Alfred Naujocks

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Alfred Naujocks immediately after the defection (1944)

Alfred Helmut Naujocks (born September 20, 1911 in Kiel , † April 4, 1966 in Hamburg ; alias Hans Müller , alias Alfred Bonsen , Rudolf Möbert ) was a senior employee of the security service of the SS (SD). He committed many acts of terrorism, including some murders. In Florian Altenhöner's biography he is referred to as a “counterfeiter, murderer and terrorist”.

Life and work until 1939

Naujocks was born as the son of the businessman Richard Naujocks and his wife Therese, née Pahlke. From 1917 he attended secondary school for eight years, which he left with the Tertia in Kiel in 1925 . He then began training as a precision mechanic .

On August 1, 1931, Naujocks joined the NSDAP (membership number 624.279) and the SS (membership number 26.240). Due to his involvement in numerous political disputes, especially street fights and hall battles, Naujocks soon became known as a thug and bully. A Kiel newspaper described him as a "rough fighter".

In 1934 Naujocks was assigned to the security service (SD) led by Reinhard Heydrich . Although he initially only worked as a driver and ordinary employee, he was soon entrusted with special assignments such as murder: in 1935 he traveled with Werner Göttsch to Czechoslovakia, where the two of them murdered the engineer Rudolf Formis , an employee of the Black Front who worked in Czechoslovakia sent anti-Nazi propaganda to the German Reich with the help of a self-made shortwave transmitter. He also carried out several bomb attacks in the Slovak part of the country, which should be attributed to Slovak nationalists. In 1936 he is said to have forged documents incriminating the Soviet Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky as alleged agents of the SD. However, recent research assumes that the NKVD itself provoked the forging of the documents in order to execute Tukhachevsky after a show trial in 1937.

In 1937, Naujocks switched to the SD foreign intelligence service , where from 1939 to the beginning of 1941 he headed the Office Group for Communication and Intelligence Operations Abroad (1939: Office VI J, renamed Office VI B in early 1940). Among other things, he was in charge of obtaining false passports, ID cards and banknotes for agents abroad in the service of the SD.

Second World War

Gleiwitz transmitter

According to his own statements during the post-war interrogations, Naujocks received "personally" the order from Heydrich to carry out a bogus "Polish" attack on the Gleiwitz transmitter on the evening of August 31, 1939 . During an interrogation on November 20, 1945, Naujocks testified in a statement machine-signed by a US officer:

“Around August 10, 1939, Heydrich, the head of the Sipo and SD, personally ordered me to fake an attack on the radio station near Gleiwitz near the Polish border and to make it appear as if Poles had been the attackers ... We took the radio station as ordered, gave a three or four minute speech on an emergency transmitter, fired a few pistol shots and left the place. "

Then, according to Naujocks, the SD agents, including him, murdered the German citizen Franz Honiok and left the body on the transmitter. Hitler used the assault on the Gleiwitz transmitter, fabricated by his subordinates, and other alleged border violations that were supposed to have been perpetrated by Polish citizens as a justification for the assault on Poland that started World War II and which he addressed in his Reichstag speech on September 1 1939 declared with the words: “They have been firing back since 5:45 am!” Without giving any further details of the alleged border violations. In the days immediately after the start of the war, German daily newspapers published reports on the alleged border violations on the orders of Goebbel's Propaganda Ministry , but further reporting was banned a short time later.

Further use in the war

On November 9, 1939, Naujocks was involved in a leading position in the Venlo incident . Two high- ranking British MI6 agents ( Richard Henry Stevens and Sigismund Payne Best ) were kidnapped by the SS security service in the Dutch city of Venlo and brought to Germany. During the kidnapping, the Nazi agents shot and killed the Dutch secret service officer Luitenant Dirk Klop , who resisted them. The Venlo incident made large parts of the British espionage network in Western and Central Europe almost worthless. It led to the resignation of the Dutch intelligence chief.

Naujocks is credited with the initiative of Aktion Bernhard in December 1939, in which false pound notes produced in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp were supposed to serve to destabilize the English economic area. At that time he was head of the technology group (IV F) of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA). He is said to have personally suggested this forgery project to Reinhard Heydrich, the second highest man in the SS hierarchy.

