Arpad Wigand

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Arpad Jakob Valentin Wigand (born January 13, 1906 in Mannheim ; † July 26, 1983 ibid) was a German SS leader and from August 1941 as SS and Police Leader (SSPF) Warsaw .

Career

Wigand was the son of a railroad assistant. The family lived in the Rhineland from 1911 after the father's death. After graduating from high school, an apprenticeship at the Reichsbahn followed in 1922 . After the end of his training, however, he was not taken over by the Reichsbahn due to cost-cutting measures. From 1925 he earned his living as a commercial clerk at Drahtverband GmbH in Düsseldorf . As a result of the Great Depression , he lost his job in 1931.

After the party was banned in 1926, Wigand became a member of the NSDAP ( membership number 30.682) and of the SS in 1930 (SS number 2.999). From 1931 he was a member of several SS standards and headed the 70th SS standard from September 1935 to the beginning of July 1936 and then the 16th SS standard "Lower Elbe" until autumn 1937. From September 1, 1937 to July 1941, he was inspector of the Security Police and the SD in Breslau .

After the attack on Poland at the beginning of the Second World War , it was Wigand who, in the course of looking for a suitable location for a new concentration camp, suggested an existing camp site in Oświęcim, Upper Silesia (Auschwitz in German). From the beginning of August 1941 he was SS and Police Leader Warsaw, officially until the end of April 1943. At a meeting in Warsaw in mid-October 1941, Wigand took the view that the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto were incapable of resistance given their poor nutritional status. Heinrich Himmler entrusted Wigand with the construction of the Treblinka extermination camp on April 17, 1942 . Wigand assigned this task to the site manager Richard Thomalla .

From July 1942 to April 1943, Wigand was represented in this position by Ferdinand von Sammern-Frankenegg , since Wigand switched to the Waffen SS in mid-1942 . From September 1942 he was first platoon leader in the 7th SS Volunteer Mountain Division "Prinz Eugen" , from spring 1943 adjutant and finally commander of III. Battalion of the SS Volunteer Mountain Regiment 13 " Artur Phleps " until February 1945.

After the end of the war he was taken prisoner by the British and was extradited to Poland in 1947 . There he was sentenced in 1950 to ten years and then fifteen years in prison. The verdict was based on Wigand's high position in the German occupation regime and his SS membership; only a small number of documents incriminating him were available to the court.

As early as 1956, Wigand was deported to West Germany as part of an amnesty and returned to his wife and three children, who lived in Mannheim. With the support of HIAG , he managed to get a job in the middle service of the city of Mannheim in the personnel office. He worked there until his retirement in 1971.

A preliminary investigation initiated against him in 1961 was discontinued that same year, a process that was later repeated in connection with the establishment of the Treblinka extermination camp. He was questioned as a witness in other Nazi trials, for example in the course of the first Frankfurt Auschwitz trial . At the Hamburg Regional Court , Wigand was sentenced to twelve and a half years imprisonment for complicity in murder at the end of 1981 ; the subject matter of the proceedings essentially comprised Nazi crimes in Warsaw. His defense attorney was the right-wing extremist Hamburg lawyer Jürgen Rieger . At the end of the trial, Rieger made a nine-hour plea in which, among other things, he described the establishment of the Warsaw ghetto as an epidemic policy measure. These and other statements by Rieger during the Wigand Trial led to a conviction in 1983 for insulting the victims of National Socialist tyranny and denigrating the memory of the deceased . Rieger was sentenced to a fine, but the verdict was overturned after the 1987 revision . Wigand died in late July 1983.

Awards

Wigand's SS ranks
date rank
June 1933 SS-Sturmbannführer
May 1934 SS-Obersturmbannführer
September 1935 SS standard leader
April 1938 SS-Oberführer
February 1943 Obersturmführer of the Reserve (Waffen-SS)
January 1944 Hauptsturmführer of the Reserve (Waffen-SS)

As an SS leader

literature

  • Gerhard Wenzl, Denis Gemmning, Karl-Heinz Schwarz-Pich: Wigand, Arpad 1906–1983. In: Baden-Württemberg biographies. Vol. 6, 2016, ZDB -ID 1210322-6 , pp. 509-511.
  • Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich . Who was what before and after 1945 (= Fischer. 16048). Updated edition, 2nd edition. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-596-16048-8 .
  • Andreas Mix: Organizers and practitioners of violence. The SS and police leaders in the Warsaw district. In: Timm C. Richter (Ed.): War and crime. Situation and intention: case studies (=  Villa Ten Hompel current . No. 9 ). Martin Meidenbauer, Munich 2006, ISBN 978-3-89975-080-5 , p. 123-134 .
  • Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum (ed.): Auschwitz in the eyes of the SS. State Museum, Oswiecim 1998, ISBN 83-85047-35-2 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Andreas Mix: From the Waldhof to Warsaw. The career of SS leader Arpad Wigand on Marchivum on April 10, 2020
  2. ↑ State Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau (ed.): Auschwitz in the eyes of the SS. 1998, p. 244 f.
  3. ^ Ernst Klee: Auschwitz. Perpetrators, accomplices, victims and what became of them. Lexicon of persons. Frankfurt / M. 2013, ISBN 978-3-10-039333-3 , p. 435.
  4. ^ Ernst Klee: The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Updated edition, 2nd edition. 2007, p. 677.
  5. ↑ Josef Wulf : The Third Reich and its executors. The liquidation of 500,000 Jews in the Warsaw ghetto. Arani, Berlin 1961, pp. 87, 362.
  6. ^ Andrej Angrick : "Aktion 1005" - Removal of traces of Nazi mass crimes 1942–1945: A "secret Reich affair" in the area of ​​conflict between the turn of the war and propaganda , Göttingen 2018, p. 140
  7. ↑ Arpad Wigand on www.dws-xip.pl
  8. Jump up ↑ The Cynicism of a Defense Attorney. In: Hamburger Abendblatt . No. 87, April 15, 1987, p. 6, ( http://www.abendblatt.de/archiv/article.php?xmlurl=/ha/1986/xml/19860415xml/habxml860406_2061.xml ( Memento from July 28th 2014 in the Internet Archive ) ).
personal data
SURNAME Wigand, Arpad
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Wigand, Arpad Jakob Valentin (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German SS-Oberführer and SSPF Warsaw
DATE OF BIRTH January 13, 1906
PLACE OF BIRTH Mannheim
DATE OF DEATH July 26, 1983
Place of death Mannheim