Friedrich Jeckeln

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Friedrich Jeckeln (around 1934)

Friedrich August Jeckeln (born February 2, 1895 in Hornberg , † February 3, 1946 in Riga , Latvian SSR ) was a German SS-Obergruppenführer , General of the Waffen-SS , the Police and Higher SS and Police Leader .

He was responsible for mass murders of over 100,000 people, including a. near Kamenets-Podolsk , in Babyn Yar and in the Riga ghetto . He was executed as a war criminal in 1946 .

Life

Early years, World War I and the interwar period

The son of a factory owner first attended elementary school and from 1905 to 1913 the upper secondary school in Freiburg im Breisgau . Then he was enrolled for one semester at the Polytechnic in Köthen . On October 1, 1913, Jeckeln joined the 5th Baden Field Artillery Regiment No. 76 of the Prussian Army in Freiburg im Breisgau as a one-year volunteer . After the outbreak of World War I , he took part with the regiment in the fighting on the Western Front . Promoted to lieutenant in the reserve in March 1915 , Jeckeln was transferred to the fusilier regiment "Prince Karl-Anton von Hohenzollern" (Hohenzollernsches) No. 40 and adjutant of this regiment in the same month . During the trench warfare in Champagne he was seriously wounded in 1916. Thereupon he switched to the air force and worked for the Air Force Replacement Department 5 until the end of the war. He then belonged to the Eastern Border Guard and was retired from military service on January 20, 1919.

From 1919 to 1925 Jeckeln worked as an estate manager near Danzig . He then earned his living as a freelance engineer in Braunschweig until 1929 . In 1922 he joined the Young German Order , of which he remained a member until 1924. In the meantime, Jeckeln was also a member of the DNVP .

He divorced his wife Charlotte Hirsch, whom he married in May 1918, in mid-December 1927 because of his supposedly Jewish father-in-law.

National Socialist dictatorship

Advancement in the NSDAP and SS

On October 1, 1929, he joined the NSDAP ( membership number 163.348 ), where he initially worked as a gau speaker and organizer. From 1932 Jeckeln was a member of the Reichstag for constituency 16 (South Hanover-Braunschweig). Even during the Nazi era , he belonged to the now politically insignificant Reichstag until the end of the Nazi regime , from November 1933 for constituency 15 (East Hanover). From the spring of 1940 he was a member of the Braunschweig State Council.

At the beginning of December 1930 he joined the SS (SS No. 4,367) and was promoted to SS-Sturmbannführer in March . From March to June 1931, he was in charge of the 1st Sturmbann of the 12th SS Standard in the SS and was promoted to SS Standard Leader on June 22, 1931 . In September 1931 he was promoted to SS-Oberführer when he left the 12th SS standard. From September 1931 to February 1933 Jeckeln led SS Section IV ( Province of Hanover and Schleswig-Holstein ) and was promoted to SS group leader there on February 4, 1933 . He took over the leadership of the SS group “South” until mid-July 1933 and the SS group “Northwest” in Braunschweig from August to mid-November 1933. Then he was there until the end of March 1936 leader of the SS upper section "Northwest".

Police chief of the Free State of Braunschweig

On June 20, 1933, Jeckeln was appointed leader of the Gestapo by the NSDAP Prime Minister of the Free State of Braunschweig , Dietrich Klagges , as President of the State Police Office. Klagges' aim was to ensure a close link between the police and the SS. In personal union he was promoted to government councilor in the state police office of the Braunschweig interior ministry as a consultant. From the beginning of October 1933 he also commanded the Braunschweigische Schutzpolizei, initially with the rank of major and from November 1933 as a lieutenant colonel . He served as President of the Braunschweig State Police Office and Commander of the Braunschweig Police Department until 1936. Eduard Holste was his successor .

Jeckeln was described as inconsiderate, brutal, excessive and harsh. He persecuted political opponents, especially members of the KPD , SPD and the trade unions , relentlessly until their death. Together with NSDAP member Friedrich Alpers , Minister of Justice and Finance in the Free State, and Prime Minister Klagges, Jeckeln was primarily responsible for the Rieseberg murders in the summer of 1933. As a result, Nazi opponents were arrested, especially in Braunschweig, Helmstedt , Wolfenbüttel and Blankenburg, many of whom did not survive the severe abuse. This lawless and brutal procedure in the Free State took on such proportions that Braunschweig was designated as New Mexico in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior .

