Gertrud Slottke

Gertrud Slottke (born October 6, 1902 in Mühlenthal (Polish : Młynowo ), Sensburg district ; † December 17, 1971 in Stuttgart ) was a German secretary and war criminal. During the Second World War , she was involved in the deportation of Jews from the Netherlands as a clerk in the Department for Jews IV B 4 at the Commander of the Security Police and the SD (BdS) in The Hague . After the end of the war, she was sentenced to five years in prison for aiding and abetting murder.

Life

Gertrud Slottke, daughter of a mill operator, grew up with her three younger siblings in different places in West Prussia , as her father changed his job several times. From 1913 the family lived in Gdansk , where Slottke's father got a job as a manager at a flour factory. After attending elementary school and business school, she worked for several commercial companies, shipping companies and forwarding agents from 1917 and, after a short period of unemployment, was employed by the State Bank of the Free City of Danzig in 1932 .

Slottke joined the NSDAP as early as May 1, 1933 , although after the end of the war she stated that she came from a family of social democrats. She later justified her entry into the party by securing a livelihood, but also contacting Gdansk SA men .

Second World War - activity in the Jewish department at the BdS in The Hague

After the beginning of the Second World War and the incorporation of the Free City of Danzig into the Reichsgau Danzig-West Prussia , she worked for the Reich Governor Albert Forster in the Labor and Economics department. Slottke was still living in her parents' house at the time and remained single until the end of her life. Slottke did voluntary service with the Danzig air raid protection.

In the spring of 1941 Slottke moved as part of an "emergency service obligation" as a police employee with the security police in the German-occupied Netherlands. Her post-war statements suggest that she had applied to the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) for a foreign assignment. In 1941 the RSHA was urgently looking for female personnel for RSHA offices in the occupied countries. At the beginning of 1942 she was transferred to Judenreferat IV B 4 at the Commander of the Security Police and SD (BdS) Wilhelm Harster in The Hague . There Slottke was concerned with the restitution of certain Jewish people (e.g. Jews with citizenships of allied or neutral nations, " Jewish mixed race ", "armaments Jews " etc.) in the Netherlands who were still from deportation to a concentration or extermination camp were excluded. After Slottke and her superior Wilhelm Zoepf began to work through the provisions in the spring of 1943 in cooperation with the Eichmann department in Berlin , the majority of the Jews who had been spared so far were deported. She complained several times to Zoepf about the lawyer Hans Calmeyer , who headed the internal administration department at the “Reichskommissariat for the occupied Dutch territories” and tried to save as many Jews of unclear ancestry as possible within the scope of his discretion. "These Callmeyer Jews" represented, according to Slottke, "such a prominent Galician type that the suspicion was confirmed that these Jews only ran the declaration of descent in order to be released from work for a certain time".

In the summer of 1943 she was officially assigned responsibility for Department IV B 4e, in which the provisions were dealt with. At times, two Dutch secretaries and two German war invalids of the Waffen SS worked under her leadership . Slottke's superior Zoepf, to whom she worked as the “right hand”, left this largely independently in her department, so that she could decide on her own initiative about the deportation of Jews or their return. In her function, Slottke visited the Westerbork transit camp several times to handle the transports to the extermination camps. She also stayed in the star camp of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp , where she conferred with members of the RSHA and the Foreign Office about the Dutch exchange Jews imprisoned there . In 1943 she received the War Merit Cross, Second Class .

