Friedrich Karst

Friedrich Karst (born August 19, 1891 in Barmen ; died June 16, 1973 ) was a German criminal investigator . From 1946 to 1948 he was the first head of the State Criminal Police Office in North Rhine-Westphalia . Like his three successors in office, Friederich D'heil , Oskar Wenzky and Günter Grasner, Karst took part in violent National Socialist crimes .

Life

After attending primary school, Karst completed an apprenticeship as a bandmaker . He took part in the First World War from 1914 to the end of the war, retired from the army in January 1919 with the rank of vice sergeant and entered the police service in Barmen. This year he was a member of the SPD for a few months . In 1920 he was transferred to the criminal police, for which he worked in Barmen and Wuppertal until 1946 . After various training courses to become a detective, he worked from 1926 mainly in the identification service, card index and intelligence services. This area served not only to investigate committed crimes, but increasingly also the so-called "preventive fight against crime", in the time of National Socialism against allegedly threatening "racial offenses" or "anti-social behavior". The persecution of the Sinti and Roma was also organized with the help of the identification service.

Karst himself had been a member of the NSDAP since May 1, 1937 (membership number 5390990). Numerous memberships in Nazi organizations are recorded in the files: in the National Socialist People's Welfare (NSV), the Reichsbund Deutscher Beamter (RDB), the Volksbund für das Deutschtum Abroad (VDA), the Reichskolonialbund (RKB), the Bund Deutscher Osten ( BDO), the Reich Air Protection Association (RLB), the NS cultural community and the NS Reich Warrior Association . Karst was not a member of the SS . He justified his non-membership in 1941 by pointing out that he was “not fully SS capable” due to injuries in the First World War.

Participation in Nazi crimes

While Karst's role within the Wuppertal police in the persecution and murder of the Sinti and Roma remains unclear, there is evidence of his active involvement in another Nazi crime of the last weeks of the war: the murder of 71 people, including at least four slave laborers in a ravine on Wenzelnberg , 25 km southwest of Wuppertal on April 13, 1945. The murdered were prisoners from various penitentiaries and prisons. As a result of an order from General Field Marshal Walter Model , prisoners for political crimes were handed over to the security police. The corresponding prisoners from the Wuppertal area were shot at a pit that had already been dug.

Karst testified after the war that he and others had taken the victims to the collection point. He did not take part in the shootings themselves, but only participated in the "shoveling of the grave" at the end. According to an order from Heinrich Himmler , his involvement in leading the victims and later shoveling them in was forced. Had he not participated, he would have been shot dead immediately. According to the historian Martin Hölzl, there was no such emergency . Karst made a "pure protection claim" here. Nevertheless, the public prosecutor's office in Wuppertal closed the preliminary investigation against Karst and other parties involved in June 1949, stating that those involved in the on-site assassination were in an "order emergency situation".

Post war career

After 1945 Karst made a career in the management area of ​​the North Rhine-Westphalian criminal police despite his lack of qualifications for the higher service - he only had the rank of criminal police master. In his denazification process he was classified in category V “unencumbered”. When the criminal police offices of the North Rhine Province and the Province of Westphalia were merged, Karst took over the establishment and management of the authority.

On February 29, 1948, the North Rhine-Westphalian Ministry of the Interior decreed that the line should be replaced by Friederich D'heil . The official reason for the replacement was the insufficient qualification of Karst. Whether or to what extent the previous public prosecutor's investigations played a role in the removal of Karst cannot be proven. Karst was neither dismissed nor suspended, but remained D'heil's deputy until 1951. He then headed various departments, most recently Kriminalgruppe III, which was responsible for the field of supra-local crime prevention, crime statistics and the reporting sheet. On October 1, 1954, he retired with the rank of chief detective. Karst died on June 16, 1973.

A study presented in December 2019 by the historian Martin Hölzl on behalf of the LKA North Rhine-Westphalia came to the conclusion that the first four directors of the State Criminal Police Office - in addition to Friedrich Karst, his successors Friederich D'heil , Oskar Wenzky and Günter Grasner  - went to NS- Crimes were involved. State Interior Minister Herbert Reul (CDU) assessed the result as follows: "From today's perspective, you should never have been allowed to work as police officers."

literature

• Martin Hölzl: Report "Nazi past of former head of the NRW State Criminal Police Office" (PDF, 945 KB)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Hölzl, Report on the Nazi Past , pp. 7–9.
2. ↑ Hölzl, report on the Nazi past , pp. 11–15.
3. ↑ Hölzl, report on the Nazi past , pp. 15–17.
4. ↑ Several former LKA bosses were Nazi criminals. In: Spiegel Online . December 16, 2019, accessed December 16, 2019 .