Friedrich Knolle (Gau culture warden)

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Friedrich Knolle (born March 12, 1903 in Amsterdam , † November 27, 1977 in Neustadt an der Weinstrasse ) was a German bookseller and Gau culture warden who worked for the security police in the Netherlands and the Balkans during World War II.

education

Friedrich Knolle was a son of the banker Carl Wilhelm Barthold Knolle (born February 13, 1870 in Hanover ; † September 13, 1945 there) and his wife Friderike Jacobine Christiane, née Stähle (born July 30, 1847 in Amsterdam; † January 30, 1958 in Höningen ). Her father worked as a bakery manufacturer.

Knolle attended elementary school and an upper secondary school in Amsterdam. In 1920 the family moved to Hanover , which is why Knolle did not graduate from school. In Hanover, he attended commercial courses at a commercial school and completed an apprenticeship at a bank from mid-1921, which he finished six months later and instead began an apprenticeship as a bookseller from the beginning of the following year. From 1924 to 1926 he had a job as an assistant in a Kiel bookstore. He then worked for a short time as a library assistant at the Deutsche Bücherei and the Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt in Hamburg . At the beginning of March 1923 he moved to Kiel and opened his own bookstore "Bücherstube Knolle", which was located in Schloßgarten 16.

Change to politics

Knolle first dealt with the theses of German nationalists in Holland. According to the curriculum vitae he wrote himself, he joined the Deutschvölkischer Schutz- und Trutzbund in Hanover . After this was dissolved, he briefly assumed a leading position in the Young German Order . From 1921 to 1922 he was a member of the DNVP . From 1923 to 1928 he was involved as a youth leader in the National Socialist youth movement . At the beginning of August 1928 he joined the NSDAP (membership number 94.033) and the Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur (KfdK) under the direction of Alfred Rosenberg . From the beginning of August 1930 to December 1932 he was a member of the SA and from the beginning of November 1932 a member of the SS (membership number 59,601).

As a National Socialist, Knolle only appeared publicly after the seizure of power . In the spring of 1923 he took over the management of the Kiel KfdK, in June of the same he was appointed district chairman and shortly afterwards regional chairman. He advocated that cultural life should quickly join a National Socialist organization and that it was administratively aligned with the highest priority. He took targeted action against the founding of further associations, such as the National Association for Homeland Security , and tried to win personalities from cultural life for the Kampfbund. He quickly made himself popular with Gauleiter and Chief President Hinrich Lohse .

In January 1934, Knolle was appointed head of the Reichbund Volktum und Heimat, which only existed for a short time. At the beginning of March 1934 he became a district culture warden. He was head of the juggling culture department of the Schleswig-Holstein NSDAP. From June 1934, he also headed the NS-Kulturgemeinde (NSKG) as district chairman, to which the KfdK and the Reichsverband Deutsche Bühne had merged. Knolle then took on a surprising number of offices: he worked for some time as district training director of the NSDAP, headed the public education department of the Gauschulungsamt and the Reichsschrifttumskammer Schleswig-Holstein, belonged to the provincial council for cultural issues, managed the business of the Schleswig-Holstein University Society and the working group "Low German Cultural creation ". At the beginning of 1935, he leased the library to his father due to the increasing workload.

In terms of content, Knolle initially dealt in particular with prehistory and early history and the cultivation of folk and homeland. His area of ​​responsibility encompassed all aspects of cultural life and science. In March 1935 he published “Schleswig-Holsteinisches Kulturschaffen. A work plan ”. This work was characterized by the plan to organize cultural life tightly and holistically. In a foreword, Knolle wrote that he was interested in the “struggle of National Socialism for the becoming and national renewal of the German people”. He recommended creating a "Heimatbund Schleswig-Holstein", which all cultural associations and institutions should join. He suggested Wilhelm Schlow as director , who actually took over the office four years later.

Between 1935 and 1936, Knolle reached his greatest level of power. According to its own statements, the NSGK had around 50,000 members in 89 local groups at the beginning of 1935. In the same year Hinrich Lohse wrote to the members that Knolle, as the person responsible for the cultural work in Schleswig-Holstein, would report directly to him, giving him full support for his projects.

In June 1937 the NSGK merged with the Deutsches Volksbildungswerk to form the Kraft durch Freude community , which reduced Alfred Rosenberg's influence. As a result, Knolle lost the post of Gau culture warden to Willi Ziegenbein in October 1937 . After that, he no longer dealt with cultural issues. Apparently with the help of old connections he went to the SD main office at the end of September 1937 . At the beginning of January 1938, he moved to the Reichsführer SS , based in Munich . A little later he took over the Security Service (SD) in Düsseldorf as Head of Department II (domestic defense) in Upper Section West.

A few months before the start of the western campaign , Knolle was appointed head of the Aachen SD section in 1940. In mid-October he went to the Commander of the Security Police (BdS) and SD for the occupied Dutch territories in The Hague . He headed the entire intelligence service there and represented the BdS. He then reached the rank of SS standard leader. He headed Department III and observed the public life of the Dutch, wrote situation reports and even persecuted political opponents. During the mass arrests of Jews on February 22 and 23, 1941, which led to the February strike , Knolle was in command of the units of the Ordnungspolizei.

On May 20, 1944, Ernst Kaltenbrunner ordered Knolle to move to Amt VI of the Reich Main Security Office (Foreign SD, Foreign Intelligence Service), where he was to take on special tasks. At the end of June 1944 he was transferred to Belgrade , where he ran an office and cracked down on partisans.

