Helmut Bischoff | |
---|---|
Born | 1 March 1908 Glogau, Lower Silesia German Empire |
Died | 5 January 1993 Hamburg, Germany |
(aged 84)
Allegiance | Nazi Germany |
Service/branch | Schutzstaffel |
Rank | SS-Obersturmbannführer |
Unit | SS-RHSA (1935-1943) SS-WVHA (1943-1945) |
Battles/wars | World War II |
Helmut Bischoff (March 1, 1908 – January 5, 1993) was a German lawyer, Schutzstaffel (SS) officer and Nazi official. During World War II Bischoff served as the leader of Einsatzkommando 1/IV in Poland and later as chief of the Gestapo departments in Poznań (Posen) and Magdeburg. In 1943 Bischoff would be appointed director of security for Germany's V-weapons program. Between 1967 and 1970 Bischoff was a central figure in the Essen-Dora war crimes trial.
Contents
Early life
Bischoff was born on March 1, 1908 in the town of Glogau in Lower Silesia, then a part of the German Empire (now: Głogów, Poland). He was the son of a prosperous Metzgermeister (master butcher) and attended the Glogau-Gymnasium. While a student in 1923 Bischoff joined the Wikingbund, a paramilitary group formerly associated with the ultra-nationalist Organisation Consul movement. Following the completion of his abitur in 1925, Bischoff went on to study jurisprudence at the University of Leipzig and the University of Geneva. It was during his time as a law student that Bischoff first became active in the Nazi movement, joining the Nazi Party in January, 1930 (Member # 203 122) and the Sturmabteilung (SA) in 1933. After receiving his doctorate of law (Dr. jur.) in 1934, Bischoff returned to Lower Silesia and worked as an assessor at the District Court offices in Schweidnitz and Strehlen.[1] During this time Bischoff also secretly functioned as an operative and informant (vertrauensmann) for the Nazi Party's domestic intelligence service, the Sicherheitsdienst (SD).
Gestapo
Bischoff joined the Schutzstaffel (SS) in November, 1935 (SS # 272 403). He was assigned to Amt IV (the Gestapo) of the SS-Reich Main Security Office. Bischoff initially worked as a Kriminalkommissar at the Gestapo's district office in Liegnitz until 1936. He would later go on to serve as chief of the Gestapo departments in Harburg-Wilhelmsburg (1936-1937) and Köslin (1937-1939).[2] By the outbreak of World War II in September, 1939 Bischoff had risen to the rank of Sturmbannführer (major) in the SS.
During the invasion of Poland Bischoff served as commander of Einsatzkommando 1/IV, which was active in Pomerania, Warsaw and Białystok. Bischoff's unit was heavily involved in the bloody pacification of Bydgoszcz (Bromberg) along with the systematic killing of Polish citizens carried out as part of Operation Tannenberg, the Nazi extermination campaign targeting the Polish intelligentsia and other members of the nation's political and cultural elite. Bischoff's Einsatzkommando later took a leading role in the brutal mass expulsion of the Jews from the city of Pułtusk and oversaw their deportation to the now Soviet-occupied east.[3]
Poznań and Magdeburg
Einsatzkommando 1/IV was disbanded in November, 1939 and it's officers and men were incorporated into stationary units of the Sicherheitspolizei. Bischoff served under the command of SS-Standartenführer Josef Albert Meisinger in the Warsaw District of the Polish General Government. In August, 1940 Bischoff was reassigned to the newly-annexed territory of Reichsgau Wartheland and took over as Kriminaldirektor of the Gestapo in the city of Poznań (Posen). It was in this capacity that Bischoff also served as the effective commandant of Fort VII, a small concentration camp maintained inside the city and used by the Gestapo to imprison and often execute local Jews and Polish political prisoners.[4]
Bischoff was promoted to the rank of SS-Obersturmbannführer (lieutenant colonel) in September, 1941 and returned to Germany, where he had been appointed Kommissar (commissioner) of the Gestapo for the district of Magdeburg. Bischoff played a central role in orchestrating the deportation of Magdeburg’s remaining Jewish population; along with those from the nearby communities of Stendal, Dessau, Bernburg and Aschersleben. Hundreds of German Jews were deported from Magdeburg by the SS between November, 1942 and March, 1943. The initial deportations were routed mainly to the concentration camp of Theresienstadt while later rail transports would carry deportees directly to Auschwitz.[5]
V-weapons security chief
In December, 1943 Bischoff was assigned to the SS-Main Economic and Administrative Office (SS-WVHA) where he joined the general staff of SS-Brigadeführer Hans Kammler; ostensibly as a representative of the Ministry of Armaments and War Production. Kammler was the director of Amt C (Buildings and Works) of the WVHA. This department was concerned primarily with the extensive engineering and construction projects of the SS. These included the building of factories and other manufacturing facilities for Germany's various secret weapons programs. The sensitive nature of these projects made their security a major concern for Kammler's SS office. Given his background in the security services, Bischoff was appointed by Kammler to serve as chief of counter-intelligence and counter-sabotage for Germany’s highly-secretive V-weapons program.
