Adolf Rube

Adolf Friedrich Wilhelm Rübe (born May 18, 1896 in Karlsruhe ; † June 23, 1974 there ) was a German criminal secretary, SS-Hauptscharführer and war criminal .

Life

Family, World War I and Police Service

As the son of master carpenter Adolf Rübe († 1917) and his wife Wilhelmine Meyer († 1899), he began an apprenticeship as a decorator in 1910 . From 1914 to 1918 he took part in the First World War. From 1920 he changed his professional orientation and joined the police in Lörrach , where he worked at the passport office there.

In 1923 he went to the Baden State Police Office in Karlsruhe. A year later he married Else Waldmann, although this marriage remained childless. The post of assistant was assigned to him in 1926. Three years later, he was promoted to the rank of police secretary. In the course of the reorganization of the police from 1933, his department was integrated into the criminal police of the country, whereby his rank as criminal secretary was designated.

Transfer to Russia

His official job consisted of managing a file for valuables. With the beginning of the Second World War he too was supposed to be drafted into the Wehrmacht , but he was still able to avoid being drafted. According to available sources, it cannot be precisely proven when beet was moved to Russia. Heinz Rosenberg, who was deported from Hamburg to Minsk, reported from Rübe with the date of August 31, 1942. In November 1942 he was transferred to " Commander of the Security Police and SD White Ruthenia " (KdS) Eduard Strauch , who is in command there would have.

Minsk ghetto

In the first two months of 1943 he was initially employed at the KdS in Minsk in Department V, the criminal police. Then he was transferred to Department IV for "Jewish Affairs". Here he served under the command of SS-Hauptsturmführer Otto Müller , who, as camp commandant, was in command of the Minsk ghetto .

Towards the end of 1942 the dissolution of the Minsk ghetto began. On February 5, 1943, SS-Obersturmführer Eduard Strauch issued a " command order " that on February 8 and 9, 1943 the Jews of the city of Sluzk should be "resettled". Rübe was a member of the 2nd group under the command of SS-Obersturmführer Jakob Oswald. Rübe later stated that he was only assigned to the reserve and did not take part in the shootings at pit 2.

Crimes in the ghetto and in Minsk

From April 1943, Rübe was the head of the guard in the Minsk ghetto. He also made patrols in the ghetto. He later claimed in court that he had never hit Jews. If he shot Jews, it was always because they had committed offenses. In these so-called criminal investigations, he himself carried out the “punishment” in a neighboring cemetery. Because a transport worker had made derogatory comments about National Socialism , he shot him. He also shot the painter Marion Baruch (born March 19, 1919) for an alleged theft after a sign she had painted caught his attention.

As in his time in Karlsruhe, he devoted himself to so-called morality offenses . Since pregnancy in the ghetto was punishable by death, he had 30 pregnant women picked up from the ghetto hospital in Minsk and shot. He said indignantly that a much too big "Klimbim" was being held around these pregnant women. When the same hospital was evacuated in July 1943, the sick in gas vans were killed. Since their capacity was limited, he had the sick shot straight away in their beds.

After the evacuation of the Minsk ghetto, he was deployed to a “Enterdungskommando”, the “ Sonderkommando 1005- Mitte”. The bodies of those murdered near Blagovshchina were excavated and burned at the beginning of November 1943 in order to cover up the traces of the mass murders . In July 1944 he returned to the police service in Baden.

Prosecution and detention

Rübe was reported by a survivor from Frankfurt am Main at the end of 1946 . He was charged with participating in 436 killings, with witnesses providing evidence of 26 personal killings. Two psychological reports were submitted about him in the trial. One diagnosed a schizoid personality disorder , the other sex-pathological sadism . In the judgment of December 15, 1949, he was sentenced to life imprisonment . He remained imprisoned in Bruchsal prison until 1962 . After that he lived in Karlsruhe until his death in 1974. In the meantime, the central office of the state justice administrations for the investigation of National Socialist crimes in Ludwigsburg had collected new incriminating material against him, which could have led to further charges against him.

literature

• Paul Kohl: The war of the German armed forces and the police 1941-1944. Frankfurt / Main 1995
• Reinhard Rürup : Topography of Terror. Berlin 1993.
• Christian Gerlach: Calculated murders - The German economic and extermination policy in Belarus 1941-1944. Hamburg 1999
• Fred Ludwig Sepainter (Ed.): Baden-Württembergische Biographien. , Volume III, Stuttgart 2002
• LG Karlsruhe, November 7, 1951 . In: Justice and Nazi crimes . Collection of German criminal convictions for Nazi homicides 1945–1966, Vol. VIII, edited by Adelheid L. Rüter-Ehlermann, HH Fuchs, CF Rüter . Amsterdam: University Press, 1972, No. 298 pp. 1–57 Individual killings of men, women and children in the Minsk ghetto on orders and on their own initiative. Furthermore, participation in the mass killing of German and Soviet Jews by shooting and gassing in a 'gas truck'

Web links

• In Document NO-5498, Rübe reports on the events of November 1943, which were commanded by SS-Obersturmführer and Chief Detective Georg Heuser