Hans Biebow

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Hans Biebow, around 1942

Hans Biebow (born December 18, 1902 in Bremen , † June 23, 1947 in Łódź ) was the head of the National Socialist German administration of the Litzmannstadt ghetto in Łódź.

biography

Family, education and work

Biebow was the son of the insurance director Julius Biebow. He graduated from secondary school and then became an apprentice to his father. During the period of great inflation he switched to the grain and feed bank in Bremen and worked in the grain trade. Around 1924 he switched to the coffee trade and had an annual turnover of one million Reichsmarks and 250 employees until the outbreak of World War II . On October 16, 1937, he applied for membership in the NSDAP, and on February 15, 1939, he was confirmed as a member of the party.

Biebow as head of the ghetto

Due to his acquaintance with Reinhard Heydrich , the head of the SS security service , the latter appointed him on May 1, 1940 as head of the ghetto food and economy office . The 250 members of the German “ghetto administration” and the Judenrat in the Lodz ghetto, which had to report directly to him, were subordinate to Biebow .

Biebow initially ordered a "purchase" of the Jews' property at a ridiculous price, which in the period from November 1940 to August 1942 led to additional income of 18,181,600 RM and amounted to  an expropriation . The hard work that the Jews had to do in the ghetto yielded a monthly profit of around 1 million Reichsmarks, without Biebow ensuring adequate food for the forced laborers . Biebow's recipient of orders in the ghetto was Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski , the chairman of the Judenrat, who had been forced to collaborate by the National Socialists in November 1939 .

In 1942, on Himmler's orders, Biebow ordered the deportation of the majority of the ghetto residents to the Kulmhof (Chelmno) extermination camp . By the end of May 1942, about 55,000 people had been deported to Chelmno. According to a statement by Biebow on June 10, 1942, there were “no more workers in the ghetto who were capable of hard physical labor” because of the decline in strength . In order to cope with the work orders of the Wehrmacht , even children from the age of ten are on duty. Despite this, the deportations continued, now for children under ten, after Biebow imposed a general curfew and initiated a brutal manhunt by the Gestapo .

After the population had shrunk to around 89,500 people, the deportations initially stopped, but began again in June 1944. At this point in time, the order to complete liquidation of the ghetto was issued, which the chairman of the Jewish Council in the ghetto had to announce as “relocation”. Biebow had the remaining Jews deported to the Chełmno extermination camp and, above all, to Auschwitz , where, with a few exceptions, they were murdered.

After the surrender in 1945, Biebow was initially able to go into hiding in Germany, but was recognized by a survivor of the ghetto and then arrested. After the Allies extradited him to Poland, he was sentenced to death in Łódź on April 30, 1947 and executed on June 23, 1947.

Fonts

  • Hans Biebow: Report to the Litzmannstadt state police station of March 4, 1942 on the consequences of hunger in the ghetto (extract) in the collection Night over Europe , Ed .: Wolfgang Schumann et al., Vol. 2: The fascist occupation policy in Poland 1939 - 1945. Pahl -Rugenstein, Cologne 1989 and VEB Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften, Berlin 1989 ISBN 3760912605 p. 217.

literature

  • Peter Klein : The "ghetto administration Lodz" 1940-1944: an office in the tension between local bureaucracy and state persecution policy , Hamburg. Hamburg Ed, 2009 ISBN 978-3-86854-203-5 ... (Berlin, Technical University, Diss, 2007).
  • Michael Alberti: The persecution and extermination of the Jews in the Reichsgau Wartheland 1939–1945 , Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 2006, ISBN 3-447-05167-1 .
  • Ernst Klee : The personal lexicon for the Third Reich: Who was what before and after 1945. Fischer TB, Frankfurt 2007, ISBN 978-3-596-16048-8 .
  • Andrea Löw: Jews in the Litzmannstadt ghetto. Living conditions, self-perception, behavior . Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2006, ISBN 978-3-8353-0050-7 .
  • Michael Koppel: Horn-Lehe-Lexikon . Edition Temmen , Bremen 2012, ISBN 978-3-8378-1029-5 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Josef Wulf, Lodz - The last ghetto on Polish soil . Bonn 1962, p. 17.
  2. ^ A. Eisenbach, Getto Łódzkie , Warsaw 1946, p. 252, here based on Josef Wulf, 1962, p. 17.
  3. ↑ Numbers according to Wolf Oschlies, see web links
  4. ↑ Special exhibition, timetable ( memento of the original from January 24, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.ghwk.de
  5. ↑ Data according to Ernst Klee, Das Personenlexikon zum Third Reich , Fischer Taschenbuch, 2nd edition 2007, p. 48, date of execution also at Oschlies, shoa.de.
personal data
SURNAME Biebow, Hans
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German merchant and war criminal
DATE OF BIRTH December 18, 1902
PLACE OF BIRTH Bremen
DATE OF DEATH June 23, 1947
Place of death Łódź