Walter Stahlecker

This article deals with the SS leader. For the ministerial director, see Walter Stahlecker (Ministerialdirektor) .

Franz Walter Stahlecker (1930)

Franz Walter Stahlecker (* 10. October 1900 in Sternenfels ; † 23. March 1942 in Krasnogwardeisk , Soviet Union ) was a German lawyer, police and SS officers, last SS - brigadier and major general of the police. Stahlecker served, among other things, as head of the Württemberg political state police office (1934-1936) as well as commander of Einsatzgruppe A and as commander of the security police and the SD in the area of ​​the Reichskommissariat Ostland .

Life

Youth and education

Stahlecker came from a wealthy Württemberg family. He was the second of three sons of the pastor and senior director Eugen Stahlecker and his wife Anna Zaiser.

From September 21 to December 7, 1918, he did military service. He attended a grammar school in Tübingen, which he left in 1920 with the final exam . He then studied law at the University of Tübingen . During his studies he belonged to the Lichtenstein student association, the voluntary Tübingen student corps and the police force. He also moved in the early 1920s in the environment of the Deutschvölkischer Schutz- und Trutzbund and the Consul organization . In 1924, Stahlecker completed his studies with the first state examination in law. From December 1924 to November 1927 he then performed the legal preparatory service at the local courts in Reutlingen and Tübingen, at the regional court in Tübingen and in a law firm in Reutlingen. In 1927 he passed the Great State Examination in Law. Shortly before his doctorate he became Dr. jur.

From March 7, 1928 to August 27, 1930 Stahlecker officiated as a bailiff in the upper offices of Ehingen and Saulgau. He then held the post of Labor Office Director in Nagold from August 28, 1930 to May 28, 1933. During this time he married Luise-Gabriele Freiin von Validlingen on October 14, 1932. The marriage had four children.

time of the nationalsocialism

A few weeks after the seizure of power by the Nazis in the spring of 1933 Stahlecker was appointed 29 May 1933 as deputy director of the Political Wuerttemberg state police office. Hermann Mattheiß , to whom Stahlecker's relationship was strained, acted as head of the office . In May 1933, Stahlecker joined the NSDAP ( membership number 3.219.015). His entry was later dated back to 1932 for optical reasons (membership number 1.069.130). On November 23, 1933, Stahlecker moved as a senior government councilor to represent Württemberg in the Reich government in Berlin.

On May 14, 1934, Stahlecker succeeded Mattheiß as head of the Württemberg Political Police Office. From there he was transferred to the state police station in Breslau as head of this department on May 11, 1937.

Shortly after Austria was annexed to the German Reich, Stahlecker was appointed inspector of the Security Police and SD in Austria on May 20, 1938. The Reich Commissioner Josef Bürckel , who was responsible for “affiliated” Austria, set up the Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Vienna on August 20, 1938 , which was formally subordinate to Stahlecker, but was actually headed by Adolf Eichmann . As Reinhard Heydrich's confidante , Stahlecker was Ernst Kaltenbrunner's antipode . A year later, after the occupation of the so-called rest of Czech Republic , he was appointed commander of the Security Police and the SD in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia on June 2, 1939 .

Stahlecker's documentation of the extermination of Jewish people by Einsatzgruppe A on January 31, 1942

After the start of the Second World War , Stahlecker was sent to Oslo in May 1940 as commander of the Security Police and the SD, where he worked until November 1940. From November 14, 1940 to June 18, 1941, he served as Ministerialrat in the Foreign Office.

In the hope of a career in the RSHA , Stahlecker took over the leadership of Einsatzgruppe A for the territories to be occupied in the Soviet Union in April 1941 as SS Brigade Leader and Major General of the Police . After the attack on the Soviet Union in June of the same year, the approximately 1000-strong task force followed Army Group North to the Baltic states as far as Leningrad in order to carry out mass executions in the rear front area in line with the racial ideology of the Nazi regime. In the following six months, Stahlecker's task force turned out to be the “most effective” of all the units deployed at the time in mass murder : by the winter of 1941 he reported the killing of 249,420 Jews to Berlin.

