Gerhard Maywald

Gerhard Kurt Maywald (born April 16, 1913 in Carlsruhe , Upper Silesia , † December 26, 1998 in Neunkirchen ) was a German SS-Obersturmführer . Maywald was responsible for the construction of the Salaspils labor camp near Riga and was involved in several war crimes .

Life

Maywald, son of a locomotive driver, learned after high school at the Pedagogical Sciences Kiel the profession of primary school teacher . Maywald worked as a primary school teacher in East Friesland and Preetz until mid-1938. Then he changed his profession.

National Socialism

Maywald first joined the Bismarck German Youth Association in 1925 . In 1937 he became a member of the NSDAP . He had already joined the SA in 1933 and the NSKK in 1935 . He later switched from the SA to the SS .

From mid-1938 Maywald embarked on the police career. Maywald initially worked as an assistant commissioner in Kiel before he was posted to Zwickau in 1940 and became detective commissioner there in the same year. During the Second World War Maywald belonged to Einsatzgruppe A , which carried out the shootings of Jews. Maywald arrived in Riga with men from Einsatzgruppe A in early July 1941. There he helped u. a. with the establishment of the criminal police . From October 1941, Maywald set up the Salaspils labor camp on behalf of Rudolf Lange, twenty kilometers southeast of Riga , which was intended for Jews deported from the German Reich . The Salaspils camp was completed in the spring of 1942 by Jewish forced laborers and Russian prisoners of war. Maywald is one of the initiators of the Dünamünde campaign , in which elderly people who were no longer able to work were selected and murdered. In mid-May 1942 Maywald was transferred to Minsk , where he was deployed in the fight against partisans .

After contracting typhus , Maywald returned to the German Reich in Zwickau in October 1942. From there he was soon transferred to Opole to the criminal police, where he worked on economic and property crimes until shortly before the end of the war .

Post War and Condemnation

At the end of the war he went into hiding with the pseudonym Gerd Hansen , but ended up in American captivity , from which he was released in early May 1945. He then moved to Hamburg , where he filed a voluntary disclosure in 1950 due to incorrect naming. Maywald, who worked as a salesperson in the cosmetics sector, was married twice and had a son from his first marriage.

Maywald was only tried and convicted in 1976/77. Until then he lived undisturbed. Although some witnesses had incriminated him heavily, the Hamburg jury court found that he was not directly involved in the murders that the public prosecutor charged him. It sentenced him to four years imprisonment (to which the pre-trial detention of 16 months was counted) for aiding and abetting murder in at least 320 cases because of a selection in the context of the Operation Dünamünde on February 5, 1942. Participation in further selections during the Operation Dünamünde was valid proven to the court as not beyond doubt. To obey orders Maywald could not rely, as he might well have had the opportunity to put themselves, as the judges in the judgment discovered.

The main reason for the verdict was that some witnesses could not be found or had died and that the other witnesses could not remember enough more than 30 years after the events, obviously mistaking him for his superior Rudolf Lange and sometimes making contradicting statements.

literature

• Jochen Kuhlmann: Maywald, Arajs and others ... 60 years of NSG justice in Hamburg . In: Democratic History. Yearbook for Schleswig-Holstein , ISSN 0932-1632, vol. 17 (2006), pp. 135-171 ( online ).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Jochen Kuhlmann: Maywald, Arajs and others ... 60 years of NSG justice in Hamburg . In: Democratic History. Yearbook for Schleswig-Holstein , vol. 17 (2006), pp. 135–171, here p. 135.
2. ↑ Andrej Angrick , Peter Klein: The "Final Solution" in Riga. Exploitation and extermination 1941–1944 . Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt 2006, ISBN 3-534-19149-8 .