Even during the Weimar Republic , Jeckeln was deeply embroiled in violent Nazi crimes. In October 1932 he ordered the murder of a renegade SS man in Braunschweig. SS man Walter Kampe, who worked for the staff guard of SS Section IV, was accompanied by an SS comrade under false pretenses to the Sickt forest, where he was shot on October 12, 1932. Jeckeln had obtained the murder weapon and ammunition for the perpetrator and helped him to escape to Austria after the murder . In 1932, Jeckeln was also responsible for bomb attacks in Braunschweig. B. on the house of the then Lord Mayor of the city Ernst Böhme ( SPD ), who remained unharmed.

Higher SS and Police Leader Middle and West

From April 1936 to July 1940 he was the leader of the SS upper section "Middle". On September 13, 1936, he was promoted to SS-Obergruppenführer and at the end of June 1938 he was appointed Higher SS and Police Leader (HSSPF) center with his office in Braunschweig . From the end of April 1938 he stayed for a week in Greece , where he appeared as a speaker for the NSDAP / AO in Saloniki , Athens and Patras . In November 1938, in Braunschweig and Hanover , Jeckeln was involved in the organization of the Jewish pogroms known under the catchphrase “ Reichskristallnacht ” .

After the beginning of the Second World War, he took part in the so-called French campaign from May 1940 as a battalion commander in the SS Totenkopf Division (1st storm man of the 2nd SS Totenkopf Infantry Regiment) .

From July 1940 he was leader of the SS Upper Section "West" and at the same time until the end of June 1941 HSSPF West in Düsseldorf . In the meantime he had been promoted to general of the police in early April 1941. In March 1941 he was a guest at the opening of the racist Nazi institute for research into the Jewish question in Frankfurt am Main.

Co-organizer of the Holocaust

Kamenets-Podolsk

Murder of Jews (September 1941)

After the German attack on the Soviet Union , he was appointed HSSPF Russia South in June 1941. The SS and police units under his command soon carried out mass murders of the Jewish population of western Ukraine as part of so-called “combing-out actions”. In the course of setting up the Reichkommissariat Ukraine occurred near the town of Kamenetz-Podolsk for largest ever mass murder of Jews in World War II , as imputed units between 26 and 28 August 1941 23,600 Jews murdered him. Around 14,000 of the victims had previously been deported from Hungary, the rest came from the surrounding area.

Babyn Yar, Rovno and Dnepropetrovsk

On September 19, 1941, Kiev was captured by German troops; a few days later, on September 27, 1941, a meeting took place on the subject of "evacuating the local Jews". Participants were u. a. Jeckeln, the commander of Einsatzgruppe C SS-Brigadführer Otto Rasch and the commander of Sonderkommando 4a SS-Standartenführer Paul Blobel . It was decided to murder all Jews.

In just two days, " Einsatzgruppen " murdered 33,771 people in the Babyn Yar gorge on September 29 and 30, 1941 ; in further shootings by October 12, 1941 a total of 51,000. In addition, mass shootings were carried out in Rivne and Dnepropetrovsk , in which Jeckeln was primarily responsible.

Riga ghetto

On October 11, 1941, Jeckeln was appointed HSSPF Russia North and East ( Baltic States and parts of Belarus ) and transferred to Riga . At the same time he became the leader of the SS Upper Section Ostland. As the HSSPF, Jeckeln was also subordinate to the SSPF Belarus in Minsk , until this jurisdiction was withdrawn from him in October 1942 due to “lack of success in fighting partisans ”.

In the autumn of 1941, the Riga Jewish Ghetto already existed and housed tens of thousands of Latvian Jews. Supposedly, Jeckeln received the order from Himmler to clear the ghetto in order to make room for Jews who were to be deported from the German Reich . Jeckeln immediately began planning the "liquidation". As the site of this mass murder, he chose a grove near Riga called Rumbula .

He had the German Jews killed and buried in the Biķernieki forest .

The Rumbula mass murder

On the morning of November 30, 1941, Latvian and German troops began to transport the Jews to Rumbula , where a total of around 27,500 people were shot in just three days, namely on November 30, December 8 and 9, 1941 - of them 21,000 women and children.

Members of the Wehrmacht and the General Commissariat were present at the mass murder in order to get a personal impression; some were even invited by Jeckeln. On November 30, 1941, the first transport train with German Jews from Berlin had already arrived at the Šķirotava freight yard outside of Riga. Jeckeln also had this killed; a telegram from Himmler expressly forbidding them to be killed arrived late. Himmler reprimanded him sharply for his arbitrariness.

