Hans-Adolf Prützmann

Hans Prützmann in the black pre-war uniform and with the (old) insignia of an SS brigade leader (1934)

Hans-Adolf Prützmann (born August 31, 1901 in Tolkemit , † May 21, 1945 probably in Lüneburg ) was a German member of the NSDAP in the Reichstag , Prussian State Council , Higher SS and Police Leader (HSSPF), SS-Obergruppenführer , General of Arms -SS and police .

Life

After training at school studied Hans Prützmann Agriculture in Göttingen before various 1918-1921 Member Volunteer Corps was. Prützmann was a member during these three years, but avoided military action. This changed in 1923 when he broke off his studies and until 1924 joined a volunteer corps that was involved in the border fight in Upper Silesia .

He then worked for a few years as an agricultural official in Pomerania , Brandenburg and East Prussia before joining the SA in 1929 . Radicalized by the Freikorps battles, Prützmann left the SA in 1930 and switched to the SS in the same year (SS No. 3.002), where he saw his personal goals better represented. At the same time he was accepted into the NSDAP ( membership number 142.290).

From this point on, a steep career began for Prützmann: He was a member of the Reichstag from July 1932 , was appointed SS brigade leader in November 1933 and was given the rank of SS group leader in February 1934. In this position he benefited from donations and - as a hunting guest - from personal favors from medium-sized companies such as the Trossingen paper goods manufacturer Fritz Kiehn , who, like Prützmann, had been an NSDAP member of the Reichstag since July 1932 and made a steep career as a Württemberg economic functionary after the National Socialist takeover. In 1933 Prützmann was also appointed leader of the SS Upper Section Southwest in Stuttgart . In this function he was involved in the arrest and murder of Hermann Mattheiß , the head of the political police in Württemberg who was personally at odds with Himmler and Prützmann, as part of the Röhm affair in 1934 . Prützmann's role here could never be clarified beyond any doubt. After the war , charges of murder were brought before the Ellwangen Regional Court against the Prützmann, who was considered missing, and against three other people, including Fritz Kiehn. The proceedings were dropped in 1950 due to lack of evidence. Even after the transfer of power to the National Socialists, he was a member of the then politically disempowered Reichstag until 1945.

From March 1937 to May 1941, Prützmann was HSSPF Northwest based in Hamburg and then headed the SS Upper Section Northeast with the headquarters in Königsberg as HSSPF . In April 1941 he was appointed lieutenant general of the police.

From June 1941 to October 1941 Prützmann was Higher SS and Police Leader of Russia North with his seat in Riga . He held the same function in the Ukraine and South Russia until the summer of 1944 . In these functions, Prützmann was involved in the escalating, systematic extermination policy against Jews at a very early stage . At the beginning of August 1941, when a subordinate asked where the Baltic Jews were being resettled , he replied : “Not as you think - they should be transported to the afterlife.” At Górka-Połonka , mass executions of Jews were carried out on his orders in August 1942 Lutsk and neighboring towns after the dissolution of the Lutsk ghetto, in which an estimated 25,000 Jews were killed. In his role as SS-Gruppenführer, he took part in the Gruppenführer conference on October 4, 1943 in Poznan, where Heinrich Himmler gave the first speech in Poznan .

From June 1944 he was the Supreme SS and Police Leader Ukraine with his seat in Kiev. One of his last promotions took place in September 1944, when Prützmann was appointed inspector general for special defense at the Reichsführer SS by his superiors . In addition, he worked as an authorized general in Croatia from December 1944. As head of the werewolf associations, in the last weeks of the war, on Himmler's orders, Prützmann commanded a final contingent of SS men, Hitler Youth and party functionaries in southern Germany behind the Allied lines. As Higher SS and Police Leader in the occupied part of the USSR, Hans-Adolf Prützmann played a leading role in the genocide of the local Jewish population. As head of the werewolf organization, he is said to have tried to conduct the intended underground fight with trained fighters in the style of the SS hunting associations , and not, as Reich Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels tried to convey through the media, as a "heroic" desperate struggle of untrained young people and women.

At the end of the war , Prützmann followed the so-called Rattenlinie Nord to Flensburg . He fell soon after in Allied POW camp where he suicide committed. There are different details about the place of death: Lüneburg is given as well as an interrogation camp near Diest (Belgium). However, the date, May 21, 1945, seems historically certain. Lüneburg would not be unlikely, as Himmler had also tried to get to safety in Flensburg beforehand. Himmler wanted to take part in the last government under Karl Dönitz . When this failed, Himmler and his entourage went south to go underground, which also failed. Himmler was arrested by the British in Meinstedt and then taken to Lüneburg, where he also committed suicide. If Prützmann was in Himmler's entourage at that time, Lüneburg would be plausible as the place of death.

See also

• List of SS-Obergruppenführer
• List of SS and police leaders

literature

• Personnel files of SS-Obergruppenführer Hans Adolf Prützmann, who directed the extermination of Jews in Ukraine-Russia in the years 1941-43. Document collection published by the Institute of Documentation in Israel for the Investigation of Nazi War Crimes. Ed. T. Friedmann (different spelling: Friedman, Tôviyyã) Haifa: Inst. Of Documentation in Israel for the Investigation of Nazi War Crimes, 1997.
• Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich . Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007. ISBN 978-3-596-16048-8 . (Updated 2nd edition).
• Ruth Bettina Birn : The Higher SS and Police Leaders. Himmler's representative in the Reich and in the occupied territories. Droste Verlag, Düsseldorf 1986, ISBN 3-7700-0710-7 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Hans-Adolf Prützmann in the catalog of the German National Library
• Hans-Adolf Prützmann in the database of members of the Reichstag

Individual evidence

1. ↑ A picture of Prützmann as a hunter of a capital stag together with Fritz Kiehn in: Berghoff / Rauh-Kühne: Fritz K., p. 84.
2. ↑ Berghoff / Rauh-Kühne: Fritz K., pp. 77–79.
3. ^ Berghoff / Rauh-Kühne: Fritz K., 244.
4. ↑ Andreas Zellhuber: "Our administration is driving a catastrophe ...". The Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories and German occupation in the Soviet Union 1941–1945. Munich 2006, p. 235, ISBN 3-89650-213-1 . (Source: Breitman, Himmler, p. 277.)
5. ↑ The Murder and Persecution of European Jews by National Socialist Germany 1933–1945 Volume 8; Soviet Union with annexed areas II, p. 714.
6. ^ Górka-Połonka - the place of execution and the mass grave of the victims of the Holocaust , Polish Museum of the History of Polish Jews online; Retrieved September 21, 2018 (Polish).
7. ^ Romuald Karmakar , The Himmler Project , DVD 2000, Berlin, ISBN 3-89848-719-9 .
8. ↑ Klaus-Dietmar Henke: The American Occupation of Germany, Munich 1995, p. 945f.
9. ↑ Stephan Link: "Rattenlinie Nord". War criminals in Flensburg and the surrounding area in May 1945. In: Gerhard Paul, Broder Schwensen (Hrsg.): Mai '45. End of the war in Flensburg. Flensburg 2015, p. 22.
10. ↑ cf. sh: z civil clothing, eye patch, new name: But there was no escape for Himmler , from May 13, 2015; accessed on May 10, 2017.