In 1941 Naujocks was released from the SD and transferred to the Waffen-SS as a simple soldier on allegations of corruption . With the Waffen-SS he came to the Eastern Front in an artillery regiment of the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler . In 1942 he was released from the Waffen-SS because of stomach ulcers. He then worked in the economic administration of the German occupiers in Belgium . There he was in charge of controlling the black market.

Reactivated after parole in the SD and promoted to Obersturmbannführer in 1943, Naujocks was deployed in Denmark for a longer period in early 1944 . Here he acted as an instructor for the first German "counter-terror group", from which the so-called Peter group emerged under the leadership of SD leader Otto Schwerdt . It was a secret terror group that carried out terrorist attacks and murders in occupied Denmark on behalf of the SD in order to prevent the Danish population from acts of resistance against the Germans and to murder suspected sympathizers of the Danish resistance. This also included what the National Socialists called “ compensatory murders ” as revenge for Germans killed by the Danish resistance movement. The Peter group murdered about 100 people.

On October 19, 1944, Alfred Naujocks defected in the Eifel and was captured by American soldiers. He was brought to Britain soon after his capture . There he was interrogated intensively by MI5 for several months in the Camp 20 interrogation camp near London .

post war period

At the end of August 1945 he was brought from Great Britain to Germany and handed over to the Prosecution of the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg. Several of his statements were included in the Nuremberg trials . In 1946 he was able to flee for a short time from an internment camp in Nuremberg . He was arrested and extradited to Denmark in 1947 . There he was charged with murdering Danish resistance fighters in a small war crimes trial and sentenced to several years in prison in the second instance. Due to the extremely mild approach of the Danish judiciary against German war criminals , he was released in 1950. The other convicts in Denmark, including the former Reich Plenipotentiary Werner Best , did not have to serve their sentences in full. Naujocks' release from prison was therefore not a privilege granted to him alone, but a direct consequence of Danish legal practice.

Naujocks settled in Hamburg in 1952 , where he lived as a businessman. Since the late 1950s, several German public prosecutors have been investigating a whole series of crimes against him. He did not accept the invitation to present the film The Gleiwitz Case in Hamburg in 1963. None of the preliminary investigations resulted in an indictment. Naujocks died on April 4, 1966 in Hamburg. The year of death 1960 mentioned in the older literature is wrong.

literature

Web links

Commons : Alfred Naujocks  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Schleswig-Holsteinische Volkszeitung , December 16, 1932.
  2. ↑ Gordon Williamson: The SS - Hitler's Instrument of Power. Neuer Kaiser Verlag 1998, p. 279.
  3. ↑ Walter Laqueur , Stalin. The Glasnost Revelations , New York 1990, pp. 105-110.
  4. ↑ Walther Hofer: The unleashing of the Second World War. In: Lit Verlag via books.google.de , 2007, p. 400.
  5. ^ Assault on the Gleiwitz transmitter. In: ns-archiv.de , Frankfurt, 1967, p. 327f.
  6. ↑ German birth certificate for Franz Honiok
  7. ↑ Florian Altenhöner: The man who started World War II. Prospero Verlag , Münster / Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-941688-10-0 , p. 111.
  8. ^ Adolf Hitler, Declaration of the Reich Government before the German Reichstag, September 1, 1939 . In: 1000dokumente.de . Retrieved October 19, 2014.
  9. ↑ Peter Koblank: The Venlo incident. In: mythoselser.de , 2006.
  10. ^ Matthias Bath: The SD in Denmark 1940-1945. Heydrich's elite and counter-terror . Neuhaus, Berlin 2015, p. 22.
  11. ↑ Whitney R. Harris: Tyranne in front of the court: The procedure against the main German war criminals after the Second World War in Nuremberg 1945-1946, BWV 2008, ISBN 978-3-8305-1593-7 , p. 211.
  12. ↑ Berliner Zeitung: Fifty years ago the film "Der Fall Gleiwitz" was released on September 17th, 2011.
personal data
SURNAME Naujocks, Alfred
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Naujocks, Alfred Helmut (full name); Müller, Hans (pseudonym); Bonsen, Alfred (pseudonym); Möbert, Rudolf (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German National Socialist
DATE OF BIRTH September 20, 1911
PLACE OF BIRTH Kiel
DATE OF DEATH April 4th 1966
Place of death Hamburg