Claus Göttsche

Claus Göttsche (* 27. May 1899 in Aasbüttel ; † 12. May 1945 in Hamburg ) was German policeman and headed the Jewish Section of the Hamburg Gestapo from 1941 to 1943. Göttsche was instrumental in the deportation of the Jews of Hamburg involved.

Life

Göttsche, whose father was a master shoemaker, worked in agriculture from 1914 after finishing school. From 1917 he took part in the First World War as a soldier and was discharged from the army in 1919. After he worked briefly in agriculture again, he signed up for twelve years as an auxiliary sergeant at the Hamburg police authority from 1921. After he was served for life in 1930 in the rank of chief guard, he switched from the Ordnungspolizei to the State Police / Political Police (from 1935 Gestapo). Göttsche, who became a member of the NSDAP at the beginning of May 1933 , was involved in the police persecution of communists after the National Socialist " seizure of power " from April 1933 under Criminal Inspector Peter Kraus and was also involved in the confiscation of SPD party assets in Hamburg.

Worked as a Jewish advisor to the Hamburg Gestapo

In 1935 he came to the Gestapo department “ Jewish matters, church affairs, freemasonry, sects” and in 1941, after being promoted to detective commissioner, he was advisor to the Hamburg Gestapo. From autumn 1941 he organized the deportations of Hamburg Jews, disguised as resettlements , to the Litzmannstadt ghetto , the Jungfernhof camp , the Riga ghetto , the Minsk ghetto , the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp and the Theresienstadt ghetto . Göttsche was therefore jointly responsible for the deaths of thousands of Hamburg Jews.

In the autumn of 1943 he switched to the Hamburg Gestapo's intelligence department and took over its management. Shortly before the end of the war, Göttsche personal documents in the name of “Claus Clausen”, a cyanide capsule and considerable funds were “organized” . Göttsche went into hiding in Hamburg-Volksdorf , but was discovered and committed suicide when he was arrested by members of the British army on May 12, 1945 by biting the cyanide capsule.

literature

• Linde Apel, in collaboration with the Research Center for Contemporary History in Hamburg and the Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial (ed.): Sent to death - The deportations of Jews, Roma and Sinti from Hamburg, 1940 to 1945 . Metropol Verlag, Hamburg 2009, ISBN 978-3-940938-30-5 .
• Herbert Diercks : Documentation town house. The Hamburg police under National Socialism. Texts, photos, documents , Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial , Hamburg 2012, p. 38.
• Beate Meyer, in collaboration with the Institute for the History of German Jews (ed.): The persecution and murder of Hamburg's Jews 1933–1945: history, testimony, memory . Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2006, ISBN 978-3-8353-0137-5