Erich Isselhorst

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Erich Heinrich Georg Isselhorst (born February 5, 1906 in St. Avold / Lorraine , † February 23, 1948, execution in Strasbourg ) was a German lawyer, police officer and SS leader during the Nazi era . Isselhorst rose to SS-Standartenführer , Oberregierungsrat and Colonel of the Police and was head of the Gestapo offices in Erfurt , Cologne , Klagenfurt and Munich , in the Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police and the SD in the Soviet Union and as the commander of the Security Police and the SD in Minsk and Strasbourg.

School and studies, family

Erich Isselhorst was born on February 5, 1906 in St. Avold as the son of the sergeant in the field artillery regiment No. 69 Johann Heinrich Isselhorst and his wife Karoline Isselhorst, née. Schiller, born. Isselhorst attended elementary school in Recklinghausen and Düsseldorf and then from 1916 the humanistic Hohenzollern-Gymnasium Düsseldorf , where he finished his school career in March 1925 with the Abitur . This was initially followed by training in the administration of the Pahl Rubber and Asbestos Society in Düsseldorf-Rath . From May 1927 he studied law at the Universities of Munich and Cologne and then went through legal clerkship at the Düsseldorf Higher Regional Court from 1930 to 1934 . In mid-June 1931 Isselhorst did his doctorate with Hans Carl Nipperdey in Cologne with a dissertation on the subject of the arbitration emergency ordinance .

On September 30, 1935 Isselhorst married Auguste Anna Josefine "Gustel" Tack (1907–2002), whom he had known since 1926. He had an illegitimate child.

During the National Socialism

Beginnings and SS

During his studies in Munich Isselhorst experienced a Hitler speech for the first time in the winter semester of 1928/1929 and then began to deal more closely with National Socialism , with which he had previously only come into superficial contact. Even before the National Socialist " seizure of power ", he entered on August 1, 1932, the NSDAP ( member number 1269847) and became immediately cell leader of the party and honorary legal adviser for the local chapter of Dusseldorf-Friedrichstadt . From March 1933 he was a member of the BNSDJ . At the beginning of May 1933 he joined the SA , in which he achieved the rank of Rottenführer , before he switched to the SS on October 15, 1934 (SS No. 267.313). In the following years he rose to the position of Untersturmführer (1935), then Obersturmführer (1936), Sturmbannführer (1938), Obersturmbannführer (1941) and finally Standartenführer (1944). In a memorandum that he wrote while in French custody in 1947, Isselhorst stated (admittedly also aware of the looming East-West conflict ) that he had “become a National Socialist because I believed that in this party I found the guarantee to avoid the Bolshevik threat to the world to be able to counter ".

At the Gestapo in Erfurt, Cologne, Klagenfurt and Munich

After completing his legal clerkship, Isselhorst was appointed court assessor on October 3, 1934 , but changed as a full-time consultant for economic policy issues to the SD Upper Section West in Düsseldorf in the middle of the month .

On February 14, 1935, he joined the Gestapo and initially performed a trial service at the Secret State Police Office in Berlin , before he was made acting head of the Gestapo in Erfurt at the beginning of April 1935 . At the beginning of February 1936 Isselhorst became head of the Gestapo in Cologne , was in the meantime entrusted with setting up the Gestapo office in Klagenfurt after the “Anschluss” of Austria from March to June 1938 and was finally transferred from Cologne to Munich in December 1939 . There he officially headed the Gestapo until November 1942, but was apparently removed from his office there as early as November 1941 due to disciplinary proceedings. He was accused of having abused his position and obtained food without the appropriate authorization and employed a female prisoner as a seamstress. At the end of January 1942, Isselhorst was severely reprimanded for "unworthy of the SS" and a two-year promotion ban was imposed on him. He himself suspected that there was an intrigue in Munich's leadership circles behind these events and the briefing that followed shortly afterwards.

During Isselhorst's time in Cologne, the confiscation of Jewish property and the deportation of Jews to Dachau and Oranienburg took place ; The establishment of foreign workers' and labor education camps during the Munich service period and the internment of the former Austrian Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg in the Gestapo prison.

With the Einsatzgruppen in the Soviet Union

In February 1942 Isselhorst was assigned to the Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police and the SD in the Soviet Union . There he initially took over the management of Departments I and II (administration and budget) of Einsatzgruppe B in Smolensk , was briefly leader of Einsatzkommando 8 of Einsatzgruppe B in autumn 1942 and then until summer 1943 leader of Einsatzkommandos 1 of Einsatzgruppe A located in Krasnogwardeisk . Then he finally took over the function of commander of the security police and the SD (KdS) for Belarus in Minsk until October 1943 and was also the leader of Sonderkommando 1b of Einsatzgruppe A.

