People’s Party (SPP), and in 1924, he became the dean and parish priest of the town of Bánovce nad Bebravou, a post he held until 1939. In 1924, the SPP became the largest political party in Slovakia, and Tiso represented it in the Czechoslovak Parliament in 1925. Between 1927 and 1928, he served as Czechoslovak minister of health.
Until 1938, Tiso’s political career did not evince any overt demonstration of antisemitism, even as the SPP began to model itself on the Nazi Party and antisemitism became more acceptable. He was even accused by some right-wing radicals of being “soft” when it came to Jews.
With the death of SPP leader Andrej Hlinka in August 1938, Tiso took over as head of the party. It was in the interests of Germany to destroy the Czechoslovak state by assisting Slovakia to become independent, and in March 1939, with the encouragement of senior German diplomat Edmund Veesenmayer, Tiso sought to negotiate a treaty with Germany that would see the creation of an independent Slovakia. The Czechoslovak government deposed Tiso for promoting the breakup of the county, but he received Adolf Hitler’s support during a visit to Berlin on March 13, 1939; the following day, he proclaimed Slovak independence. The Germans occupied what remained of Czechoslovakia on March 15, 1939, and one day later, Tiso placed the new Slovak state under Germany’s protection—primarily, it was clear, to avoid its annexation by Hungary.
Tiso was prime minister from March 14, 1939, until October 26, 1939, when he became president of an autonomous Slovakia, although he was forced to share power with the fascist paramilitary Hlinka Guard (Hlinkova garda). His government willingly collaborated with the Germans, allowing some tens of thousands of Slovakian Jews to be deported to German concentration camps. By expropriating Jewish property, Tiso showed support for Germany’s policies as well as improved Slovakia’s economic position.
In 1940, Germany first approached Slovakia with a demand to begin deporting Jews. Deportations started in March 1942, and at first, Tiso resisted pressure from the Vatican and Jewish groups to end them. They were stopped, however, despite German opposition, in October 1942, once Tiso learned that Germany not only used the Jews as forced laborers but had also begun systematically murdering them in camps. Public protests arose, as well as pressure from the Holy See, and Slovakia thus became the first state in the Nazi sphere to stop deportations of Jews. By that stage, though, some 58,000 Jews (75 percent of Slovak Jewry) had already been deported, mostly to Auschwitz, where only a minority survived.
On August 29, 1944, the Slovak Antifascist Uprising (supported by Edvard Beneš’s Czechoslovak government in exile) was launched to oust Tiso and his government. Elements of the Slovak army began to desert, and German troops were sent to put down the uprising and occupy Slovakia.
With the troops came security police charged with rounding up Slovakia’s remaining Jews. Despite losing domestic support, Tiso remained in office, but his presidency was relegated to a mostly titular role as Slovakia lost whatever de facto independence it had. Tiso now gave heartier support to the deportations, since he saw Jews as the leaders of the revolt. The deportation process was accelerated. Between October 1944 and the end of the war, 13,500 more Slovak Jews were deported, and 5,000 Jews were imprisoned. Some were murdered in Slovakia itself, in particular at Kremnička and Nemecká. By the end of the Holocaust, the Jewish population in Slovakia had collapsed to 24,000, from a population of 136,737 in 1930.
Tiso’s government fell to the Red Army and Czech partisans in April 1945, when the Soviet Army conquered the last parts of western Slovakia. Tiso fled to Austria but was apprehended by U.S. authorities and extradited to Czechoslovakia, where he was tried and convicted of treason and war crimes. He was executed by hanging in Bratislava on April 18, 1947.
Harald Turner was an SS commander in the German military administration of Serbia during World War II.
He was born on October 8, 1891, in Leun, Hesse, into a family where his father, William W. Turner, was a lieutenant in the German army. Turner Sr. was born in London in 1861 but later joined the Prussian army and served with District Command in Worms. His great-grandfather was probably a German-born cavalry officer who fought against Napoleon in Spain and at the Battle of Belle Alliance on June 18, 1815, in the aftermath of Waterloo.
From 1901, Harald Turner was a cadet at Schloss Orienstadt, sited at Diez on the Lahn. He attended a Prussian officer school from April 1906 to January 31, 1908, and entered the Prussian army on March 19, 1908, serving in the Lorraine Infantry Regiment No. 131. Shortly after, he attended Potsdam War School from October 1908 to July 1909, and on August 19, 1909, he became a lieutenant of the Second Company of his regiment.
