Ernst Knorr

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Ernst Knorr (1945)
Esmée van Eeghen (around 1940)
Memorial stone for the murdered resistance fighters near Norg
The prison in Scheveningen

Ernst Knorr (born October 13, 1899 in Heiligenbeil , † July 7, 1945 in Scheveningen ) was a member of the National Socialist Security Police with the rank of criminal inspector and Untersturmführer of the SS, notorious for his brutality .

biography

Ernst Knorr came from East Prussia . During the First World War he volunteered for military service. He then studied law, probably in Königsberg , and received his doctorate . In 1923 he went to the police. He was married and had two sons. Otherwise no information is available about his life up to 1933.

From 1933 Knorr was an employee of the Gestapo in Oberhausen ; he was known for his strict anti-communism . In June 1934 he was promoted and transferred to Düsseldorf . The Düsseldorf state police station was subordinate to Oberhausen, it had 160 full-time employees and was the second largest in Germany after Berlin. In 1934/35 alone, around 2,000 people were arrested by the Düsseldorf Gestapo. In Düsseldorf Knorr met a number of men with whom he would later work in the Netherlands, such as Robert Lehnhoff , who later became an “arch rival”.

After the Netherlands was occupied by the Germans in May 1940, Knorr was transferred from Düsseldorf to The Hague and promoted again. Initially, he was responsible for “Combating Communism” in Section IVA, and his place of work was in Binnenhof No. 7 in The Hague.

Ernst Knorr, whose fingers on his left hand were amputated, was notorious for his violent and sadistic character; his favorite weapon was the baton . If people were mistreated during an interrogation, they were told that the doctor would now be called .

Knorr was one of the four men who tortured Geuzen Sjaak Boezeman so brutally that he died. After three hours of interrogation in the Binnenhof in The Hague, he was badly mistreated and taken back to the prison in Scheveningen with severed wrists, where Boezeman stated that it was not he who injured his wrists. On September 2, 1941, in the Oranjehotel , the Scheveningen prison , Knorr conducted the interrogation of the communist Herman Holstege , who had remained silent for a month and did not reveal the names of leading communists in the party leadership in Amsterdam . Knorr penetrated Holstege's buttocks with a rubber club , which tore his intestines to pieces . Fellow inmates heard him scream and call for help for an hour and a half. Holstege did mention names that later turned out to be invented. The next day he died.

In early 1942 Knorr temporarily headed the office in The Hague, but was then replaced by Hans Munt in May . Munt complained to his superior Wilhelm Harster about Knorr's brutal interrogation methods, which often resulted in the prisoners' death, which is why they did not receive the information they wanted. On February 19, 1943, when the communist Gerrit Kastein was arrested in Delft , Knorr was injured when he shot him. Kastein was arrested anyway and tied to a chair in an interrogation room in the Binnenhof; he threw himself out of the window with the chair and died.

When the head of the Gestapo in Groningen , Georg Schwarting, was killed in a car accident in May 1943 , Harster seized the opportunity to transfer Knorr to the Scholtenhuis there , the seat of SD and SiPo , albeit without promotion. The historian Monique Brinks from the Stichting Oorlogs- en Verzetscentrum Groningen suspects that Groningen was the outpost to which unpleasant employees were deported. In the Scholtenhuis , where Lehnhoff also headed a department, there was a competitive climate, and after further "intensified" interrogations, Knorr increasingly found himself in an outsider position. His new boss, Bernhard Georg Haase , the successor of Harster, had the "annoying habit of regularly releasing prisoners at his own discretion", which Knorr resented and led to the fact that the relationship between Haase and Knorr soon deteriorated.

Increasingly, Knorr began to act on his own account and to seal off his department. He personally shot several deserters and resistance fighters, including the Bedumer Jannes Wiebe Formsma, for whom there is a stumbling block today.

On August 9, the resistance fighter Esmée van Eeghen was arrested in Amsterdam and taken to Groningen because she was involved in the Frisian resistance. According to Monique Brinks' research, she is said to have received preferential treatment from Knorr in the Scholtenhuis and allegedly also had a sexual relationship with him. The secretary he was dating was transferred. Esmée van Eeghen was forced by Knorr to write a letter to the resistance fighter Krijn van der Helm, who had gone into hiding in Amersfoort . The letter was addressed to van der Helm's parents, and Van Eeghen may not have known that he was there at the time. The brothers Pieter and Klaas Carel Faber , employees of Knorr, were supposed to deliver the letter. While Klaas Carel Faber was waiting in front of the house, there was a fight inside, in which van der Helm was shot by Pieter Faber. Since this source had now dried up - they had wanted to catch van der Helm alive - and Esmée van Eeghen did not disclose any further information, her death was obviously decided.

