Franz Fischer (SS member, 1901)

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Franz Fischer

Franz Fischer (born December 10, 1901 in Bigge , † September 19, 1989 in Olsberg ) was a German SS Sturmscharführer in World War II .

Life

Youth and World War II

Fischer was the oldest of five children in a Catholic family. From an early age he felt strongly attracted to the Church and wanted to follow his brother and his mother's sister to a monastery. Actually he couldn't cope with the loneliness. In middle school, he dropped his plan to go to the monastery and did his military service . After completing his nine-month military service, he found work in a tax office, which he did not like. He switched to the police force, attended a police school and found his first job in 1922/23 with the criminal police in Bochum . In 1937 he moved to the Secret State Police (Gestapo) in Düsseldorf .

NSDAP and World War II

Although he had not been interested in politics so far , he became a member of the NSDAP in 1933 after Hitler came to power in the German Reich . In 1934 he married. On May 28, 1940 - the German Wehrmacht had occupied the Netherlands - he was transferred to the branch office of the Security Police and SD in Utrecht , where he was supposed to stay for only one month. In November 1940 he was transferred to Unit IV-B4 in The Hague . This agency was tasked with the deportation of Jews in the Netherlands and tracking down people who gave them shelter. His immediate superior was Government Councilor Wilhelm Zoepf as the official Jewish advisor on site; this left Fischer the management of the daily business.

Franz Fischer gained the reputation of being a particularly sadistic SS Sturmscharführer when carrying out Jewish deportations. He tortured Dutch resistance fighters with sticks and iron bars to extort confessions forcibly, and he kept submerging his victims until they revealed useful information.

After the war

After the war, Fischer was arrested and sentenced to life imprisonment by a Dutch special court in The Hague on March 17, 1949 . A death sentence was not given because, according to the judgment of the Court of Justice, he was awarded mitigating circumstances (his strong urge for validity mixed with a sense of guilt and pronounced anti-Semitism as well as psychological aspects). A special cassation court overturned this judgment and sentenced him to death on July 12, 1950. The death penalty was not carried out, but was commuted to life imprisonment in 1951. He was then interned in Breda prison together with Willy Lages , Joseph Johann Kotälla and Ferdinand from the Fünten (see also: the " Four from Breda ").

According to the judgment of the Hague Court of Cassation, Fischer was guilty of participating in the deportation of around 13,000 Jews from The Hague to the Westerbork transit camp and of arranging the transfer of Jews from Westerbork to camps in annexed Poland. He was also responsible for the mistreatment of Jews and civilians who were suspected of helping Jews.

Only a few months after his release from prison on January 27, 1989, he died at the age of 87 in Bigge (City of Olsberg).

Meaning of his biography

With his biography, Franz Fischer is a prime example of a perpetrator of the Holocaust who comes from a petty-bourgeois background . Together with the other “ Vier von Breda ” he was symbolic in the Netherlands for the Nazi crimes committed during the occupation and the Hitler dictatorship in World War II . The death penalty , sentence and possible early release of the "Four from Breda" were repeatedly the subject of heated public discussions in the Netherlands until the release of the remaining "Two from Breda" in January 1989, shortly before their death, 44 years after the end of the war.

literature

  • Harald Fühner: Follow-up. Dutch politics and the persecution of collaborators and Nazi criminals, 1945–1989. Münster 2005, ISBN 3-8309-1464-4 .
  • Wolfgang Benz (Hrsg.): Dimension of the genocide. The number of Jewish victims of National Socialism. Dtv, Munich 1996, ISBN 3-423-04690-2 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Mercy for Mass Murderers , Felix Bohr, Spiegel Online , October 18, 2018
personal data
SURNAME Fischer, Franz
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German SS-Sturmbannführer
DATE OF BIRTH December 10, 1901
PLACE OF BIRTH Bigge
DATE OF DEATH September 19, 1989
Place of death Olsberg