Erich Wenger

Erich Otto Wenger (born November 20, 1912 in the village of Romeyken , district of Stallupönen , † after 1973) was a German Gestapo employee and German investigator in the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution .

Wenger joined the NSDAP on April 1, 1932, the SA on July 1, 1932, and the SS on February 1, 1933 . Until 1935 he was a member of the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler , then he entered the service of the SD and the Gestapo, from 1935 to the end of 1936 in the control center Berlin of counterintelligence . He completed his specialist training at the Charlottenburg Police Institute and at the beginning of 1939 worked as a detective commissioner at the headquarters against forgery of passports in the Reich Security Main Office. Then he served from July 1940 to August 1944 in the German embassy in Paris in the permit department since 1943 as hauptsturmführer , and led from late summer 1944 by Nancy from a security battalion in the Vosges for partisan warfare . At the end of the war he served the Reich Security Main Office in Bregenz , where a “Sonderkommando Pannwitz” prepared the assassination of General George S. Patton . He was briefly taken prisoner of war in May 1945 , then he was held in British custody in Wuppertal from October 1946 to March 1948 because he had been involved in the shooting of British paratroopers. The proceedings were discontinued without result. He then lived until 1954 under a false name "Eduard Wolters".

From September 1950 he was a freelancer for the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution , which was being established , on January 1, 1956, he was regularly taken on in the procurement department and headed this group in the counter-espionage department, since 1961 as a member of the government . In 1963 he was supposed to go on a business trip to the USA to exchange ideas with those responsible for the CIA , but the trip was canceled because more details about his Nazi career had become known. On August 27, 1963, journalist Peter Stähle published an article about Wenger in Stern magazine, “The Man Without a Name”, and unmasked him a week later. Federal Interior Minister Hermann Höcherl saw a further cover-up as pointless and assigned Wenger to the Federal Administration Office with responsibility for war graves . Wenger also appeared as a witness in the trial against Werner Pätsch in 1965 , in which he praised his own successes with the help of the old SS men, who were known as the “clique of old fighters ”. In 1966 the public prosecutor's office in Cologne opened proceedings for the shooting and deportation of French civilians, which were discontinued in 1973 due to a lack of evidence and statute of limitations.

literature

• Constantin Goschler , Michael Wala: “No new Gestapo”. The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and the Nazi past . Rowohlt, Reinbek 2015, ISBN 978-3-498-02438-3 .

Web links

• Press kit for the man without a name (PDF) at the American foreign intelligence service CIA

supporting documents

1. ↑ According to disclosed CIA document [1]
2. ↑ SS membership number 169200, by: good conscience . In: Der Spiegel . No. 38 , 1963, pp. 19-30 ( online - Sept. 18, 1963 ).