After the end of the Second World War

After the end of the war, Knolle spent a short time in English custody. Then he went to Bremen under the cover name "Fritz Götten" and lived as a simple worker. After four years of investigations by the Allied military authorities and the German police, he was arrested in August 1949. Several requests from the Dutch for extradition were unsuccessful. As a deputy of the BdS, Knolle was supposed to have prepared the shootings of 20 political prisoners in 1942 and 1943. However, there is only evidence that he helped bring Dutch forced laborers to Germany and persecuted forced laborers who had fled and ensured their return. He likely participated in war crimes in Yugoslavia, but there is no evidence.

A German court imposed a two-year prison sentence and a fine of 500 marks on Knolle for wearing a cover name and forged documents. Because of his political activities, he was sentenced to six months in a labor camp. In August 1950, an allied military court in Bremen decided not to extradite Knolle to the Netherlands. Knolle then went on an alcohol withdrawal cure and settled in Bad Dürkheim , where he began as a caretaker in a plastics factory and rose to become human resources manager. He then worked for several years as a technical manager in other plastics factories. In April 1973 he joined the FDP.

classification

In the field of Schleswig-Holstein’s cultural policy, Knolle tried to create a large apparatus for harmonization, but he was unable to fill it with life. In order to be able to cover as many topics as possible from culture and science, his plan provided for several hundred speakers for numerous specialist areas. Usually only teachers and lay researchers cooperated with him; leading scientists kept their distance. He often found the speakers in the "Association for the Care of Natural and Regional Studies". He used the monthly magazine "Die Heimat", later: "Organ for homeland research and care in the Nazi cultural community", for his project with great success.

In the state-ordered reorganization of associations based on the leader principle , Knolle benefited as a juggler's warden from organizational structures that were already beginning to exist and the initially unclear political conditions. In 1933 and 1934, several people worked with him who later rejected him. They included the prehistory researchers Gustav Schwantes and Herbert Jankuhn and, as the toughest critic, Ernst Sauermann . The latter took action against Knolle's intended merger of homeland security with the KfdK and the NSGK. Knolle then endeavored to have the association's lectures and meetings prohibited. He denounced Sauermann to the Gestapo. Knolle also had major conflicts with Arthur Haseloff .

Knolles work in the field of Low German customs and in the Low German stage and lecture business proved to be successful. People from the theater and from folklore and local history supported him if they were laypeople. All in all, he did not achieve his goals of conformity and had to suddenly give up all political offices in 1937.

family

On August 11, 1933, Knolle married Ute Ziemke (born November 19, 1910 in Kiel ; † May 15, 1996 there). Her father Ernst Ziemke (born August 16, 1867 in Stettin ; †?) Was a professor of forensic and social medicine and married to Magdalena, née Weber from Halle.

On December 31, 1942, Knolle divorced. On September 3, 1943, he married Lieselotte Siemann (born May 27, 1912 in Bremen ; † October 11, 1988 there), whose father was a lecturer in shipbuilding technology. The marriage was divorced on January 11, 1956.

Knolle married Erna Katharina Ehresmann for the third time on November 23, 1962 (born November 17, 1923 in Niederaichbach ; † April 26, 1989 in Heidelberg ).

Knolle's first and second marriage each had a son.

literature

  • Thomas Scheck: Knolle, Friedrich . in: Biographical Lexicon for Schleswig-Holstein and Lübeck . Wachholtz, Neumünster 1982–2011. Vol. 11 - 2000. ISBN 3-529-02640-9 , pages 207-212.
  • Perry Pierik: Friedrich Knolle . bekentenissen van en onderzoek naar een SD-officier. Aspect, Soesterberg 2011, ISBN 978-90-5911-912-3 (Dutch).
  • Peter Wulf: "carried by the trust of Gauleiter Lohse." Friedrich Knolle Schleswig-Holstein cultural policy 1933–1937 . In: Mitteilungen der Gesellschaft für Kieler Stadtgeschichte, Vol. 89, 2018, pp. 209–220.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f Thomas Scheck: Knolle, Friedrich . in: Biographical Lexicon for Schleswig-Holstein and Lübeck . P. 207.
  2. ↑ Thomas Scheck: Knolle, Friedrich . in: Biographical Lexicon for Schleswig-Holstein and Lübeck . Pp. 207-208.
  3. ↑ a b c Thomas Scheck: Knolle, Friedrich . in: Biographical Lexicon for Schleswig-Holstein and Lübeck . P. 208.
  4. ↑ Thomas Scheck: Knolle, Friedrich . in: Biographical Lexicon for Schleswig-Holstein and Lübeck . Pp. 208-209.
  5. ↑ Thomas Scheck: Knolle, Friedrich . in: Biographical Lexicon for Schleswig-Holstein and Lübeck . P. 209.
  6. ↑ Katja Happe, Michael Mayer, Maja Peers (edit.): The persecution and murder of European Jews by National Socialist Germany 1933–1945 (collection of sources) Volume 5: Western and Northern Europe 1940-June 1942. Munich 2012, ISBN 978-3 -486-58682-4 , p. 225 with note 7.
  7. ↑ Thomas Scheck: Knolle, Friedrich . in: Biographical Lexicon for Schleswig-Holstein and Lübeck . Pp. 209-210.
  8. ↑ Thomas Scheck: Knolle, Friedrich . in: Biographical Lexicon for Schleswig-Holstein and Lübeck . P. 210.
  9. ↑ Thomas Scheck: Knolle, Friedrich . in: Biographical Lexicon for Schleswig-Holstein and Lübeck . Pp. 210-211.
  10. ↑ Thomas Scheck: Knolle, Friedrich . in: Biographical Lexicon for Schleswig-Holstein and Lübeck . P. 211.
personal data
SURNAME Knolle, Friedrich
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German bookseller and district warden
DATE OF BIRTH March 12, 1903
PLACE OF BIRTH Amsterdam
DATE OF DEATH November 27, 1977
Place of death Neustadt an der Weinstrasse