Bernhard Baatz

Bernhard Baatz (born November 19, 1910 in Dörnitz ; † April 26, 1978 in Düsseldorf ) was a German SS-Obersturmbannführer , head of Divisions IV D 2 and IV D 4 of the Reich Security Main Office and leader of Einsatzkommandos 1 as well as commander of the Security Police and the SD in Estonia .

Origin and studies

Bernhard Baatz was born on November 19, 1910 in Dörnitz (today in Saxony-Anhalt ). His father was a garrison administration inspector. Baatz attended elementary school in Graudenz in West Prussia . When most of West Prussia was ceded to Poland after the First World War , his father was transferred to Dessau . Here Baatz attended the humanistic grammar school . He studied law in Jena and Halle . During his studies in 1929 he became a member of the Teutonia Jena fraternity .

At the Gestapo

On March 1, 1932, Baatz became a member of the NSDAP (membership number 941 790) and on July 1, 1932 he also joined the SS (membership number 46 414).

During his internship he did a. a. at the state police station in Berlin . In February 1937, Baatz joined the Gestapo's church department as an assessor .

At the task force of the security police in Poland

During the attack on Poland , Baatz was deployed in the Tannenberg company on the staff of Einsatzgruppe IV from September 1939 to November 1939.

In the Reich Security Main Office

In December 1939 Baatz returned to the Gestapo, which had since been integrated into the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA), which was newly established with effect from October 1, 1939, together with the Reich Criminal Police Office and the Security Service of the SS (SD). Here Baatz took over Section II O (Occupied Polish Territories) until January 1940, which was then transferred to the new Section IV D 2 ( Government General Affairs , Poland in the Reich).

After the campaign in the west, Baatz was entrusted in July 1940 with setting up the new Section IV D 4 (occupied territories: France , Luxembourg , Alsace and Lorraine , Belgium , Holland , Norway and Denmark ) as SS-Sturmbannführer and government councilor. In April 1941 he took over the department for foreign workers. In this capacity, he also represented the RSHA in the "Working Group for Security Issues in Deploying Foreigners", which was created on December 3, 1941.

With the Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police and SD in Estonia

On August 1, 1943, Baatz was appointed leader of the Einsatzkommando 1 (EK 1), which had to fulfill its security police tasks and the order to liquidate all "elements hostile to the Reich and racially inferior" in the Estonia area . The EK 1 led Baatz until October 15, 1944. From November 1943 to October 1944 Baatz was deployed as commander of the Security Police and the SD (KdS) in Estonia. In 1944/45 he was transferred to Reichenberg as KdS in the Krakow district of the Generalgouvernement and Sudetenland .

After the war

After the end of the war, Baatz initially remained completely unmolested. At first he went into hiding and later worked for an insurance company in Düsseldorf. He later rose to become the director of the Mannesmann housing association in Duisburg . It was not until June 26, 1967, at the instigation of the Public Prosecutor's Office at the Berlin Court of Appeal , that he and former comrades from Office IV (Gestapo) of the RSHA were arrested and taken to the Moabit prison in Berlin. The public prosecutor's office accused him of deliberately and for low motives, by participating in edicts for the execution of Polish forced laborers without judgment, killing 240 people:

“As a fully qualified lawyer, he knew that there was no legal basis for ' special treatment ' and wanted - like Hitler , Göring , Himmler , Heydrich and Müller - the killing of Polish civilian workers and prisoners of war by way of special treatment for low motives, namely for that reason because he viewed them as 'racially inferior subhumans ', who should be denied those legal safeguards which, according to the unanimous legal opinion of all civilized peoples, are also due to those who have committed a criminal act. "

In the present case law, the only perpetrators were Hitler, Himmler and Heydrich. All others were counted among the assistants , if they had not killed people themselves and for low motives. However, it was precisely the change to a law from the Nazi era that led to an inglorious end to the public prosecutor's efforts to hold the desk perpetrators in the RSHA accountable.

According to the ordinance of December 5, 1939 ( RGBl. I p. 2378), in contrast to the previous legal situation, the same threat of punishment applied to the perpetrator as to the perpetrator. The Grand Criminal Law Commission therefore decided in February 1955 that it should again be possible to differentiate between perpetrators and perpetrators with regard to the level of punishment. On the occasion of the relief of the courts from the ever increasing number of criminal proceedings for traffic offenses, the introductory law to the law on administrative offenses was formulated as an article law, with which u. a. Section 50 (2) of the Criminal Code was also newly drafted in line with the Criminal Law Commission. According to this, the perpetrator only had to be punished with the same punishment as the perpetrator if there were special personal characteristics. If the "low motives" of the murder assistants could not be proven in the accusation of murder, the crime could no longer be punished with the life imprisonment applicable to the perpetrator , but only with an early sentence of a maximum of 15 years. Such early crimes, however, were subject to the statute of limitations , which for offenses before the end of the war had already entered into on May 8, 1960. The attempt to exclude acts from the Nazi era from this regulation through legal constructions ultimately failed because of the final decision of the Federal Court of Justice on May 20, 1969 (see statute of limitations debate ). The majority of those accused in the so-called RSHA trial had to be released, including Baatz.

Bernhard Baatz died on April 26, 1978.

literature

• Helge Dvorak: Biographical Lexicon of the German Burschenschaft. Volume I: Politicians. Volume 7: Supplement A – K. Winter, Heidelberg 2013, ISBN 978-3-8253-6050-4 , p. 27.
• Michael Wildt: Generation of the Unconditional. The leadership corps of the Reich Security Main Office , Hamburger Edition , 2002, ISBN 3-930908-75-1 .
• Jörg Friedrich: The cold amnesty , Frankfurt a. M. 1984, Fischer Taschenbuchverlag, ISBN 3-596-24308-4 .
• Ruth Bettina Birn : The Security Police in Estonia 1941-1944, A Study on Collaboration in the East , Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn 2006, ISBN 978-3-506-75614-5 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Dieter Schenk: Hans Frank - Hitler's Crown Lawyer and Governor General, Frankfurt 2008, p. 425, quoted from a letter dated August 24, 1953 to the former senior RSHA employee Paul Werner: “Benne Baatz is fine. He is legalized again after being in hiding for quite a while and working as a farmer. Now he's in some insurance company in Düsseldorf and is starting to become a lawyer again. In any case, he got through time undamaged without imprisonment or camp. "
2. ^ Jörg Friedrich: The cold amnesty , Frankfurt a. M. 1984, Fischer Taschenbuchverlag, ISBN 3-596-24308-4 .