In 1916, Turner married his fiancée, Adelheid “Heidi” Bechtel; their daughter, Irmingard, was born in 1917, and a son, Harald, was born in 1918. Turner served as a police officer in occupied Vilna (Vilnius) from December 1915 to July 1916 and reached the rank of captain on July 15, 1918. From December 13, 1918, to May 11, 1919, he acted as adjutant to the commander of the Wesel fortress.
Turner became a member of the Freikorps Wesel in Münster between June 1919 and March 1920 and was leader of the Beckum Rescue Service from October 1, 1919, to March 1, 1920. He commanded the staff quarters until April 1, 1920. That same month, he was taken into the Provisional National Army and served at Wesel in various administrative capacities from April 1, 1920, to May 1, 1922. Turner served at the Kreuznach Office between August 1, 1923, and April 1, 1924, and for the Trier Government Council from February 1926 onward. From April 1927 to February 1930, he studied law (obtaining his doctorate) prior to joining the SS on April 13, 1932. In January 1933, he became a leader of the SS-Sturmbann II/5.
Turner served as a higher-service government official in the supply office at Trier from February 12, 1933. Then he moved into a new role as the president of the government in Koblenz, where he remained from May 3, 1933, until January 17, 1936. He then became director and head of the personnel and salary department in the Prussian Ministry of Finance from February 1, 1936, a position he retained until May 1945.
On February 1, 1937, Turner became a major in the army reserve and a member of the Prussian State Council, where he served from 1938 until May 1945. He was promoted to SS-Brigadeführer on January 30, 1939. In June 1940, after seeing action in the Western campaign as head of the German military administration, he was sent to Paris as a key military administrator, serving there until February 1941.
Turner was appointed chief of staff of the German Military Administration in Serbia in April 1941, was promoted to lieutenant general in September 1941, and remained as chief of staff until 1943. On September 27, 1941, he became an SS group leader; his deputy was Georg Kiessel. In mid-August 1941, Turner suggested that all Jews be deported down the Danube to Romania or the Generalgouvernement, and although this was rejected, Turner pursued the matter further. Adolf Eichmann, operating through Franz Rademacher, eventually sent a reply saying that Jews could not be taken to Russia or the Generalgouvernement, since those places could not even take the Jews from Germany. Eichmann’s proposed solution was that Turner work on killing them by shooting.
Soon after Turner received this response, massacres of Jews and Roma began. In an order dated October 26, 1941, Turner wrote that Jews and Roma represented a threat to public order and security, the more so as the Jewish intelligentsia had caused this war and had to be destroyed. On October 2, 1941, Yugoslav resisters killed 21 soldiers from a German communications unit in Topola. The military commander, Franz Böhme, then ordered Turner to kill 100 prisoners for every dead German, and Turner thereupon chose 2,100 Jews and communists from the concentration camps at Šabac and Belgrade.
Böhme and Turner were also responsible for the massacres in Kraljevo and Kragujevac the same month, when thousands of Jews were shot.
In March 1942, a gas van was delivered to Belgrade at the request either of Turner or Emanuel Schäfer, the chief of security forces in Belgrade. On April 11, 1942, Turner reported to Karl Wolff, of Himmler’s personal staff, about the killings carried out with the aid of a “delousing car” (i.e., a gas van), stating that he would be using this van to kill Jews. Within two months, the SS had killed some 8,000 Jewish women and children from the Sajmište concentration camp in this van. On August 29, 1942, Turner bragged in a lecture given to the military commander of Southeast Europe that “Serbia is the only country where the Jewish question and the Gypsy question has been resolved.”
In a 1942 letter to Wolff, Turner described the murderous nature of SS activities in the occupied territory, indirectly indicating that he intended to use vehicles most likely equipped with gas to murder Jews.
In early 1944, Turner was appointed deputy chief of the SS Race and Settlement Headquarters in Berlin. On February 18, 1944, he was confirmed in his position as an SS lieutenant general, with effect from January 30, 1944. However, in August 1944, at the SS school for junior military officers in Bad Tolz, he suggested that the SS should replace the NSDAP in command of the Reich. Because of this criticism of the NSDAP, he was relieved of his post and sent to fight at the front.
In 1945, Turner was imprisoned in a British prisoner-of-war camp. He was handed over to the government of Yugoslavia in 1945. He was tried in Belgrade for atrocities, massacres, and deportations. He was sentenced to death and shot in Belgrade on March 9, 1947.