Andrej Angrick and Peter Klein interpret this incident as follows: “In Jeckeln's eyes, the Himmler order to liquidate the Latvian ghetto also gave him the opportunity to take just as radical action against the newcomers, since in his opinion there was no difference between German and Latvian Jews. It may remain open whether Jeckeln misunderstood Himmler's order or whether he consciously used it to further accelerate the dynamism of the extermination process. We tend towards the last variant, as the rushing ahead in Riga was, so to speak, a copy of the Kamenez-Podolsk massacre, which Jeckeln had brought the hoped-for merits to his superiors. "

Camp fever and Operation Winter Magic

Arrival of Jeckeln (5th from left), other officers and Hinrich Lohse at the Riga train station , 1944

Since August 22nd, 1942, Jeckeln has been in charge of the so-called Sumpffieber campaign , with which, according to Heinrich Himmler, the "gang activity in White Ruthenia [...] should be fundamentally cleared up". Around 6,500 men were deployed, whose express task it was to "destroy all the villages in the swamp and forest areas of the operational area". In the course of this action 8,350 Jews - most of them from the Baranowitschi ghetto - were murdered. The company was canceled on September 21st on Himmler's instructions and was considered a failure. His entire staff was always personally involved in this as well as in other actions , which Jeckeln attached great importance to. Jeckeln was not one of the calculating technocrats of the German occupation regime, but was a fanatical anti-communist and anti-Semite who considered it necessary to “murder the Jews of the whole world”. In February and March 1943, Jeckeln headed Operation Winterzauber in northern Belarus , which was supposed to create a 40 km wide unpopulated strip in the fight against the partisans. In the course of the action, several tens of thousands of Belarusian civilians were burned, shot or abducted by Baltic collaborators .

Final phase of the war

At the beginning of July 1944 he was appointed General of the Waffen-SS and Police. From late September 1944 to mid-January 1945 he was also nominally HSSPF Belgium and northern France, but remained in Russia. From mid-January 1945 he was stage manager for the replacement troops of the Waffen SS at the HSSPF Southeast for one month . He officially served as HSSPF Ostland until January 1945. In the end of the war, Jeckeln was appointed commanding general of the V. SS Volunteer Mountain Corps in mid-February 1945 , with whom he ended up in the Halbe pocket and taken prisoner by the Soviets at the end of April .

Captivity, Riga Trial and Execution

Friedrich Jeckeln in Soviet custody (1945/1946)

After his capture, Jeckeln was taken to the Soviet Union and interrogated several times over a period of months. Before a Soviet military tribunal on January 26, 1946, he was defeated in the Riga war crimes trial of the “liquidation of the Riga ghetto”, the Rumbula campaign and his responsibility “for the murder of around 47,000 Jews in Kamenets-Podolsk and Babi-Yar in August and September 1941 “Accused. According to the indictment, he carried out the extermination of the "Soviet citizens of Jewish nationality who were rounded up from Riga and other areas in the Rigas and other ghettos" in a "particularly animal manner ... according to the instructions received from Himmler". On the basis of Jeckeln's testimony, witness reports from victims and perpetrators and German documents incriminating him, he was not only accused of giving orders and directing mass murders, but also of being present and participating in the shootings. On February 3, 1946, he and the SA-Standartenführer and Area Commissioner of the Tallinn District Alexander Boecking as well as the Wehrmacht officers in the general rank Albrecht Digeon von Monteton , Hans Küpper , Wolfgang von Ditfurth , Bronislaw Pawel , Siegfried Ruff and Friedrich Werther on the basis of ukas 43 sentenced to death . In front of several thousand spectators, those sentenced to death were publicly hanged on the same day on Victory Square ( Uzvaras laukums ) in Riga, near the Daugava River (German: Düna ) .

