Georg Wippern

Georg Wippern (born May 26, 1909 in Hildesheim , † April 26, 1993 in Bonn ) was the SS-Sturmbannführer in the " Aktion Reinhardt " tasked with sorting, processing and forwarding Jewish assets .

Wippern joined the NSDAP in 1933 (membership number 1,323,347) and soon afterwards also the SS (membership number 118,449). At first he was commander of the substitute department of the SS administrative services in Dachau and an employee of the inspection of the SS available troops .

Action Reinhardt

From the summer of 1941, Wippern headed the Lublin SS site administration with the following branches: Cholm , Jablon , Lemberg , Lubartów , Trawniki , Zamosc . In the course of "Aktion Reinhardt", Wippern was commissioned in spring 1942 by Oswald Pohl , the head of the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office, to sort, process and forward the property of Jewish victims. At the beginning of "Aktion Reinhardt", Christian Wirth took on this task, who forwarded the confiscated property directly to the Reichsbank . In Pohl's opinion, this happened in such an unsatisfactory manner that this task was delegated to Georg Wippern. Wippern was responsible for the IVa department (Administration of Jewish Property), which was located in a five-storey building directly in the city center of Lublin. A Jewish prisoner command consisting of 20 to 30 people from the “Lipowa Strasse” forced labor camp in Lublin, led by SS men Eichholz and Dorl, was busy sorting and storing Jewish property in Department IVa. Money transfers and other banking transactions were carried out by trained bankers who were also SS members (Huber, Teichelmann, Pflanzer, Rzepa). Just like the funds, the valuables were registered in the SS site administration in Lublin, the foreign currency and banknotes were deposited into accounts and the valuables were sent to Berlin.

The SS-Sturmbannführer Alfred Franke-Gricksch , who visited Division IVa with his superior Maximilian von Herff, stated the following in a report from May 1943:

“From Trawniki we traveled back to Lublin to visit the special company REINHARD. This department had the task of exploiting the entire movable property of the Jews in the Generalgouvernement. It is astonishing what a huge fortune the Jews had amassed in the ghetto. Even ragged, vermin-infested, filthy little Jews who looked like beggars carry with them foreign currency, gold pieces , diamonds and other valuables (if you remove their clothes) . We walked through the cellars of this 'specialty company' and were reminded of the fairy tales of ' A Thousand and One Nights '. Whole boxes filled with real pearls , boxes full of diamonds, a basket full of gold pieces and many kilos of silver coins , next to jewels of all kinds. In order to be able to use these valuables better, the gold and silver are melted into bars in the garden of the house. There is a small foundry in which gold and silver are melted, then poured into bars and delivered to the Reichsbank on certain days. The 'specialist company REINHARD' has so far delivered 2,500 kilos of gold, 20,000 kilos of silver, 6.5 kilos of platinum , 60,000 Reichsmarks in foreign currency, 800,000 dollars in cash and 144,000 gold dollars. The huge amount of diamonds and pearls can hardly be estimated. "

In addition, Wippern was also subordinate to a clothing depot in the SS textile workshops in Lublin (Flugplatz camp), in which the clothing of the Jewish victims was sorted and cleaned. In this function he was commissioned by Odilo Globocnik , the SS and Police Leader (SSPF) of Lublin, to equip the camp personnel in Belzec and Sobibor with SS uniforms . On January 5, 1944, Globocnik reported to Heinrich Himmler the final settlement of the assets of the Jewish victims obtained in “Aktion Reinhardt”: 178,745,960.59 RM .

At the beginning of October 1944, Wippern was transferred to the SS headquarters in Berlin.

After the war

After the end of the war, Wippern fled his US internment in August 1945. After that he was employed again as an administrative clerk in the middle service, among other things as a customs inspector in Saarbrücken. Wippern, who often moved within Germany, was investigated by the German judiciary at the beginning of the 1960s, but without any indictment or trial. In 1962 he maintained: "I would like to say that I carried out the task at the time with reluctance, but to the best of my knowledge and belief."

Wippern died in Bonn in spring 1993.

literature

• Joseph Poprzeczny: Odilo Globocnik - Hitler's man in the East. McFarland, London, 2004. ISBN 0786416254
• Yitzhak Arad : Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka - The Operation Reinhardt Camps. Indiana University Press, Indiana, 1987, ISBN 0253213053 .

Web links

• Georg Wippern

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Quoted in: Georg Wippern
2. ^ Quotation from Ernst Klee : Das Personenlexikon zum Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945 . Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, second updated edition, Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 978-3-596-16048-8 , p. 680.