Slottke was a member of the Jewish department at the BdS in The Hague until the end of the war. After the Allied landing in Normandy in June 1944, their office was relocated to the Reich border on German territory and finally to the Ravensbrück concentration camp . Slottke stayed several times in The Hague until the end of the war, until she was interned in Canada and taken to the Hilversum internment camp .

post war period

Slottke was released from internment in May 1945 and moved to live with her sister in Waiblingen in June 1945 . In January 1948, as part of a court hearing that was closed, Slottke was denazified as a fellow traveler . Slottke was already working as a temporary secretary in 1945 and in the same year took over the management of the Association of Expellees . From 1949 she was employed by the Raiffeisen Association and from 1953 at the Southwest German Plant Breeders Association of the Stuttgart-Hohenheim Agricultural University. Slottke took early retirement in 1965 but continued to work as a marginal part-time worker in her last job. In the post-war period, she became involved in organizations for expellees: for example, she took over the state management of the Danziger Frauenwerk in Baden-Wuerttemberg, was a member of the Baden-Wuerttemberg state executive committee of the Federation of Danziger and was state consultant for women's work in the Association of Landsmannschaften , a predecessor organization of the Federation of Expellees .

Trial and sentencing

From 1959 onwards, deportations of Jews from the Netherlands were investigated for the crime complex. First Zoepf was found, then Slottke and finally Harster were involved in the investigation.

Between January 23 and February 24, 1967, the main trial against Wilhelm Harster and others took place before the jury court at Munich II district court . The desk workers Harster, Zoepf and Slottke were of aid for Community murder accused Harster in 82856, 55382 and Zoepf in Slottke in 54,982 cases. The prosecution was represented by the Chief Public Prosecutor Benedikt Huber . Robert Kempner acted as co-plaintiffs' families in the Bergen-Belsen concentration of typhus or typhoid died Anne Frank and the Auschwitz-Birkenau murdered Edith Stein . Harster and Zoepf were defended by Eugen Leer and Slottke from Rudolf Aschenauer .

“The main burden of the extensive work in the Jewish department of the commander of the Security Police and the SD in The Hague was carried out by the accused as the only security police force in the Netherlands who was fully trained in this part of the de-Judgment program from the start. The accused directed all her interests to the service and always tried to go too far for the de-Jewification. Sometimes it applied stricter standards against the persecuted than those set by the Reich Security Main Office. "

- From the indictment against Gertrud Slottke

Of the defendants, Harster confessed and Zoepf partially, only Slottke denied their share of responsibility for the extermination of the Jews in the Netherlands. Slottke denied being an anti-Semite and justified herself in court as follows: “I only worked according to dictation. I just followed the orders that came from Berlin. ”She had“ thought about the transports to Auschwitz ”, but“ I couldn't even imagine killing the Jews, I believed there were also deportees in the East Jews Reserves for Retirement ”. Furthermore, she justified herself: "I did not go into hiding and did not take on a strange name".

On February 24, 1967 Harster to fifteen, Zoepf to nine and were Slottke to five years in prison convicted. According to the judgment, ideological and anti-Semitic motives were of little importance for Slottke's actions, which were characterized by a “zeal for service” aimed at “smoothly carrying out” the deportations. The process was closely followed by the Dutch public, and special rapporteurs reported extensively on the process in the Dutch media. According to the trial observer Heiner Lichtenstein , Slottke did not utter a word of remorse or shame during the proceedings . Slottke himself described her conviction as a "miscarriage of justice".

From July 1968, Slottke served her prison sentence in the Gotteszell women's prison in Schwäbisch Gmünd . Various requests for early release from prison by Slottke were refused. However, due to illness is Slottke held since the fall of 1970 in a Stuttgart hospital, their remaining sentence was for this reason in May 1971 by the Bavarian Ministry of Justice for parole suspended. On December 17, 1971, Slottke died in a hospital in Stuttgart due to a neurological disease.