See also

literature

  • Reinhard Bein : Jews in Braunschweig. 1900-1945. Materials on national history. 2nd edition, Braunschweig 1988.
  • G. Harry Bennett: Exploring the World of the Second and Third Tier Men in the Holocaust: The Interrogation of Friedrich Jeckeln: Engineer and Executioner. In: Liverpool Law Review. Volume 32, 2011, pp. 1-18.
  • Richard Breitman: Friedrich Jeckeln - specialist for the "final solution" in the east. In: Ronald Smelser , Enrico Syring (ed.): The SS. Elite under the skull. 30 résumés. Paderborn 2000, pp. 267-275.
  • Wassili Stepanowitsch Christoforow, Wladimir Gennadjewitsch Makarow, Matthias Uhl (ed.): Interrogated: The questioning of German generals and officers by the Soviet secret services 1945-1952 . Berlin and Boston, De Gruyter Oldenbourg, [2015], 978-3-11-041604-6 (Jeckeln interrogation protocols)
  • Frank Flechtmann: November 1944: “And now more than ever!” A Hornberger lets shoot. In: The Ortenau. Publications of the historical association for Mittelbaden, Offenburg, 76th annual volume 1996, pp. 471–492.
  • Israel Gutman (Ed.): Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. The persecution and murder of the European Jews. Volume 2: H-P. 2nd edition, Munich 1998, p. 667.
  • Beatrix Herlemann , Helga Schatz: Biographical Lexicon of Lower Saxony Parliamentarians, 1919–1945 , Verlag Hahnsche Buchhandlung, Hanover 2004, pp. 174/175.
  • Institute of Documentation in Israel for the Investigation of Nazi War Crimes (Ed.): SS-Obergruppenführer Friedrich Jeckeln responsible for the murder of Jews in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia 1941–1944 (document collection).
  • Bernhard Kiekenap : Hitler's and Himmler's executioners. The SS general from Braunschweig. Biographical notes on Friedrich Jeckeln (1895–1946) , Appelhans Verlag, Braunschweig 2013, ISBN 978-3-941737-91-4 .
  • Bernhard Kiekenap: SS Junker School. SA and SS in Braunschweig. Appelhans, Braunschweig 2008, ISBN 978-3-937664-94-1 .
  • Anita Kugler : Scherwitz . The Jewish SS officer. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 2004, pp. 193, 216, 250 ff.
  • Dieter Lent : Jeckeln, Friedrich. In: Horst-Rüdiger Jarck , Günter Scheel (ed.): Braunschweigisches Biographisches Lexikon - 19th and 20th centuries . Hahnsche Buchhandlung, Hannover 1996, ISBN 3-7752-5838-8 , p. 300 f .
  • Joachim Lilla , Martin Döring, Andreas Schulz: extras in uniform: the members of the Reichstag 1933–1945. A biographical manual. Including the Volkish and National Socialist members of the Reichstag from May 1924 . Droste, Düsseldorf 2004, ISBN 3-7700-5254-4 .
  • Joachim Lilla : Senior administrative officials and functionaries in Westphalia and Lippe (1918–1945 / 46). Biographical manual. Aschendorff, Münster 2004, ISBN 3-402-06799-4 , pp. 207 f. ( Publications of the Historical Commission for Westphalia. 22, A, 16 = historical work on Westphalian regional research. Economic and social history group. 16).
  • Horst-Rüdiger Jarck , Gerhard Schildt (ed.): The Braunschweigische Landesgeschichte. A region looking back over the millennia . 2nd Edition. Appelhans Verlag, Braunschweig 2001, ISBN 3-930292-28-9 .
  • Edith Raim: Justice between dictatorship and democracy: Reconstruction and prosecution of Nazi crimes in West Germany 1945–1949. Oldenbourg, Munich 2013, ISBN 978-3-486-70411-2 . (Zugl .: Augsburg, Univ., Habil.-Schr., 2012).
  • Richard Rhodes: The German Murderers. The SS Einsatzgruppen and the Holocaust. Translated from Jürgen Peter Krause. Bastei-Lübbe, Bergisch Gladbach 2006, ISBN 3-404-64218-X .
  • Isabel Rohloff: Kurt Meyer. In: Reinhard Bein : Hitler's Brunswick staff. döringDRUCK, Braunschweig 2017, ISBN 978-3-925268-56-4 , pp. 76-85.
  • Gerhard Wenzl: Jeckeln, Friedrich 1895-1946. In: Sepaintner, Fred Ludwig (Ed.) (2016): Baden-Württembergische Biographien , Volume VI, pp. 215-218.
  • Gerhard Wenzl: Friedrich Jeckeln: A man for the rough. In: Wolfgang Proske (Hrsg.): Perpetrators helpers free riders. Nazi victims from Baden-Württemberg. Volume 9: People polluted by the Nazis from the south of what is now Baden-Württemberg. Kugelberg Verlag, Gerstetten 2018, pp. 207-221, ISBN 978-3-945893-10-4 .
  • Gerhard Wysocki: The Secret State Police in Braunschweig. Police law and police practice under National Socialism. Campus, Frankfurt 1997, ISBN 3-593-35835-2 .

