Ernst Ehlers (SS member)

Ernst Boje Ehlers (born October 16, 1909 near Pinneberg ; † October 4, 1980 ) was a German SS-Obersturmbannführer . During the time of National Socialism in Belgium occupied by German troops in 1944 (until February 26th) he was the “Commissioner of the Chief of the Security Police and the SD ” (head of the “Jewish Department”). That is why Ehlers was later often referred to as the “ final savior of Belgium”. Only in 1980 was a process against him about, but Ehlers took just before the trial started, the life .

Life

Ehlers first studied medicine. As early as 1928, according to other sources in 1931, he joined the NSDAP (membership number 95.459) and the SS in 1932 (membership number 307.426).

National Socialism

From 1935 he worked in the Saxon Ministry of the Interior and from 1936 acted there as a government and medical councilor . After his transfer to the "SD" in 1937, he became head of Department II in the Reich Security Main Office in 1938 . After he had passed his exam for assessor in 1941 , he joined the Gestapo in July of the same year , where he was chief of the Brussels office of the security police and SD until about the end of 1943, and from about the beginning of 1944 as “the chief's agent of the Security Police and the SD ”at the Military Commander in Belgium and Northern France in Brussels .

The "SS-Major" Ehlers was responsible for the deportations of the Belgian Jews . Beginning on July 27, 1942 to 1944, several transports to the Auschwitz concentration camp were organized in the "Dossin barracks" in Mechelen ( SS assembly camp Mechelen ) , all of which were put together under Ehler's responsibility. For his "services" he received the golden party badge .

Of a total of 998 deportees on the first transport, 570 were men and 428 women, 140 of them were children. Most of them had registered “voluntarily” because they had received a so-called “work order” written in German and believed that they were going to work. When the transport was put together, 168 people were classified in the "KV" (no use) category. 254 of the deportees were murdered immediately upon arrival in Auschwitz, including all 140 children.

This deportation was followed by 26 more transports by July 31, 1944.

Ehlers' deputy was Constantin Canaris (a nephew of Wilhelm Franz Canaris ). Ehlers was the direct superior of the later for the deportation of 25,000 Jews and Sinti to Auschwitz only condemned " Jewish affairs " Kurt Asche .

From February 26, 1944 until the end of the war in May 1945, Ernst Ehlers was inspector of the Security Police and SD Kassel ( military district IX). Ehlers's successor in Belgium was Constantin Canaris.

After the end of the war

After the end of the Second World War , Ehlers initially lived undisturbed with relatives in Freiburg-Elbe under his real name. Apparently he felt so safe from persecution that he applied to the Schleswig Administrative Court as an assistant judge in 1957 and was hired. After only two years he was appointed to the Administrative Court Council (according to other sources he was a judge at the Regional Social Court). Many other former Nazi supporters were also found in the Schleswig-Holstein state administration, namely in the judiciary.

Intensive research by the Paris lawyer Serge Klarsfeld and his wife Beate led to the clarification of the identity and place of residence of Ehlers. When asked by the Central Office of the State Judicial Administrations located in Ludwigsburg near Stuttgart to investigate National Socialist crimes , which had been investigating Ehlers since the early 1960s as to whether an Ernst Ehlers from Brussels was working at the Schleswig court, his superior initially denied this.

The Schleswig-Holstein judiciary initially took no preliminary proceedings against Ernst Ehlers or against Kurt Asche, Constantin Canaris and Karl Fielitz, the head of the Antwerp branch. Instead, the process was dragged off for decades. Only when the Ludwigsburg central office sent the results of the preliminary investigations to the public prosecutor in Kiel in 1967 (52 volumes of files) and the press took up the case, they started investigations. However, it was not until October 1972 that the public prosecutor's office requested that the preliminary judicial investigation be opened. The application was granted a year later, in October 1973.

The Schleswig-Holstein Minister of Justice only became active through the press reports. Ehlers was now suspended from work (with full payment of his salary) and put into provisional retirement in 1974 (the salary that was continued to be paid totaled 450,000 German marks ).

process

In February 1975, the Kiel public prosecutor's office brought charges against Ehlers as the main defendant, as well as Canaris, Asche and Fielitz, at the Flensburg jury court . On January 27, 1976, however, the first criminal division of the Great rejected the District Court Flensburg the opening of the trial on the grounds that the accused will not be to prove that it was aware of the organized killing of Jews deported; a conviction therefore seems unlikely. The Flensburg judges only saw a "not insignificant suspicion" in Ehlers and Asche. And Canaris and Fielitz are also “burdened by a number of circumstances”, the latter by such “lower weight”. In May of the same year, Jewish demonstrators from Belgium, accompanied by a Brussels television team and Beate Klarsfeld, occupied Ernst Ehlers' apartment in Schleswig. They hung a banner from the window with the demand: "Convict the Nazi criminal Ehlers as soon as possible , responsible for the death of 25,000 Jews from Belgium".

In response to a complaint from the public prosecutor's office, the 1st criminal division of the Schleswig Higher Regional Court overturned the decision of the Regional Court on March 1, 1977 and referred the proceedings to the Kiel Regional Court for the main hearing . Like the other defendants, Ehlers filed a constitutional complaint against the referral decision on the grounds that it would be withdrawn from his legal judge . The Federal Constitutional Court refused to accept the complaint on November 23, 1979 for lack of sufficient prospect of success.

During his interrogation, Ehlers stated that he had “carried out his official business in a humane spirit” in Brussels. The chief prosecutor in the Düsseldorf Majdanek trial said that it was Ehler's credit "when it was less harsh in Belgium than elsewhere".

Shortly before the main hearing officially began (November 26, 1980), Ehlers committed suicide on October 4, 1980. Most of the other defendants' trials have been dismissed. Only Kurt Asche, who had remained silent for most of the trial and only stated that he only obeyed Ehlers' orders and had no knowledge of the destination of the deportation transports, was sentenced on July 8, 1981 by the Kiel Regional Court to seven years in prison.

literature

• Kerstin Freudiger: The legal processing of Nazi crimes . Series: Contributions to the legal history of the 20th century, 33. Mohr Siebeck, 2002, p. 203. ISBN 978-3-16-147687-7 .
• Tuviah Friedman : The deportation of the Jews from Belgium and Luxembourg during the Nazi occupation 1940-1944: Document collection . Haifa: Institute of Documentation in Israel for the Investigation of Nazi War Crimes, 1999.
• Dan Michman : Belgium and the Holocaust: Jews, Belgians, Germans . Berghahn Books, 1998. ISBN 978-965-308068-3 .
• Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich: Who was what before and after 1945. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-596-16048-8
• Serge Klarsfeld ; Maxime Steinberg (ed.): The final solution of the Jewish question in Belgium. Documents , the Beate Klarsfeld Foundation, New York, ca.1981
• Insa Meinen: The Shoah in Belgium , Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt 2009 ISBN 978-3-534-22158-5

Web links

• Nazi trials: in a humane spirit? , Die Zeit , November 28, 1980 (No. 49).
• Chronology of the deportations from Belgium

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Ernst Klee: Das Personenlexikon zum Third Reich: Who was what before and after 1945. , Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 127