literature

• Elisabeth Kohlhaas: Gertrud Slottke - employee in the Dutch Jewish department of the security police . In: Klaus-Michael Mallmann & Gerhard Paul : Careers of violence. National Socialist perpetrator biographies. WBG , Darmstadt 2004, ISBN 3-534-16654-X .
• Elisabeth Kohlhaas: Slottke, Gertrud. In: Fred Ludwig Septainter (Ed.): Baden-Württembergische Biographien. Volume V, Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 2013, ISBN 978-3-17-024863-2 , pp. 413-416.
• Joachim Castan / Thomas F. Schneider (eds.): Hans Calmeyer and the rescue of Jews in the Netherlands; Catalog for the exhibition of the same name. Göttingen: V&R unipress 2003. ISBN 3-89971-122-X .
• Edith Stein and Anne Frank. Two in a hundred thousand. The revelations about the Nazi crimes in Holland before the jury in Munich . Published by Robert MW Kempner , Freiburg i.Br. 1968.
• Harald Fühner: Follow-up. Dutch politics and the persecution of collaborators and Nazi criminals, 1945–1989 . Dutch Studies Volume 35, Waxmann, Münster 2005, ISBN 3-8309-1464-4 . GoogleBooks
• Kathrin Kompisch: perpetrators. Women in National Socialism , Böhlau Verlag, Cologne 2008, ISBN 978-3-412-20188-3 .
• Christian Ritz: Desk perpetrator in court: the proceedings before the Munich district court for the deportation of Dutch Jews (1959–1967) . Paderborn: Schöningh, 2012 ISBN 978-3-506-77418-7 Marburg, Univ., Diss., 2011

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Elisabeth Kohlhaas: Gertrud Slottke - employee in the Dutch Jewish department of the security police . In: Klaus-Michael Mallmann & Gerhard Paul : Careers of violence. National Socialist perpetrator biographies. , Darmstadt 2004, p. 208.
2. ↑ ^{a b} Kathrin Kompisch: perpetrators. Women in National Socialism , Cologne 2008, p. 86 f.
3. ↑ ^{a b} Dietrich Strothmann : An accused and their victims In: Die Zeit , No. 7/1967 of February 17, 1967.
4. ^ Elisabeth Kohlhaas: Slottke, Gertrud. Stuttgart 2013, p. 414.
5. ↑ Joachim Castan / Thomas F. Schneider (eds.): Hans Calmeyer and the rescue of Jews in the Netherlands Göttingen 2003, p. 51.
6. ↑ Slottke after a raid on Jews in Amsterdam in May 1943. Quoted in: Elisabeth Kohlhaas: Gertrud Slottke - employee in the Dutch Jewish Department of the Security Police . In: Klaus-Michael Mallmann & Gerhard Paul : Careers of violence. National Socialist perpetrator biographies. , Darmstadt 2004, p. 213 f.
7. ↑ Elisabeth Kohlhaas: Gertrud Slottke - employee in the Dutch Jewish department of the security police . In: Klaus-Michael Mallmann & Gerhard Paul : Careers of violence. National Socialist perpetrator biographies. , Darmstadt 2004, p. 210 f.
8. ↑ Elisabeth Kohlhaas: Gertrud Slottke - employee in the Dutch Jewish department of the security police . In: Klaus-Michael Mallmann & Gerhard Paul : Careers of violence. National Socialist perpetrator biographies. , Darmstadt 2004, p. 209.
9. ^ Elisabeth Kohlhaas: Slottke, Gertrud. Stuttgart 2013, p. 414 f.
10. ↑ Harald Fühner: Follow-up. Dutch politics and the persecution of collaborators and Nazi criminals, 1945–1989 , Münster 2005, p. 220.
11. ↑ Dietrich Strothmann :: The Harster case and others ... In: Die Zeit , No. 4/1967.
12. ↑ ^{a b c} Harald Fühner: Follow-up. Dutch politics and the persecution of collaborators and Nazi criminals, 1945–1989 , Münster 2005, pp. 221f.
13. ↑ ^{a b} Quoted in: Dietrich Strothmann: An Accused and Her Victims In: Die Zeit , No. 7/1967 of February 17, 1967.
14. ↑ ^{a b} Elisabeth Kohlhaas: Slottke, Gertrud. Stuttgart 2013, p. 415.
15. ↑ Elisabeth Kohlhaas: Gertrud Slottke - employee in the Dutch Jewish department of the security police . In: Klaus-Michael Mallmann & Gerhard Paul : Careers of violence. National Socialist perpetrator biographies. , Darmstadt 2004, p. 210.