Web links

Commons : Friedrich Jeckeln  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Andreas Schulz, Günter Wegmann, Dieter Zinke: The generals of the Waffen SS and the police. The military careers of the generals, as well as the doctors, veterinarians, intendants, judges and ministerial officials with the rank of general. Volume 2 (Hachtel – Kutschera), Biblio-Verlag, Bissendorf 2005, ISBN 3-7648-2592-8 , portrait of Friedrich August Jeckeln pp. 343–357.
  2. ↑ Joachim Lilla: Senior administrative officials and functionaries in Westphalia and Lippe (1918–1945 / 46). Biographisches Handbuch , Münster 2004, pp. 185f.
  3. ↑ a b c d Reinhard Bein: Jews in Braunschweig. 1900-1945. Materials on national history. 2nd edition, Braunschweig 1988, p. 51.
  4. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k Joachim Lilla: Senior administrative officials and functionaries in Westphalia and Lippe (1918–1945 / 46). Biographisches Handbuch , Münster 2004, p. 186.
  5. ↑ a b Joachim Lilla: Senior administrative officials and functionaries in Westphalia and Lippe (1918–1945 / 46). Biographisches Handbuch , Münster 2004, p. 187.
  6. ^ Andreas Schulz, Günter Wegmann, Dieter Zinke: The generals of the Waffen SS and the police. The military careers of the generals, as well as the doctors, veterinarians, intendants, judges and ministerial officials with the rank of general. Volume 2 (Hachtel – Kutschera), Biblio-Verlag, Bissendorf 2005, ISBN 3-7648-2592-8 , portrait of Friedrich August Jeckeln p. 346.
  7. ^ Internet portal Westphalian History (accessed April 28, 2019)
  8. ^ Edith Raim: Justice between dictatorship and democracy: Reconstruction and prosecution of Nazi crimes in West Germany 1945–1949. Oldenbourg, Munich 2013, p. 743
  9. ^ Edith Raim: Justice between dictatorship and democracy: Reconstruction and punishment of Nazi crimes in West Germany 1945 - 1949 , Oldenbourg, Munich 2013, p. 731.
  10. ^ Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945 . Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Second updated edition, Frankfurt am Main 2005, p. 285.
  11. ^ Christian Gerlach: Calculated murders. The German economic and extermination policy in Belarus 1941 to 1944. Hamburg 1999, p. 184.
  12. ↑ Andrej Angrick, Peter Klein: The "Final Solution" in Riga. Darmstadt 2006, ISBN 3-534-19149-8 , p. 169.
  13. ↑ Quoted from Gerlach: Calculated murders. 1999, p. 930.
  14. ^ Friedrich Jeckeln, quoted in Gerlach: Calculated Morde. 1999, p. 932 (footnote 324).
  15. ↑ Gerlach: Calculated murders. 1999, pp. 703, 932.
  16. ↑ Gerlach: Calculated murders. 1999, p. 931 f.
  17. ↑ Gerlach: Calculated murders. 1999, p. 1140 (footnote 22).
  18. ↑ Gerhard Förster, Richard Lakowski (Ed.): 1945. The year of the final defeat of the fascist Wehrmacht. Documents, 2nd edition, Berlin 1985, p. 170 f.
  19. ↑ Vasilij Stepanowitsch Christoforow, Vladimir Gennadjewitsch Makarow, Matthias Uhl: Interrogated: The questioning of German generals and officers by the Soviet secret services 1945–1952 , Oldenburg 2015, p. 437.
  20. ↑ Klaus-Dieter Müller, Thomas Schaarschmidt, Mike Schmeitzner, Andreas Weigelt: Death sentences of Soviet military tribunals against Germans (1944–1947): A historical-biographical study , Göttingen 2015, p. 296.
  21. ↑ Excerpts from the indictment of the Supreme Military Prosecutor of the Red Army of January 22, 1946. Quoted in: Klaus-Dieter Müller, Thomas Schaarschmidt, Mike Schmeitzner, Andreas Weigelt: Death sentences of Soviet military tribunals against Germans (1944–1947): A historical-biographical study , Göttingen 2015, p. 68.
  22. ↑ Klaus-Dieter Müller, Thomas Schaarschmidt, Mike Schmeitzner, Andreas Weigelt: Death sentences of Soviet military tribunals against Germans (1944–1947): A historical-biographical study , Göttingen 2015, p. 68.
  23. ↑ Makss Kaufman: Churbn Latvia. Ebreju iznīcināšana Latvijā . Shamir, Riga 2014, ISBN 978-9934-8494-0-4 , p. 372 (Latvian).
personal data
SURNAME Jeckeln, Friedrich
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Jeckeln, Friedrich August (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician (NSDAP), MdR, general of the Waffen-SS, perpetrator of the Holocaust, war criminal
DATE OF BIRTH February 2, 1895
PLACE OF BIRTH Hornberg
DATE OF DEATH February 3, 1946
Place of death Riga , Latvian SSR , Soviet Union