Bernhard Fischer-Schweder

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Friedrich Bernhard Fischer-Schweder (born January 12, 1904 in Spandau ; † November 28, 1960 in Hohenasperg prison ) was a German detective and SA or SS leader, most recently with the rank of SS Oberführer . He was best known as the commander of the Tilsit Task Force , which murdered several thousand Jews in Lithuania in the summer of 1941 in Memel (Klaipėda).

Life

Early life

Fischer-Schweder was born as the son of the building contractor Friedrich Carl Fischer (born April 15, 1871 in Praussnitzin, † August 2, 1915 in Nongrodno) and his wife Marie Amalie Elise Fischer, née. Schweder (born January 18, 1874 in Trebitz). He only acquired the double name Fischer-Schweder as an adult.

Fischer, who only had a simple school education, made contact with circles on the extreme political right very early on. Already in 1921 he joined as a teenager a volunteer corps to before in the "1923 Black Reichswehr worked". Allegedly he joined the NSDAP for the first time on May 11, 1923 and was a member of it until it was dissolved in the wake of the Hitler coup of November 1923.

On August 28, 1925, there is evidence that Fischer-Schweder joined the newly founded NSDAP ( membership number 17.141). He also became a member of the Sturmabteilung (SA), the party's street fighting association, at that time . In this he reached the rank of Standartenführer until 1933 and finally, in 1938, the rank of SA Oberführer.

Career in the Nazi state until the Second World War

Shortly after the National Socialists came to power in the spring of 1933, Fischer-Schweder was accepted into the police service. From March 1933 he worked as a detective officer in Berlin-Charlottenburg . On June 26, 1933, Fischer-Schweder and his mentor at the time, Karl Belding, murdered the former SA man Helmuth Unger , who was considered a traitor in the SA after it became known that he was a staff leader in the SA standard led by Belding in 1931 - Before 1933 worked as a spy for the political police of the Weimar Republic in the SA and passed on confidential information about their activities to the police against payment. Fischer-Schweder and Belding arrested Unger that day and brought him for interrogation by the Gestapo commissioner Rudolf Braschwitz . After the interrogation was over, they took Unger into their "custody" again and killed him in an unknown location.

In May 1934, Fischer-Schweder was transferred to Breslau as a detective commissioner. Meanwhile, the Berlin SS accused him of participating with Belding in the alleged Schorfheide assassination attempt on Heinrich Himmler on June 19, 1934 - which probably never took place. Nevertheless, on the orders of Himmler, who was firmly convinced that Belding and Fischer-Schweder were responsible for an assassination attempt on him, he and Belding were arrested by the SS on June 30, 1934 in the course of the Röhm affair in Breslau: Both men were taken into custody by the SS when they appeared on June 30, 1934 for their duty as detectives at the Breslau police headquarters, and were sent as prisoners to the police headquarters' house prison. While Belding was taken from his cell by SS members, together with six other SA members from Breslau, on the night of July 1st, taken to a wooded area outside of Breslau, and there fusiled by a firing squad, Fischer-Schweder escaped this fate by luck, since an SS man interceded for him. He was released a few weeks later.

After his release, Schweder returned to the police force. In 1938 he had reached the rank of criminal councilor. In this function he took part in the German invasion of the Sudeten areas in autumn 1938. In the wake of the annexation of this hitherto Czech territory, he contributed to the development of the German police structures there. He was awarded the medal in memory of October 1, 1938 for his "excellent work in the organization of the operation in the Sudetenland".

Until the outbreak of the Second World War he remained active in the Silesian area (Breslau and Liegnitz) before he was appointed acting police director of Memel in October 1940. In January 1941 he was confirmed in this position and installed as permanent police director of Memel. In this position he was accepted into the SS on August 15, 1941 with Heinrich Himmler's approval , receiving the rank of SS Oberführer in accordance with the principle of equalization based on his police rank.

Second World War

In Memel, in the summer of 1941, Fischer-Schweder was involved in the establishment of the Tilsit task force formed on the occasion of the German attack on the Soviet Union . In the first months of the Russian campaign in the area of responsibility of Einsatzgruppe A, this command carried out mass executions in the area of ​​Lithuania, which according to the report of the leader of Einsatzgruppe A Walter Stahlecker, 5,502 people were killed.

