Franz royal house

Franz Königshaus (born April 10, 1906 in Wegeleben ; † after 1971) was SS-Hauptsturmführer in the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA), Head of Division IV A 1c, responsible for the execution of more than 5000 prisoners of war in World War II .

Police service, Gestapo and Gestapa Berlin

The royal family came from a strictly religious Catholic family. In 1926 he passed the Abitur exam in Magdeburg . For his professional career, he chose the police force . In 1931 he was part of the traffic police . In 1934 he worked as an administrative inspector at the Magdeburg Police Headquarters.

In 1935 he moved to the state police station in Magdeburg . He married in church in August 1935, only to leave the church a year later. The reason for this was obviously a transfer to the Secret State Police Office Berlin (Gestapa Berlin) in 1936, where he was assigned to the Churches Department.

Member of the SS, SD, NSDAP and service in the RSHA

On June 1, 1938 he joined the SS (SS No. 290 942) as SS-Untersturmführer . On November 9, 1938, he became a member of the SD . On April 20, 1939 he was promoted to SS-Hauptsturmführer .

In September 1939 he became a clerk for questions about protective custody in the RSHA in Section IV C 2 . This was followed by a transfer to Section IV D 1 for Bohemia and Moravia . On April 1, 1942, he joined the NSDAP (No. 8 981 408). In April 1942, he succeeded Franz Thiedecke as head of the Department for Questions of Communism IV A 1 c. In this position he was directly subordinate to the official group leader IV Friedrich Panzinger .

Execution orders for prisoners of war

In this function he also had to work on proposals for the execution of prisoners of war. In doing so, he worked out the relevant decrees and presented them to Heinrich Müller , the head of the office, for signature . After the execution was completed, a report was made to the royal family.

On January 27, 1943, the royal house in Lublin reported on the execution of prisoners of war in 1942 in the general government at a working meeting of the security operations commandos in the Stalags of the General Government. After that, 3,217 prisoners of war from the Soviet Union were executed. At this meeting he gave a one-hour lecture on experiences in the surveillance system in the supervision of prisoners of war. Streim gives the text of the protocol in facsimile .

Wounding and imprisonment

In the course of a reorganization of Office IV in the RSHA, which also affected the prisoner-of-war area , he came to Section IV D 5 d, which was last called IV B 2a. In February 1944 he was transferred to the department for visa IV F 5, most recently designated IV B 4 c. In November 1944 he was seriously wounded by a low-flying aircraft near Lippstadt . After recovering in the spring of 1945, he came to the Mil. D, which was responsible for defense tasks in the RSHA and was commanded by Otto Skorzeny . His last station was near Golling an der Salzach near Salzburg . There he was captured by US troops.

Statement about the royal house in Nuremberg

After his release from captivity, he assumed a different identity. In the Nuremberg trials , Kurt Lindow made a statement about the position of the royal family in the RSHA. It was not until the 1960s that the first investigations into the royal family came about because his whereabouts had become known.

Investigation procedure and preliminary investigation

On February 15, 1971 there was a preliminary investigation by the public prosecutor's office at the Berlin Superior Court (Az .: 1 Js 1/64 [RSHA]). The accusation of guilt consisted in the fact that from April 1942 he was responsible for fifteen relevant decrees, so that 5,154 prisoners of war from the Soviet Union were executed. Since the royal family presented a medical certificate that he was unable to stand trial, the proceedings against him were temporarily suspended in November 1971. The Berlin Regional Court then finally dropped the proceedings against him in November 1989.

literature

• 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 .

Individual evidence

1. ^ Alfred Streim, The treatment of Soviet prisoners of war in the "Barbarossa case" - A documentation, Karlsruhe 1981, p. 97.
2. ↑ Detlef Schweffler, Protective Custody in National Socialism (1933 to 1945): The Bureaucracy of the Reich Security Main Office and the Persecution of Political Opponents, Dissertation of the Free University of Berlin, 1998, p. 306.
3. ↑ Christian Streit, No Comrades - The Wehrmacht and the Soviet Prisoners of War 1941 - 1945, Bonn, 1997, p. 94.
4. ↑ Alfred Streim, ibid, p. 226.
5. ^ Statement by Kurt Lindow about the tasks of Franz Königshaus in the RSHA
6. ↑ Reinhard Otto, Wehrmacht, Gestapo and Soviet prisoners of war in the German Reich 1941/42, Munich 1998, p. 249, FN 410.