Hans Helmut Wolff

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Hans Helmut Wolff after the end of the war during internment

Hans Helmut Wolff (born February 2, 1910 in Wiehl ; † August 1, 1969 ) was a German lawyer, civil servant and SS leader, most recently SS-Obersturmbannführer (1945).

Live and act

Youth and education

After attending a grammar school in Gummersbach , which he graduated from high school in 1929 , Wolff studied law at the universities of Marburg , Munich and Cologne . In October 1930 he passed the first state examination in law. He then completed his legal preparatory service in Koblenz , which he completed in January 1937 with the major legal state examination.

Wolff had been politically oriented towards the Nazi movement at least since the early 1930s: in March 1932 he became a member of the SA . He joined the NSDAP on May 1, 1932 ( membership number 1,111,862).

Career in the Gestapo

At the beginning of March 1937 Wolff became an assessor at the Gestapo in Berlin and changed from the SA to the SS (SS no. 290.186). At the Gestapo, he was initially deputy head of Section 2 B 3, who was responsible for handling personnel (passport and entry confirmations) for Germans abroad, especially emigrants.

At the beginning of March 1938, Wolff was transferred to Halle (Saale) as deputy head of the state police station there . At the end of August 1939 he came to Frankfurt (Oder) in the same position . At the end of January 1940, Wolff, now promoted to the government council, was acting head of the Danzig Gestapo. From there he was posted to the command of the Security Police and the SD (BdS) in The Hague as head of Department IV (Gestapo) until September 1941 . He was then transferred back to Berlin, where he was represented at the RSHA in matters of counter-espionage with a focus on the West until the beginning of 1943. In January 1943 he took over Section IV D 3 in the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA), which was responsible for the “central state political surveillance of foreigners in the Reich” and the “support of foreign national trust centers”. In this position, which he held until the spring of 1945, he was primarily responsible for supervising and caring for Eastern Europeans (Poles, Russians, Ukrainians) who had come to Germany before the Second World War. In June 1944 he was appointed head of department to the senior government council.

In March 1945, after a brief assignment with the Commander of the Security Police and the SD (KdS) Dresden, Wolff was deployed as head of the Weimar State Police and Commander of the Security Police in Thuringia with the task of handling this department: In addition to burning incriminating files, Wolff was also in the March and April 1945 responsible for numerous shootings in his area of ​​responsibility: For example, he ordered the execution of various members of the Wehrmacht and police as well as members of the local population, or passed on such orders, which he or others "offenses" against the war discipline such as desertion , Defeatism , a lack of perseverance, degradation of military strength or cowardice. In some cases he even took part in such shootings himself. For example, he passed on the order of the Higher SS and Police Leader of the region to shoot a teacher in Gera who had a picture of Hitler in his class on the grounds that the Americans would be there soon and that it would then be “cleaned up” and replaced it with a picture of a dog, to the Gestapo branch in Gera, which was under his control. An American report lists eleven people who were killed in this way by Wolff's orders, as well as two prisoners from a concentration camp who escaped after the "evacuation" and were shot personally by Wolff and his colleague Kretschmer.

At the beginning of April 1945 he also ordered the liquidation of numerous prisoners from the regional court and Gestapo prison in Weimar . As a result of this order, a total of 149 prisoners were shot at Webicht on April 5, 1945 , including seven women. The victims were buried in bomb crates and only exhumed, cremated and buried in the main cemetery in Weimar in August 1946 .

post war period

At the end of the war, Wolff was interned by the US Army . As a result, he was heard as a witness at the Nuremberg Trials . After escaping from the Dachau internment camp in October 1947 , he managed to go into hiding in Düsseldorf under the pseudonym Kuhnke. There he earned his living in the following years in various areas of activity in the British military. After working as a foreign language correspondent from 1950, Wolff became managing director of a limited partnership at the beginning of 1954 and became a general partner there in 1956 .

literature

  • Marlis Gräfe / Bernhard Post / Andreas Schneider: The Secret State Police in the NS Gau Thuringia 1933 - 1945. Sources on the history of Thuringia . II. Half volume, published by: State Center for Political Education Thuringia , unchanged new edition 2005. (PDF; 1.5 MB)
  • Ernst Klee : The personal lexicon for the Third Reich: Who was what before and after 1945. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2007.
  • Gerhard Paul, Klaus-Michael Mallmann (eds.). The Gestapo in World War II. Home Front and Occupied Europe, Darmstadt 2000.  

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Wolff witness literature at the Institute for Contemporary History (PDF; 3.5 MB) The eleven people whose shooting is listed here: A habitual criminal from Weimar; a Wehrmacht officer who was entrusted with the winding up of a Waffen-SS recruiting office in Fulda-Werra and who left without authorization; a teacher from Gera; a police translator who refused to obey orders; a Wehrmacht captain in Greiz; an armorer at Greiz; a criminal secretary who showed himself unwilling to fight; a farmer near Erfurt, who showed solidarity with foreign prisoners and threatened that the other side would soon be "attacked"; three citizens from Neuburg.
  2. ^ Förderverein Buchenwald eV: Memorial stone in the Webicht - Tiefurter Allee
  3. ^ Marlis Gräfe / Bernhard Post / Andreas Schneider: The Secret State Police in the NS Gau Thuringia 1933 - 1945. Sources on the history of Thuringia . II. Half volume, State Center for Civic Education Thuringia , unchanged new edition 2005, p. 560
  4. ↑ Witness in the Nuremberg trials see the interrogation protocols of Hans Helmut Wolff (ZS 1586) from 1945 to 1947 in the archive of the Institute for Contemporary History
personal data
SURNAME Wolff, Hans Helmut
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German SS-Obersturmbannführer and government councilor in the Reich Security Main Office
DATE OF BIRTH February 2, 1910
PLACE OF BIRTH Wiehl
DATE OF DEATH 1st August 1969