On Sunday, June 22nd, 1941, the 61st Infantry Division under Lieutenant General Siegfried Haenicke had the task of advancing in a north-easterly direction to Telšiai . For this purpose, the town of Garsden in the Lithuanian border area was to be taken. Of the approximately 3,000 inhabitants of this place, 600 to 700 were Jews. During the attack, the German shock group lost 100 infantrymen.

The Gestapo chief von Tilsit, government councilor and SS-Sturmbannführer Hans-Joachim Böhme , requested reinforcements from Fischer-Schweder on June 23. This is said to have exclaimed in astonishment: "Thunder, those are consequences that the Russian campaign brings with it, which one had not thought of at first." In a speech to his police detachment, he defended the shootings with the demonstrably false reason Prisoners had resisted the German troops. Fischer-Schweder was significantly involved in the Garsden execution of 201 people on June 24th: On his own initiative, he did not make his bullying detachment available as a mere locking detachment, as originally requested, but as an execution detachment, he proposed the official "execution formula" ("You are shot for offenses against the Wehrmacht on the orders of the Führer ”) and gave additional shots at the victims of his own accord. His bullying squad also took part in the executions in Krottingen I ( Kretinga ) under his command, with his active participation this time also including the prior checking of Lithuanian alleged communists and the shooting of attacking or fleeing victims.

From October 1942 he was employed as an SS and police leader in Kharkov . He was disciplined in 1943 for a casino shoot-out and transferred to the Waffen-SS in the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler . Most recently he was company commander in the 12th SS Panzer Division "Hitler Youth" from January 1945 .

post war period

After the end of the Second World War, Fischer-Schweder went into hiding under the name of Bernd Fischer. Under his new identity, he initially worked for a few years as a sales representative for a Stuttgart vacuum cleaner company before trying to gain a foothold in the public sector.

In 1955, Fischer-Schweder became head of the Wilhelmsburg refugee camp near Ulm . However, his past became known and he was discharged from service. When he tried again to recruit from the South Baden Regional Council, he was rejected. He then sued the labor court for reinstatement. The case became public, a newspaper headlined with the headline "SS-Obersturmführer (sic!) Complains for reinstatement". A man who knew Fischer-Schweder from Memel saw this message. He wrote to the newspaper and also reported on the shootings. The result was that the letter was passed on to the Ulm public prosecutor, who arranged for him to be arrested and the proceedings to be initiated.

In the 1958 Ulm Einsatzgruppen Trial , Fischer-Schweder was sentenced to 10 years in prison on August 29, 1958 for aiding and abetting community murder in 526 cases. Before the court it was established that the defendant Fischer-Schweder had acted voluntarily and not on orders from an “innate need for recognition”; as a civil servant, in the opinion of the court, on the other hand, pursuant to Section 7 (2) of the German Civil Service Act 1937, he was obliged not to obey the execution order, as this constituted an order the execution of which was clearly contrary to the criminal laws.

Fischer-Schweder died of a pulmonary embolism in 1960 in the penal institution on Hohenasperg near Ludwigsburg .

marriage and family

Fischer-Schweder married Charlotte Juliane Voigt on June 8, 1934 in Rogau (born March 4, 1910 in Luckenwald).

Archival tradition

Various personnel documents on Fischer-Schweder have been preserved in the Federal Archives in the former Berlin Document Center . Such as an SS leader personnel file (SSO), a file of the Race and Settlement Main Office of the SS on his marriage (RS), a file of party correspondence of the NSDAP to him (PK) and a file of the Supreme Party Court on an internal party dispute in which he is involved was (OPG). In addition, a Fischer-Schweden questionnaire on the occasion of the party statistical survey of 1939 and an award proposal (R 601) on the occasion of the Sudeten crisis of 1938 are available in the Federal Archives.

literature

Remarks

  1. ^ Benjamin Carter Hett: Burning the Reichstag: An Investigation into the Third Reich's Enduring Mystery , p. 204.
  2. On Siegfried Haenicke see: Hendrik George Dam and Ralph Giordano: KZ crimes before German courts: Einsatzkommando Tilsit. The Ulm Trial , European Publishing House, 1962, page 90
  3. Jörg Friedrich, p. 337.
  4. a b Willi Böhmer: You couldn't remember anything , Südwest-Presse February 9, 2008
  5. ^ The judgment at CF Rüter, page 56ff, in excerpts from Heiner Lichtenstein, page 29ff.
  6. ^ German Civil Service Act of January 26, 1937, RGBl. I, p. 39
  7. Der Spiegel No. 51/1960 .