During this time, Isselhorst was primarily involved in administrative activities, but was also occasionally on site for operations to combat partisans and the evacuation or destruction of Jewish ghettos . Regarding the annihilation of the ghetto in Glebokie from August 18 to 20, 1943, he noted in his diary: “There is resistance, there is a great bloodbath (3,100 years dead); only 350 volunteered to be transported away. "

As BdS in Strasbourg

After his mission to the east and a cure in autumn and winter 1943, Isselhorst was used from January to December 1944 as commander of the security police and the SD (BdS) in Strasbourg and inspector of the security police and SD of Wehrkreis V in Stuttgart . In October 1944 he was made a police colonel .

Isselhorst's assignment as BdS in Strasbourg and events from this period are the only section of his activity that was investigated in court proceedings after the war (see below). His other assignments with the Gestapo or in the Soviet Union were not followed closely.

From autumn 1944 the region was taken by the Allies, and Strasbourg was liberated in November by the French 2nd Panzer Division . Isselhorst attributed the release from his duties in December 1944 to the fact that in his administration he failed to meet the "necessary hardship" from the point of view of Ernst Kaltenbrunner , the head of the Reich Security Main Office . Isselhorst then worked without an office in Office IV (Gestapo) of the Reich Main Security Office in Berlin, before in April 1945 he was in charge of the alternate office of Office IV of the Reich Main Security Office in Hof.

End of war

On February 6, 1945, Isselhorst wrote to his wife, concerned about the course of the war, to reassure him: “You should know that, as a man, I paid more than lip service to the Fuehrer's movement. I have an unshakable belief in the good and pure of National Socialism, in the greatness of the German Reich and people and the inaccessibility of our Führer. "

Shortly before the end of the war , for a few days in April and May 1945, he took over the leadership of a Waffen SS group near Jachenau to occupy a valley near the Chiemsee , but there was no enemy contact. On June 12, 1945 in Isselhorst was Sachenbach by soldiers of the US 7th Army captured.

After the war

British military trial

After being captured by American troops, Isselhorst was initially held and questioned in various prisons and internment camps in Augsburg , Karlsruhe , Heidelberg , Frankfurt-Oberursel , Dachau and Stuttgart-Zuffenhausen , before he was transferred to a British internment camp in Recklinghausen at the end of January 1946 and finally at the beginning of May 1946 was transferred to Wuppertal .

There he had to answer before a British military tribunal for the killing of 32 paratroopers from the 2nd Special Air Service Regiment and a member of the RAF in the Vosges and Alsace in autumn 1944. Isselhorst had ordered or approved the shooting of the captured soldiers on the basis of the command order. His defense argued that the paratroopers had for cooperation with the Resistance not as regular soldiers, but as volunteers counted and therefore not entitled to treatment as prisoners of war had. Her shooting without military or even court martial proceedings was therefore lawful; In particular, because Isselhorst examined a connection between captured paratroopers and the Resistance and, if this could not be proven, treated them as prisoners of war in at least one case (contrary to the wording, but within the framework of an interpretation of the command order that is permissible in Isselhorst's opinion). The prosecution countered that the command order itself was contrary to international law due to the Hague Land Warfare Regulations and should therefore not have been obeyed. In addition, the cooperation of regular soldiers with the Resistance, even if this had turned them into irregulars at all, should have been reviewed in a military court case. The manner in which the executions were carried out in the form of secret shootings in the forest, the burning or burying of the corpses in bomb craters and the fact that the actions were not documented were an indication of their inadequate legality. On July 11, 1946 Isselhorst was sentenced to death .

After the verdict, he was first admitted to the Werl prison , in the meantime heard as a witness in the Nuremberg trials at the beginning of August 1946 and brought back from Werl to Wuppertal in September 1946 to testify as a witness in further trials. There he managed to escape during a transport within Wuppertal on April 12, 1947 when the truck on which he was being transported had to stop briefly at a street crossing in the city center. After just a few days, however, he was picked up again in front of the bridge in Kettwig, extradited to France at the end of April and taken to the La Citadelle military prison in Strasbourg .

French military court proceedings

In mid-May, the first of two trials against Isselhorst opened before the Permanent Military Tribunal of the 6th Region in Strasbourg. He was accused of having given the Gestapo chief in Strasbourg, Julius Gehrum , the order in November 1944 to kill members of the Alliance resistance group . During this time Gehrum had several prisoners of the Alliance extradited from prisons in Strasbourg and various places in Baden and had them executed. In his own trial, Gehrum claimed to have received Isselhorst's execution order, which the latter firmly denied. Exoneration witnesses were not heard for lack of time; a few days later, on May 17, 1947, the death sentence was imposed.

A second trial followed because of the passing on of an order from Gauleiter Robert Wagner (in his capacity as Reich Defense Commissioner ) to shoot four civilians, including two women, from Hüningen / Alsace in November 1944, who had been in contact with the French army through light signals . In this trial too, Isselhorst was sentenced to death on July 23, 1947 (for the third time).

Applications in cassation and a petition for clemency from the French President were unsuccessful. Isselhorst was shot dead in Strasbourg on February 23, 1948 .

