Günther Patschowsky

Günther Patschowsky or, after a name change from 1937, Günther Palten (born March 3, 1903 in Schnellewalde ; † May 17, 1945 in Vorderstade or Hamburg ) was a German lawyer, SD official and district president.

Live and act

Youth, training and career in the Weimar Republic

Patschowsky was the son of a pastor. After attending school, Patschowsky studied law at the University of Wroclaw . He passed the first state law examination on February 28, 1925 with the grade "satisfactory". From 1925 to 1928 he completed the legal preparatory service at the District Court in Breslau (July to October 1925: Criminal Procedure Department; October 1925 to January 1926: Civil Procedure Department), at the District Court in Breslau (January 1926 to September 1926), at the District Court in Breslau (September 1926 to June 1927) and at the Breslau Higher Regional Court (December 1927 to June 1928). Patschowsky finished his training on December 11, 1928 with the passing of the Great State Examination in Law, which he passed with the rating “sufficient”. During his training Patschowsky was with a thesis on the Recognition fee in the urban self-government Dr. jur. PhD. During his studies he was also a member of the Leopoldina Breslau singers .

After Patschowsky had tried to work as a freelance lawyer for a short time, he resigned from the judiciary at the age of entry in June 1929 by joining the public prosecutor's office in Breslau. As a public prosecutor in Breslau, Patschowsky, who was politically close to the radical political right, made use of his position by pursuing the political offenses of Social Democrats and Communists with great vigor from 1930 until the National Socialists came to power in the spring of 1933, while he conversely pursued political offenses Showed great reluctance to commit criminal offenses.

Patschowsky became a member of the NSDAP on June 1, 1931 (membership number 566.217). On April 4, 1932, he joined the SS (SS No. 40.064). According to Aronson, he became a troop leader in a regular SS unit in Breslau on August 15, 1932, and one of the first academic employees in Reinhard Heydrich's security service (SD) on September 15 of the same year .

Worked for the Wroclaw Police and the Secret State Police Office (1933 to 1935)

In 1933 Patschowsky was accepted into the police administration in Breslau, where he took over the office of the city's deputy chief of police as the deputy of Edmund Heines . In December 1933, Patschowsky was brought to the Secret State Police Office (Gestapa) in Berlin as a lawyer with the rank of senior government councilor . There, as the successor to Hans Oelze, he took over the management of Main Department IV (treason and espionage), which soon afterwards was given the number III after the main department was renumbered. The task of this main department, briefly referred to as the defense department, was the police investigation and fight against treason by Reich citizens as well as the fight against foreign espionage in the Reich territory. Patschowsky's appointment as head of the defense department was the result of a complex intrigue of the SS: when the SS-hostile Gestapo boss Rudolf Diels asked the Reichswehr Ministry at the end of 1933 whether they could name a suitable man to head the planned new department in the Gestapa, he recommended one there on the advice of the son of the general Remus von Woyrsch, Udo von Woyrsch Patschowsky. What was not known, however, was that Udo von Woyrsch was a confidante of Himmler and Heydrich, and that he recommended Patschowsky for the post of head of the Abwehrabteilung, as he was also a confidante of the SS leaders.

In addition to his work as head of the main department III / IV, Patschowsky was involved in the intrigue against Rudolf Diels in the spring of 1934 as a representative of Heydrich and Himmler, which culminated in Diel's fall and the appointment of Heydrich as the new head of the secret state police office: Imzug The power struggle for control of the Secret State Police with Himmler and Heydrich on the one hand and Hermann Göring and Gestapo chief Diels on the other was the task of Patschowsky and his colleagues Ernst Damzog and Walter Kubitzky , who he brought with him from Breslau, and the Berlin representatives of Heydrich's security service accused of systematically undermining and sabotaging Diel's position as head of the Secret State Police Office as smuggled moles, in order to finally remove him from office and thus clear the way for Himmler and Heydrich to take over the office.

From April to June 1934 Patschowsky was involved in the procurement and production of "incriminating material" against the leaders of the Nazi Sturmabteilung (SA) on behalf of Heydrich , which Hitler finally induced to trigger the Röhm affair , the numerous SA leaders and other people fell victim. From June 30 to July 2, 1934, Patschowsky is said to have played a leading role in organizing the action. The alleged former Gestapo officer Hansjürgen Koehler remembered Patschowsky for this time in his book Inside the Gestapo , published in England in 1940 .

After Patschowsky had participated in a joint conference with Wilhelm Canaris , Rudolf Bamler , Heydrich, Werner Best and Heinz Jost on January 17, 1935 , during which the work of the various secret services in the Nazi state was coordinated, he was appointed in spring 1935 at the instigation of the Wehrmacht - which in the meantime had learned of the intrigue at the turn of the year 1933/1934 - removed from his post as Head of Department III and replaced by Best.