Much of Germany’s V-1 flying bombs and V-2 ballistic missiles were produced at Mittelwerk, a massive armaments factory housed in an elaborate subterranean tunnel system in the Harz Mountains that had been built and was partially administered by Kammler's SS department. The complex and dangerous work performed to assemble the V-weapons themselves was done under brutal conditions by thousands of slave-laborers (mainly Russians, Poles and French, among other nationalities) drawn from the inmate population of the nearby Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp. As the head of security, Bischoff was responsible for both maintaining the secrecy of the missile production facility at Mittelwerk from the Allies and preventing organized attempts by the prisoner-laborers to sabotage the V-weapons during the assembly process.[6]
Mittelbau-Dora
The various Nazi police and security services stationed in the areas surrounding Mittelwerk and the subsidiary camp of Mittelbau-Dora would be formally consolidated under Bischoff’s control in February, 1944. Counter-sabotage operations were begun, mainly targeting the numerous resistance organizations operating among the various prisoner groups working in the tunnels.[7] Under Bischoff's direction, the SS arrested much of the resistance leadership among Mittelbau-Dora's Russian, French and Communist inmates in November, 1944. Many of those taken into custody were interrogated under torture with some later being executed and the remainder interned in solitary confinement.[8]
In February, 1945 the SS administration of Mittelbau-Dora was reorganized under former Auschwitz commandant Richard Baer. Under this new arrangement, Bischoff, in addition to his other security duties, also took over as director of Mittelbau-Dora's internal Sicherheitsdienst (SD) organization. In response to rumors of a planned escape attempt, Bischoff's SD command initiated a wave of executions in March, 1945 which saw hundreds of the camp's prisoners, mostly Soviet POWs, killed in a series of mass-hangings. Bischoff also ordered much of the surviving leadership of the camp's resistance organizations to be shot by firing squad prior to the liberation of Mittelbau-Dora by the US Army in April, 1945.[9]
Post-war
Following the German defeat Bischoff returned to Magdeburg, now located inside the Soviet occupation zone of Germany. Bischoff went into hiding and was able to evade capture by the Allies for several months before he was eventually identified and arrested by Russian authorities in January, 1946. He was interned at NKVD Special Camp No. 1 near Mühlberg until September, 1948 when he was transferred to NKVD Special Camp No. 2 (formerly the Buchenwald concentration camp) outside of Weimar. In 1950 Bischoff was deported by the Soviets to a forced labor camp located in Siberia. He would remain imprisoned in the USSR for the next five years. In 1955 Bischoff would be among the last German prisoners of war to be released from captivity by the Soviet Union. After settling in West Germany Bischoff worked as an investigator for the German Red Cross Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen, where he was employed from 1957 to 1965.[10]
Essen-Dora trial
On November 17, 1967 Bischoff and two other former SS officers who hand served with him at Mittelbau-Dora, were indicted for war crimes by the Superior Court of Essen. The charges against Bischoff stemmed from his involvement in the series of mass executions that occurred at Mittelbau-Dora between February and April, 1945. He was also charged with the use of torture against prisoners under interrogation. Bischoff entered a plea of not guilty.[11] The trial (known as the Essen-Dora Process) began in November, 1967 and would continue for two and a half years. The proceedings included the testimony of over 300 witnesses, among them former Nazi Armaments Minister Albert Speer and the famed inventor of the V-2 rocket, Wernher von Braun, now a premier rocket scientist in the United States.
On May 5, 1970 the case against Bischoff was dismissed by the court due to reasons of his poor health.[12] He was thus able to avoid being formally convicted of war crimes (as his former co-defendants were) just three days later. Other efforts to prosecute Bischoff for his wartime activities also met with little success. An investigation by the District Court of West Berlin into his involvement with the Einsatzgruppen killings in Bydgoszcz was discontinued in 1971, citing a lack of evidence. A further effort to prosecute Bischoff, this time for atrocities committed during his tenure as Gestapo chief in Poznań, was likewise abandoned in 1976, once again owing to Bischoff's precarious health. Bischoff continued to reside in West Germany for the remainder of his life. He died in Hamburg on January 5, 1993.[13]
References
- ^ Jens-Christian Wagner:Produktion des Todes: Das KZ Mittelbau-Dora, Göttingen 2001, S. 666.
- ^ Ernst Klee: The Encyclopedia of persons to the Third Reich. Wer war was vor und nach 1945. Who was that before and after 1945. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Zweite aktualisierte Auflage, Frankfurt am Main 2005, S. 51. Penguin Books, second edition, Frankfurt am Main 2005, p. 51.
- ^ Ernst Klee: The Encyclopedia of persons to the Third Reich. Wer war was vor und nach 1945. Who was that before and after 1945. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Zweite aktualisierte Auflage, Frankfurt am Main 2005, S. 51. Penguin Books, second edition, Frankfurt am Main 2005, p. 51.
- ^ hospital Owinska and Fort VII in Poznan at deathcamps.org
- ^ Alfred Gottwaldt, Diana Schulle: The Deportation of Jews from the German Reich 1941-1945 - An Annotated Chronology, Wiesbaden, 2005, ISBN 3-86539-059-5.
- ^ Ernst Klee: The Encyclopedia of persons to the Third Reich. Wer war was vor und nach 1945. Who was that before and after 1945. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Zweite aktualisierte Auflage, Frankfurt am Main 2005, S. 51. Penguin Books, second edition, Frankfurt am Main 2005, p. 51.
- ^ Jens-Christian Wagner, Production of Death: The Mittelbau-Dora, Göttingen, 2001 S. 666th.
- ^ Sellier, Andre. A History of the Dora Camp. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee. 2003.
- ^ "Mittelbau: Last Phase". Ushmm.org. Retrieved 2012-05-30.
- ^ Jens-Christian Wagner, Production of Death: The Mittelbau-Dora, Göttingen, 2001 S. 666th.
- ^ André Sellier: Forced Labor in the missile tunnel - History of the Dora camp, Lüneburg, 2000, p. 518.
- ^ Ernst Klee: The Encyclopedia of the Third Reich persons, Fischer Taschenbuch 2005, S. 51, Quelle: 24 Js 549/61 (Z) OStA Köln. Penguin Books 2005, p. 51, source: 24 Js 549/61 (Z) OSTA Cologne.
- ^ Sellier, Andre. A History of the Dora Camp. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee. 2003.