Hans Himpe

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Hans Joachim Kurt Himpe (born November 18, 1899 in Berlin ; † December 31, 1982 in Aachen ) was a German SS leader.

Life

Early life

After attending elementary school , Himpe was trained at the cadet institutions Wahlstadt and Lichterfelde from 1909. After the latter was dissolved in 1918, he took part in the battles of the Voluntary State Hunters Corps and the Freikorps Silesia from 1919 to 1920. In order to put down communist uprisings in Berlin and in the Ruhr area, he joined the Freikorps Schlesien in the Reichswehr, in which he was promoted to deputy sergeant and in the following years advanced to lieutenant.

At the end of 1929, Himpe resigned from the Reichswehr in order to turn to aviation. After he had obtained the pilot's license and the aerobatic pilot's license, he came to Colombia on the basis of an application in 1932, where he took part as an aviator in battles against Peru.

time of the nationalsocialism

In 1933 Himpe, who had already joined the NSDAP (membership number 911.702) and the SS (membership number 26.854) in November 1931, returned to Germany. Nominally, he took over the leadership of the 8th SS Standard in Hirschberg on December 8, 1932 as SS-Obersturmbannführer . There, on July 1, 1934, by order of the SS-Standartenführer Richard Hildebrandt in Görlitz , Himpe had the three Jews from Hirschberg, Kurt Charig, Walter Förster and Alexander Zweig, as well as Zweig's wife, arrested by the SS men at his disposal and on the pretext that they had them tried to escape, shot from behind on a country road outside the city.

On September 1, 1934, Himpe relinquished the command of the 8th SS Standard in order to take over the leadership of the 25 SS Standard "Ruhr" in Essen with the rank of SS-Standartenführer , which he held for nineteen months until 1. April 1936, retained. On April 1, 1936, Himpe was entrusted with the management of SS Section XXXIII in Schwerin and was transferred there. Shortly before, he had applied for a seat in the Reichstag, which had become politically uninfluential, in the Reichstag election on March 29, 1936. The sources contradict each other on the question of whether his candidacy was successful or unsuccessful: While Klee states that Himpe was not elected to parliament, documents in a trial file (see below) from 1936 suggest that he was initially given a mandate was able to win, but never took a seat as a member of the Reichstag, since the mandate had been withdrawn from him before the meeting of parliament due to criminal proceedings initiated against him.

After it was established in the spring of 1936 in connection with police investigations that Himpe had had homosexual contacts with a young man in Essen, he was demoted to an SS man by order of SS chief Himmler on April 21, 1936 and charged with "unnatural fornication" Expelled from the SS. Also on April 21, he was relieved of leadership of SS Section XXXIII, which was transferred to Standartenführer Rudolf Lohse on April 22 as a replacement . In addition to the SS, he was also excluded from the NSDAP and all its branches and placed on the party's “black list” in order to prevent a possible re-entry.

In a civil case, Himpe was sentenced on August 10, 1936 by the criminal chamber at the Essen regional court to a prison term of one year, which he served in the Bochum prison. After the end of his prison term, Himpe was taken into protective custody and held in Sachsenhausen concentration camp for seventeen months .

post war period

After the Second World War , Himpe was found guilty of aiding and abetting four murders in connection with the murder of the Hirschberg citizens in 1934 by the jury court in Berlin . In 1954, he was therefore to ten years imprisonment convicted, which was reduced by a judgment of 12 September 1955, six years. He then acted as managing director of the Silent Aid Association for POWs and internees .

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Death register of the Aachen registry office No. 4/1983.
  2. ↑ Federal Archives: Himpe trial file, note by the Attorney General in Hamm on May 26, 1936: "There should be no concerns about the admissibility of the measures taken against the Reichstag member of Himpe with regard to the fact that the Reichstag has not yet met."
  3. ↑ Gritschneder: Condemned to death, p. 112.
personal data
SURNAME Himpe, Hans
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Himpe, Hans Joachim Kurt (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German SS leader
DATE OF BIRTH November 18, 1899
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH December 31, 1982
Place of death Aachen