On September 7, 1944, Esmée van Eeghen and another prisoner, 24-year-old Luitje Kremer, were brought out of town in a car and shot. Their bodies were thrown into the Van Starkenborgh Canal. According to a statement by Klaas Carel Faber in September 1945, only Knorr should have shot. However, an autopsy in the Pathological Anatomical Laboratory in Groningen showed that the 13 bullets in van Eeghen's body had three different calibers, while Kremer's body contained four bullets with two different calibers.

One week before the final liberation of the province of Drenthe , on April 8, 1945, Ernst Knorr was involved in the shooting of ten resistance fighters who had been in prison in Groningen. At that time, the south of the province had already been liberated by Canadian troops. The prisoners were killed near the Peest airfield and their bodies were buried in a mass grave.

On April 16, 1945, Knorr and around 125 other Gestapo and SD members fled to Schiermonnikoog , hoping to get from there to Borkum and then to mainland Germany. The island was fortified as part of the Atlantic Wall and a German garrison with 600 soldiers was stationed there. On May 31, the group gave up and the men and women were taken to the mainland and detained in Groningen prison. On June 27, Knorr was transferred by Canadian Field Security to the Scheveningen prison , which they had renamed King's Prison , the former Oranjehotel , where he had previously carried out brutal interrogations.

On July 7, 1945, Ernst Knorr was found dead in his cell with a rope around his neck. According to reports from other German inmates, he was badly mistreated and died as a result. The exact cause of death could never be determined; there is a presumption that he was murdered by his Dutch guards in revenge for his atrocities. His body was taken to Zuidwal Hospital and, because it was very hot that week, was buried on July 14th on Algemene Begraafplaats . On October 10, 1958, Knorr's remains were reburied in the Ysselsteyn war cemetery near Venray . Knorr's colleague and competitor Lehnhoff was executed in Groningen in 1950.

literature

  • Nico de Both: Het Scholtenhuis 1940–1945 . In Boekvorm Uitgever, Assen 2008, ISBN 978-90-77548-54-7 (Dutch).
  • Rudi Harthoorn: Vuile oorlog in The Hague: bestrijding van het communistische verzet tijdens de Duitse bezetting . Van Gruting, Westervoort 2011, ISBN 978-90-75879-48-3 (Dutch).
  • Monique Brinks: Het Scholtenhuis 1940–1945 . Part 2: Daders . Uitgeverij Profiel, Bedum / Profiel / Groningen 2013, ISBN 978-90-5294-544-6 , pp. 57-80 (Dutch).

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Brinks, p. 58.
  2. ↑ a b c Brinks, p. 59.
  3. ^ Brinks, p. 60.
  4. ↑ a b Stichting Oorlogs- en Verzetscentrum Groningen: Mysterieuze (zelf) moord op Ernst Knorr. In: facebook.com. July 7, 2015, accessed October 6, 2016 .
  5. ↑ a b Brinks, p. 61.
  6. ↑ a b Brinks, p. 62.
  7. ↑ Verzetsman Gerrit Kastein 1910–1943. Go2War2.nl, accessed December 24, 2014 (Dutch).
  8. ↑ Brinks, p. 108.
  9. ↑ Brinks, p. 64.
  10. ↑ Dood en verderf in het Scholtenhuis: Dood en verderf in het Scholtenhuis. In: - Geschiedenis Beleven. July 20, 2014, accessed November 8, 2016 (Dutch).
  11. ↑ Jannes Wiebe Formsma. In: stolpersteine.groningen.nl. Retrieved November 8, 2016 (Dutch).
  12. ↑ Brinks, pp. 65/66.
  13. ↑ 1940-1945. Leeuwarden: A Cadillac ziekenwagen in de illegiteit. De geschiedenis van UMCG, accessed December 24, 2014 (Dutch).
  14. ↑ a b Arnold Karskens: Het beestmensch. 2012, pp. , Accessed December 24, 2014 (Dutch).
  15. ^ Cold Case van de Eeuw. (No longer available online.) Arnold Karskens, archived from the original on December 24, 2014 ; Retrieved December 24, 2014 (Dutch). Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / arnoldkarskens.com
  16. ↑ April 8, 1945 - 70 years later. (PDF) S. o. S. , accessed on November 8, 2016 .
  17. ↑ Schier in the Ban van Duitse bumps . In: Leeuwaarder Courant , April 30, 2015, p. 36.
  18. ↑ Mensenrechte geschonden bij naoorlogse zuivering trouw.nl , 29 December 2009
  19. ↑ Remembrance Day at the Oranjehotel, Saturday, September 26, 2015 ; accessed December 4, 2016;
  20. ↑ Brinks, p. 76.
  21. ^ Brinks, p. 103.
personal data
SURNAME Knorr, Ernst
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German criminal inspector and Untersturmführer of the SS
DATE OF BIRTH October 13, 1899
PLACE OF BIRTH Holy ax
DATE OF DEATH July 7, 1945
Place of death Scheveningen