Orders and awards

See also

Literature and Sources

  • The estate of Erich Isselhorst and his wife is kept in the State Archive of North Rhine-Westphalia, Rhineland Department, and forms part RW 0725 there.
  • Hermann-J. Rupieper / Alexander Sperk (ed.): The situation reports of the secret state police for the province of Saxony 1933–1936, Vol. 3: Administrative region Erfurt. Edited with supplementary materials, introduced and explained by Alexander Sperk, Halle (Saale) 2006.
  • Association Amicale Alliance (ed.), Mémorial de L'Alliance , Paris, undated (1948).
  • M.-M. Fourcade: L'Arche de Noé, Réseau ALLIANCE, 1940-1945. Paris, 1968.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Landesarchiv NRW, Dept. Rhineland inventory RW 0725 No. 2
  2. ↑ Landesarchiv NRW, Dept. Rhineland, inventory NW 0110 No. 3
  3. ↑ Landesarchiv NRW, Dept. Rhineland inventory RW 0725 No. 1
  4. ↑ Landesarchiv NRW, Dept. Rhineland, inventory NW 0110 No. 3
  5. ↑ Landesarchiv NRW, Dept. Rhineland, inventory NW 0110 No. 3
  6. ↑ Landesarchiv NRW, Dept. Rhineland, holdings RW 0725 No. 4
  7. ↑ Landesarchiv NRW, Dept. Rhineland inventory RW 0725 No. 23
  8. ↑ Landesarchiv NRW, Dept. Rhineland, inventory RW 0725 No. 15
  9. ↑ Landesarchiv NRW, Dept. Rhineland inventory RW 0130 No. 220 Bd. Indl-Is
  10. ↑ Landesarchiv NRW, Dept. Rhineland inventory RW 0725 No. 9
  11. ↑ Landesarchiv NRW, Dept. Rhineland, inventory NW 0110 No. 3
  12. ↑ Landesarchiv NRW, Dept. Rhineland, inventory NW 0130 No. 220 Bd. Indl-Is
  13. ↑ Landesarchiv NRW, Dept. Rhineland inventory RW 0725 No. 14
  14. ↑ a b c d Joachim Lilla: Isselhorst, Erich , in: ders .: Minister of State, senior administrative officials and (NS) officials in Bavaria 1918 to 1945
  15. ↑ Landesarchiv NRW, Dept. Rhineland inventory RW 0725 No. 14
  16. ↑ Landesarchiv NRW, Dept. Rhineland inventory RW 0725 No. 14.
  17. ↑ Landesarchiv NRW, Dept. Rhineland inventory RW 0725 No. 14
  18. ↑ Landesarchiv NRW, Dept. Rhineland inventory RW 0725 No. 14
  19. ↑ Landesarchiv NRW, Dept. Rhineland inventory RW 0725 No. 11, 14
  20. ↑ On the destruction of the ghetto in Glebokie see Wolfgang Curilla, Die deutsche Ordnungspolizei and the Holocaust in the Baltic States and in Belarus: 1941–1944, Paderborn 2006 ( http://d-nb.info/981642373 ), p. 690
  21. ↑ Landesarchiv NRW, Dept. Rhineland inventory RW 0725 No. 11
  22. ↑ Landesarchiv NRW, Dept. Rhineland, inventory RW 0725 No. 15
  23. ↑ Landesarchiv NRW, Dept. Rhineland inventory RW 0725 No. 14
  24. ↑ Landesarchiv NRW, Dept. Rhineland inventory RW 0725 No. 31
  25. ↑ Landesarchiv NRW, Dept. Rhineland inventory RW 0725 No. 14
  26. ↑ Landesarchiv NRW, Dept. Rhineland inventory RW 0725 No. 21
  27. ↑ Landesarchiv NRW, Dept. Rhineland inventory RW 0725 No. 39
  28. ^ Landesarchiv NRW, Dept. Rhineland inventory RW 0725 No. 10
  29. ↑ Landesarchiv NRW, Dept. Rhineland, inventory NW 0110 No. 3
  30. ↑ Landesarchiv NRW, Dept. Rhineland inventory RW 0725 No. 21
  31. ↑ Landesarchiv NRW, Dept. Rhineland, inventory NW 0110 No. 3
  32. ↑ Landesarchiv NRW, Dept. Rhineland, inventory NW 0110 No. 3
  33. ^ Landesarchiv NRW, Dept. Rhineland inventory RW 0725 No. 8, 13
  34. ^ Landesarchiv NRW, Dept. Rhineland inventory RW 0725 No. 24
personal data
SURNAME Isselhorst, Erich
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Isselhorst, Erich Heinrich Georg (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German lawyer, policeman and SS leader
DATE OF BIRTH February 5, 1906
PLACE OF BIRTH St. Avold
DATE OF DEATH February 23, 1948
Place of death Strasbourg