Arthur Liebehenschel

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Arthur Liebehenschel (1940)

Arthur Liebehenschel (born November 25, 1901 in Posen , † January 24, 1948 in Krakow ) was a German SS leader. From November 1943, Liebehenschel was camp commandant and site elder in the main camp of Auschwitz and from May 1944 also camp commandant in the Majdanek concentration camp, which had already been cleared . He was sentenced to death in the Auschwitz trial in Kraków in 1947 and executed the following year.

Life

School time and military career

After eight years of elementary school, Liebehenschel attended a trade school for three years and then worked for the Poznan Railway Directorate. In January 1919 he left Posen to avoid the threat of Polish internment and was involved in the Eastern Border Guard . In September 1919 he enlisted in the Reichswehr for twelve years , which he left in October 1931 with the rank of sergeant major . During this period he graduated from a commercial school for administration and economics.

Promotion to the concentration camp SS until 1943

Liebehenschel had been a member of the NSDAP ( membership number 932.760) and the SS (SS number 29.254) from the beginning of February 1932 . Under the leader of the 27th SS Standard Walter Gerlach , Liebehenschel was employed as his adjutant from August 4, 1934 in the notorious Berlin Columbia House and later in the Lichtenburg concentration camp . On 5 July 1937, he joined as head of department in the staff of the leader of the SS Death's Head units ( Theodor Eicke over) to Berlin, where he remained until May 1940 at the Inspectorate of Concentration Camps the area Political Department headed. In 1940 he was in the service of a staff leader. His last SS rank was Obersturmbannführer (active) , which he had received on January 30, 1941.

From Liebehenschel comes the instruction that SS members who were involved in executions and were to be awarded the War Merit Cross should in no way use the term "execution", but rather talk about "carrying out war-important tasks" .

From mid-March 1943 Liebehenschel was head of Department D 1 / Central Office in the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office (WVHA) under Oswald Pohl and representative of the inspector of the concentration camp Richard Glücks . When Rudolf Höß was appointed to a higher office, Pohl redistributed the administrative tasks.

Commander of the Auschwitz I and Majdanek concentration camps

On November 11, 1943, Liebehenschel became camp commandant and site elder in Auschwitz I (main camp) . At the same time, Friedrich Hartjenstein in Auschwitz II (Birkenau) and Heinrich Schwarz in Auschwitz III (Monowitz) were the first to deploy their own camp commanders.

According to prisoners, Liebehenschel partially improved the bad conditions in the main camp. As a functionary prisoners "political" prisoners were now preference and the extensive spy system should have remained unused. The periodic bunker selections in Block 11 with subsequent shootings in front of the Black Wall (execution wall ) had been stopped. Liebehenschel had the standing cells torn down, which offered no space to sit or lie down and into which prisoners had previously been locked up as a punishment. He issued a general bunker amnesty and later had the black wall removed. He also canceled the order to shoot every refugee captured again.

In April 1944, Pohl sent his adjutant Richard Baer to the Auschwitz concentration camp with a letter to persuade Liebehenschel to separate from his partner Anneliese Hüttemann . Liebehenschel had divorced his wife in early December 1943 and left the family because of his love affair. Hüttemann, who Liebehenschel had met while working as a secretary to his boss Glücks , had been transferred to the SD section in Klagenfurt shortly before Liebehenschel's divorce . After it turned out that she had been taken into protective custody for three weeks in Düsseldorf in 1935 because of her relationship with a Jew , she was released, moved to Liebehenschel's place of employment, and both applied for marriage to the Race and Settlement Main Office (RuSHA). After an unsuccessful discussion with Liebehenschel and Hüttemann, Baer returned to Berlin on April 21, 1944 . In the following months, Hüttemann conducted correspondence with Pohl, Baer, ​​the Personal Staff Reichsführer SS and Heinrich Himmler himself. Meanwhile pregnant, she polemicized in her letter to Himmler of May 13, 1944, especially against Baer, ​​who had been "married childless for two years" . Since Hüttemann was finally expecting a child, Heinrich Himmler approved Liebehenschel's marriage proposal against Pohl's opposition. Liebehenschel lost his post in Auschwitz on May 8, 1944 and was transferred as camp commandant to the Majdanek concentration camp , which had already been cleared, on May 19, 1944 . His successor in Auschwitz was Baer.

This affair was probably only the immediate reason for the transfer. Liebehenschel himself saw the protracted argument with Pohl about his divorce, refused marriage permission and rebellion as a reason. His removal is likely due to his changes to the "measures of camp control". Höss thought Liebehenschel was incapable.

Deployment in Italy and end of the war

After the Majdanek concentration camp was dissolved, Liebehenschel was transferred to the office of Higher SS and Police Leader Trieste under Odilo Globocnik ( Adriatic Coastal Operation Zone ). At the end of the war he fled via the so-called Rattenlinie Nord to Flensburg .

Internment, trial and execution

After the surrender of the Wehrmacht , Liebehenschel was interned and interrogated for the planned Nuremberg trial of the main war criminals . After delivery by the United States Armed Forces in Poland, he was on 22 December 1947 by the Supreme National Tribunal in Auschwitz Trial sentenced to death and on January 24, 1948 Krakow Montelupich prison by hanging executed .

literature

Web links

Commons : Arthur Liebehenschel  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Johannes Tuchel: Concentration camps: organizational history and function of the inspection of the concentration camps 1934–1938. 1991, pp. 381f.
  2. ↑ a b c d Ernst Klee: The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 371.
  3. ^ Brün Meyer (Ed.): List of seniority of the Waffen-SS , Reprint Biblio Verlag Osnabrück (1987), p. 119, serial no. 2857.
  4. ^ Hermann Langbein: People in Auschwitz. Vienna / Munich 1995, p. 59ff.
  5. ↑ Karin Orth: The Concentration Camp SS , Munich 2004, p. 244f.
  6. ↑ Karin Orth: The Concentration Camp SS , Munich 2004, p. 247.
  7. ↑ Karin Orth: The Concentration Camp SS, Munich 2004, p. 242f.
  8. ↑ Karin Orth: The Concentration Camp SS , Munich 2004, p. 245f.
  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.
personal data
SURNAME Liebehenschel, Arthur
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German National Socialist and SS leader
DATE OF BIRTH November 25, 1901
PLACE OF BIRTH Poses
DATE OF DEATH January 24, 1948
Place of death Krakow