Eugen Steimle

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Eugen Steimle during the task force process

Eugen Steimle (born December 8, 1909 in Neubulach near Calw ; † October 9, 1987 in Wilhelmsdorf , district of Ravensburg ) was a high-ranking employee ( SS standard leader ) of the security service (SD) during the time of National Socialism and was the head of two special commandos of Einsatzgruppen of the SD responsible for mass murders in the Soviet Union .

Life

Careers in the SD

Steimle came from a strictly Pietist family . He studied history, German and French at the universities of Tübingen and Berlin . In 1929 he became a member of the Normannia Association in Tübingen . In May 1935 he passed his teaching qualification and in March 1936 he qualified as a study assessor.

In 1932 he joined the NSDAP (membership number 1.075.555) and became a member of the SS (SS number 272.575) and the NSDStB . In 1933/34 he was the group leader of the NSDStB and leader of the student body at the University of Tübingen. From October 1934 to April 1936 he served the Nazi regime as the student leader of Württemberg-Hohenzollern. In April 1936 he joined the Security Service (SD) ( recruited by Gustav Adolf Scheel , who organized the SD Upper Section Southwest). As early as September 1936, he headed the SD office in Stuttgart. First he headed the SD subsection Württemberg and from 1939 to 1943 the SD lead section Stuttgart.

From September 7 to December 10, 1941, he was the leader of Sonderkommando 7a within Einsatzgruppe B. Within two months, Steimle's unit under his command murdered 500 Jews . From August 1942 to January 1943 he was head of the Sonderkommando 4a of Einsatzgruppe C . After returning to Germany in 1943 he became head of Group VI B in the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA), which was the foreign secret service responsible for the “German-Italian area of ​​influence in Europe, Africa and the Middle East”. He was promoted to SS Standartenführer in 1944.

After the war he took the pseudonym Dr. Hermann Burlach and finally hid in Groß-Höchberg with a farmer, where he was arrested on October 1, 1945.

After 1945

Eugen Steimle on the Tübingen homecoming table (2010)

Steimle was sentenced to death in the Nuremberg Einsatzgruppen Trial in 1948 . When asked there how many people had been murdered in the Russian city of Velikije Luki , he initially stated that he did not know. Later, at the urging of the public prosecutor Benjamin Ferencz , he replied: "I think there were fewer than a thousand." In the court, Steimle tried to shift responsibility for the deeds on the one hand to the Führer order and on the other hand to his subordinates, who had carried out the investigations. Three young women were shot dead under his command as a communist partisan group. In court, Steimle could only rely on presumptions on the basis of which he justified the shootings.

His sentence was then reduced to 20 years in prison by a mercy court in January 1951. In June 1954 he was released from the Landsberg War Crimes Prison .

Steimle profited from the pardon rulings of the American High Commissioner McCloy in January 1951, who reduced their sentences to 79 out of 89 prisoners in Landsberg. McCloy was significantly influenced by petitions and appeals from Federal Republican politicians and church people . The deliberately created linguistic confusion between prisoner-of-war soldiers on the one hand and convicted war criminals on the other led so far that the city of Tübingen also listed the names of the convicted war criminals Otto Abetz and Eugen Steimle on a plaque for prisoners of war returning late . In August 2003, the memorial plaque for the prisoners of war at the Tübingen Holzmarkt, which had been hanging there since 1951, was completely removed.

After his release, Steimle, returning to his Pietist roots, became a teacher of German and history at the private upper level of the then Protestant high school of the Zieglerschen Anstalten in Wilhelmsdorf . However, the high school authority in Tübingen had forbidden Steimle's work at the state lower and middle school level. Attempts Steimles to be re-accepted into the civil service were unsuccessful. He retired in 1975.

literature

  • Georg Herrmann: Eugen Steimle - The Barras. Memories of the mass murderer . In: Wolfgang Proske: perpetrators helpers free riders , vol. 4: Nazi victims from Upper Swabia . Kugelberg Verlag, Gerstetten 2015, ISBN 978-3-945893-005 , pp. 281–292 (memories of a former student from the time in Wilhelmsdorf).
  • Helge Dvorak: Biographical Lexicon of the German Burschenschaft , Vol. 1.8, Supplement L – Z. Winter, Heidelberg 2014, ISBN 978-3-8253-6051-1 , pp. 304-305.
  • Christian Ingrao : Hitler's Elite. The pioneers of the National Socialist mass murder . Translated by Enrico Heinemann and Ursel Schäfer. Propylaeen, Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-549-07420-6 (first Paris 2010);
  • Rainer Smile: From the Reich Security Main Office to a Protestant grammar school. The story of Eugen Steimle . In: Rainer Smiling, Jörg Thierfelder (Hrsg.): Evangelical Württemberg between world war and reconstruction . Calwer Verlag, Stuttgart 1995, ISBN 3-7668-3289-1 , pp. 260–288 (=  sources and research on Württemberg church history , volume 13);
  • Horst Junginger: Tübingen executors of the final solution. Efficient mass murderers at the forefront of the SS Einsatzgruppen and the Security Service ( PDF ).

documentary

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Michael Grüttner : Biographical Lexicon for National Socialist Science Policy (= Studies on Science and University History. Volume 6). Synchron, Heidelberg 2004, ISBN 3-935025-68-8 , pp. 166-167.
  2. ↑ The persecution and murder of European Jews by National Socialist Germany 1933–1945 (collection of sources), Vol. 3: German Reich and Protectorate. September 1939 - September 1941 , edited by Andrea Löw, Munich 2012, ISBN 978-3-486-58524-7 , p. 80.
  3. ^ A b Ernst Klee: Das Personenlexikon zum Third Reich , Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 599.
  4. ↑ Musmanno, Michael A., USNR, Military Tribunal II, Case 9: Opinion and Judgment of the Tribunal. Nuremberg: Palace of Justice. April 8, 1948. pp. 168–171 (original mimeographed copy), here p. 168 ( online ( memento of December 2, 2002 in the Internet Archive )).
  5. ↑ Rainer Lächele: From the Reich Security Main Office in a Protestant school. The story of Eugen Steimle . In: Rainer Smiling, Jörg Thierfelder (Hrsg.): Evangelical Württemberg between world war and reconstruction . Calwer Verlag, Stuttgart 1995, p. 272.
  6. ↑ Commemoration of the fallen and missing; Dealing with the "homecoming sign" ( Memento from May 22, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 48 kB) Memento from May 22, 2014, original no longer available
  7. ↑ Gymnasium Wilhelmsdorf (ed.): 150 years Gymnasium Wilhelmsdorf (formerly KI) , Wilhelmsdorf 2007, p. 16.
  8. ↑ Rainer Lächele: From the Reich Security Main Office in a Protestant school. The story of Eugen Steimle . In: Rainer Smiling, Jörg Thierfelder (Hrsg.): Evangelical Württemberg between world war and reconstruction . Calwer Verlag, Stuttgart 1995, p. 272 ​​f.
personal data
SURNAME Steimle, Eugene
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German SS officer, Einsatzgruppenführer, grammar school teacher
DATE OF BIRTH December 8, 1909
PLACE OF BIRTH Neubulach near Calw
DATE OF DEATH October 9, 1987
Place of death Wilhelmsdorf (Württemberg)