Emil Laurich

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Emil Laurich (born May 21, 1921 in Hohenstein near Aussig ; † July 11, 1985 in Hamburg ) was SS-Hauptscharführer and in the Majdanek concentration camp employee in the protective custody camp department.

Life

Laurich, son of a bricklayer foreman, completed his school career in 1936 with a secondary school leaving certificate. After an internship in a metalworking company, he began training as an adjuster, which he completed in 1938. After moving from the Sudetenland to Bavaria in March 1938, he joined the SS and completed infantry and telecommunications training at SS-Standarte Deutschland. He then worked in his unit's switchboard. After the Munich Agreement , he took part in the occupation of the Sudetenland with his unit at the beginning of October 1938. After the outbreak of the Second World War he acted as an instructor for the 11th SS-Totenkopfstandarte .

Activity in concentration camps

From May 1940 Laurich was initially assigned to the security guard of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp and a few weeks later he was transferred to the guards in the Neuengamme concentration camp . In July 1941, now as SS Rottenführer , he was transferred to the Groß-Rosen concentration camp and from there on October 10, 1941 to the Majdanek concentration camp , where he initially worked at the communications center of the commandant's office in the city center. From spring 1942 he worked directly in the Majdanek concentration camp as a member of the protective custody camp department. Its tasks included the registration of newly arriving prisoners, the death reports and daily receipt numbers as well as the postal service. After the registry was transferred to prisoner functionaries , he was responsible for assessing German prisoner functionaries and participating in the interrogation of prisoners by the protective custody camp leader Anton Thumann . Laurich was responsible for collecting the prisoners who were to be executed by firing squads and was also known as the “Angel of Death” because of his participation in individual shootings. In "intensified interrogations", Laurich increasingly took over the management, abused prisoners by punching them with his fist or whipping them in the face.

Laurich, who married in September 1942 (the marriage had two children), was sentenced to two months in prison in 1942 for military theft and smuggling. In March 1944, as part of the investigation against Karl Otto Koch , he was again targeted by SS judge Konrad Morgen . For embezzlement he was imprisoned in the arrest department of the Buchenwald concentration camp from May 1944 and sentenced to a short term by the SS and Police Court in Kassel. In the spring of 1945 Laurich worked briefly in the supplementary company of the Waffen-SS in the Buchenwald concentration camp and then worked as a courier at the SS and Police Court in Priem am Chiemsee.

After the end of the war

After the end of the war, Laurich was taken prisoner by the Americans in the Harz Mountains, from which he was able to escape. He then returned to his wife and worked both in agriculture and as a driver for the British Army. In the 1950s he initially worked as a traveling soap dealer and in 1957 he set up a drugstore in Hamburg. Until the 1970s he ran a small soap shop in Jork / Altes Land, near Hamburg. As part of the investigation into the crimes in the Majdanek concentration camp in the mid-1970s, Laurich was initially charged with aiding and abetting murder before the Düsseldorf Regional Court in the Majdanek trial . Laurich, who was taken into custody in June 1979 because of the risk of fleeing, was finally sentenced to eight years imprisonment in June 1981 for community complicity in the murder of at least 195 people in five cases. Emil Laurich died in Hamburg in July 1985.

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personal data
SURNAME Laurich, Emil
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German SS-Hauptscharführer in the Majdanek concentration camp
DATE OF BIRTH May 21, 1921
PLACE OF BIRTH Hohenstein near Aussig
DATE OF DEATH July 11, 1985
Place of death Hamburg