Stahlecker as a Wounded Man (1941)

From autumn 1941 Stahlecker was in command of the Security Police and the SD (BdS) in the Reichskommissariat Ostland. In this capacity he had the Jungfernhof camp near Riga set up at the end of 1941 .

On March 22, 1942, Stahlecker suffered a gunshot wound to a main artery in his thigh during a partisan attack near his headquarters. He was treated in a hospital in Riga, but died as a result of blood loss on the flight to Prague, where his family lived. Stahlecker held an official state funeral in Prague, at which Reinhard Heydrich gave the funeral speech and to which Himmler and Ribbentrop sent death wreaths.

Promotions

Promotions in the SS :

• 1938: SS standard leader
• February 6, 1941: SS brigade leader and major general of the police

literature

• Lutz Hachmeister : The enemy researcher. The career of SS leader Franz Alfred Six. Beck, Munich 1998, ISBN 3-406-43507-6 .
• Heinz Höhne : The order under the skull. S. Mohn, Gütersloh 1967.
• Helmut Krausnick , Hans-Heinrich Wilhelm: The troop of the Weltanschauung war. The Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police and SD 1938–1942. DVA, Stuttgart 1981, ISBN 3-421-01987-8 .
• Hans-Joachim Lang : The murderous career of Walter Stahlecker. In: Schwäbisches Tagblatt . May 18, 1996.
• Jürgen Schuhladen-Krämer: The executors of terror. Hermann Mattheiß, Walter Stahlecker, Friedrich Mußgay. Head of the secret state police headquarters in Stuttgart. In: Michael Kißener , Joachim Scholtyseck (ed.): The leaders of the province. Konstanz 1999, pp. 405-443.
• Michael Wildt : Generation of the Unconditional. The leadership corps of the Reich Security Main Office. Hamburger Edition , Hamburg 2002, ISBN 3-930908-75-1 .
• Biographical manual of the German Foreign Service 1871–1945. Volume 4: S. Edited by the Foreign Office, Historical Service, edited by: Bernd Isphording, Gerhard Keiper, Martin Kröger . Schöningh, Paderborn u. a. 2012, ISBN 978-3-506-71843-3 .
• Sigrid Brüggemann: Walter Stahlecker, head of the Gestapo in Stuttgart and mass murderer. In: Hermann G. Abmayr (Ed.): Stuttgarter NS-Täter. From fellow travelers to mass murderers. Butterfly Verlag, Stuttgart 2009, ISBN 978-3-89657-136-6 , pp. 126-133.
• Ingrid Bauz, Sigrid Brüggemann, Roland Maier (eds.): The Secret State Police in Württemberg and Hohenzollern. Butterfly-Verlag, Stuttgart 2013, ISBN 3-89657-138-9 .

Web links

• The University of Tübingen under National Socialism - Tübingen executors of the "Final Solution" ( Memento from October 12, 2008 in the Internet Archive ). Lecture by Prof. Michael Wildt (video recording no longer available)
• The Einsatzgruppen: The “Jaeger Report” (December 1941). In: The Jewish Virtual Library
• Virtual history site Hotel Silber. Biographical notes on Stahlecker's time in Stuttgart
• Sigrid Brüggemann: Walter Stahlecker. Head of the Gestapo in Stuttgart and mass murderer (excerpt from book, excerpt)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Hans Safrian : Eichmann and his assistants. Frankfurt am Main 1995, ISBN 3-596-12076-4 , p. 41.
2. ^ Walter Stahlecker: Einsatzgruppe A - General report on October 15, 1941. (PDF retrieved from the Library of Congress) In: Vol. XXXVII, p. 677 ff. Trial of the Major War Criminals before The International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, November 14 - October 1, 1946, 1949, accessed May 19, 2020 .