Later career in the Nazi state (1935 to 1945)

From 1935 to 1937 or 1938 Patschowsky served as Deputy Police President of Gleiwitz . In October 1937 he gave up his previous family name, which now sounded too Polish to him in the sense of the National Socialist racial ideology, and took the name Günther Palten.

On July 18, 1938, Palten was appointed police chief of the Upper Silesian industrial area based in Gliwice. There he was involved in the mass evacuation and deportation of Jews across the imperial border to Poland, which was carried out on a large scale in the last year before the start of the Second World War. He then served from 1939 to 1941 as district president in the district of Bromberg (Danzig-West Prussia) and finally from 23 September 1941 to May 1945 as the successor to Hans von Helms as district president of Upper Danube with his official seat in Linz . According to a source, Palten was also appointed Deputy District President in Opole on April 6, 1940 . In his role as district president, Patschowsky also took part in court martial proceedings as a lay judge in his area of ​​responsibility, where he was also involved in the imposition of death sentences. B. in February 1945 against eight members of a Freetown resistance group. Shortly before the end of the war, Palten reached the high point of his SS career on June 21, 1944 when he was promoted to SS Brigadefuhrer.

Shortly after the end of the Second World War , Palten took his own life as an Allied prisoner of war, probably to avoid extradition to the Poles.

Aftermath

Rönn von Uexküll said in his 1976 study, Our Man in Berlin , that Patschowsky was the author of the book National Socialism published in 1945 under the pseudonym "Heinrich Orb" . 13 years of power intoxication , the experience report of an alleged former leading SD employee. According to the findings of more recent research, however, the author of this book was another SD employee named Heinrich Pfeifer , whom Uexküll had taken to be another alias / pseudonym Patschowsky's, but Mario Dederichs was able to show that he was a separate second person. Another argument against an identity of Patschowsky with Orb is the death year 1945 found by Kreuzer.

Promotions

• August 15, 1932: SS troop leader
• March 5, 1933: SS-Untersturmführer
• November 9, 1933: SS-Obersturmführer
• 4th July 1934: SS-Hauptsturmführer
• June 20, 1935: SS Standartenführer
• November 9, 1938: SS-Oberführer
• June 21, 1944: SS brigade leader

Archival tradition

Patschowsky's personal files from his time in the legal preparatory service and in the judicial service have been preserved in the Federal Archives in Berlin (R 3001/70363). The holdings of the former Berlin Document Center contain files with party correspondence from the NSDAP about him (PK Mikrofilm I 380 images 2153–2158 and microfilm I 364, images 583–614).

Fonts

• The recognition fee in the municipal self-government , Breslau 1926. (Dissertation)

Web links

• Literature by and about Günther Patschowsky in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Date of birth and year of death according to Bernd Kreuzer: Reichsgau Oberdonau , 2005, p. 309. The fact of the name change in 1937 and confirmed by Wolf Gruner: Deutsches Reich 1933–1937 , 2008, p. 363.
2. ↑ Paul Meißner (Ed.): Alt-Herren-Directory of the German Singers. Leipzig 1934, p. 75.
3. ↑ Shlomo Aronson : Reinhard Heydrich and the early history of the Gestapo and SD , 1971, p. 157.
4. ↑ Michael Wildt : Generation of the Unconditional. The Leadership Corps of the Reich Security Main Office , 2002, p. 351.
5. ↑ Hansjürgen Koehler: Inside the Gestapo , 1940, p. 36. In the original the passage reads: “A tall stiff, but not fat, man with thick black hair, parted in the middle; he has dark and penetrating eyes, a little rasping unpleasant voice with a silent accent, and overbearing manner; a brutal and egotistic man. "
6. ↑ Heinz Höhne : The order under the skull. The history of the SS , 1967, p. 172.
7. ↑ Wolf Gruner: German Reich 1933–1937 , p. 363.
8. ↑ Bernd Kreuzer: Reichsgau Oberdonau , 2005, p. 309.
9. ^ Walter Schuster: German National, National Socialist, Denazified , 1999.
10. ^ Rönn von Uexküll: Our man in Berlin , 1976.
11. ↑ Mario R. Dederichs: Heydrich. The face of evil , 2005, p. 11. Dederich refers, among other things, to the son of Pfeifer, Hans Pfeifer, who he found.
12. ↑ Bernd Kreuzer: Reichsgau Oberdonau , 2005, p. 309. Since Orb's more than 400-page book was published in 1945, i.e. in the year Patschowsky died, he would hardly have had the time to write it in the short time before his death.