Hans Krüger (Gestapo)

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Hans Erich Kurt Krüger (born July 1, 1909 in Posen ; † February 8, 1988 in Wasserburg (Lake Constance) ) was a German agricultural inspector who, as SS-Hauptsturmführer, had several mass shootings carried out in eastern Galicia . The Stanislau Blood Sunday, organized by him , on which more than ten thousand Jewish men, women and children were shot on October 12, 1941, is considered to be the beginning of the “ Final Solution ” in the General Government .

Origin and education

Hans Krüger was born in 1909 in Posen, then part of the German Empire, as the son of a private trade school teacher. From 1914 he attended secondary school and the German grammar school there. After the First World War , the father became involved in the "German People's Council of the Province of Posen", a collection movement of national conservative citizens. During the Poznan uprising he was interned and then had to leave his home - now part of Poland - immediately with his family. The father could no longer find a job and the impoverished family moved their residence via Schwiebus to Luckenwalde , where Hans Krüger left the local grammar school in 1923 with the upper secondary school leaving certificate. In 1925 he passed the final examination to become an agricultural inspector and accounting officer and was then employed on two manors. In 1928 he helped his parents, who in Stangenhagen a grocery store run and a chicken farm. In the years between 1930 and 1933 Hans Krüger was unemployed with only a few interruptions.

Pre-war career

As early as 1925 - at the age of sixteen - Hans Krüger joined right-wing extremist associations such as the " Jung- und Ringstahlhelm " and joined the Sturmabteilung (SA) on April 1, 1929 , where he was promoted to storm leader in 1931 and in 1932 to storm leader . From September 1, 1930 he was a member of the NSDAP (membership number 336.924).

From May to November 1933, Krüger was the head of the police station in Oranienburg . In October 1934, as an old fighter, he was given a better paid position in the management of the Luckenwalde employment office. On May 1, 1938, Krüger was taken over by the Allgemeine SS (membership number 293.735) with the rank of SS-Hauptsturmführer , immediately applied to the security police and in March 1939 began his service as a candidate for a detective commissioner in Berlin.

Second World War

During the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, Krüger moved into Poland with a task force from Opole . In Zakopane he trained Ukrainian auxiliary police officers from November 1939 , then took part in a guide course in Berlin and returned to Krakow in June 1941 as a detective inspector .

Murder of the "Polish intelligentsia"

During the attack on the Soviet Union , Krüger arrived in Lemberg on July 2, 1941 with the Einsatzkommando e.g. V. , which was headed by Karl Eberhard Schöngarth . Krüger is ascribed an organizational contribution to the Lviv professor murder; however, there is no evidence of direct participation in the shooting.

At the end of July 1941, Krüger came to the city of Stanislau (today Ivano-Frankiwsk ) and set up the Stanislau branch of the commander of the Security Police and SD Lemberg (later the Stanislau Border Police Commissariat ) in the wing of a courthouse , which he headed until August 1942. She was responsible for the districts of Stanislau and Kalusch as well as the region around Rohatyn with over 700,000 inhabitants. The agency had barely thirty German employees; most of them were from the Cracow District Security Police . For reinforcement, however, Krüger had numerous volunteers who were recruited from local ethnic Germans and Ukrainian militia .

On August 2, 1941, Kruger ordered the registration of lawyers, teachers, rabbis, engineers, doctors and other members of the Polish intelligentsia. Of the 800 people who followed the order, 200 were sent home as initially indispensable specialists, all the others were shot and buried in a wooded area.

"Final Solution" in Galicia

On October 6, 1941, Krüger carried out a murder operation in the small town of Nadwirna . 2,000 Jews were rounded up on the market square, taken to a nearby forest, and shot there by members of the security police and the 133 reserve police battalion as well as Ukrainian auxiliary police. A few days after this "dress rehearsal", on October 12, 1941, such a massacre was repeated on Bloody Sunday in Stanislau . Almost 20,000 Jews were rounded up and marched in troops to the cemetery, where 10,000 to 12,000 of them were shot. The action was canceled when it got dark. By December 1, 1941, numerous other mass shootings were carried out in the Galicia district , namely in Rohatyn, again in Stanislau and in Deljatyn and Kalush, each of which killed several thousand Jews. At the end of March 1942, Krüger had thousands of “useless Jews” arrested from the Stanislau ghetto; from April 1, 1942, they were deported to the Belzec extermination camp and gassed there .

In most of the “actions” against Jews, Krüger was in command: he gave the order to open fire and personally killed with “ catch shots ”. He also had numerous Poles and Ukrainians liquidated on the mere suspicion that they were communists or belonged to a resistance movement.

The massacres of October 6th and 12th are considered to be the "beginning of the final solution in the Generalgouvernement", as women, children and Jewish men of all ages were killed en masse for the first time in this area. It has not yet been clarified whether Karl Eberhard Schöngarth, Helmut Tanzmann or Friedrich Katzmann gave express instructions to begin the murder of Jewish women and children at this location before the extermination camp was completed . Krüger himself later stated that the motive was the limited capacity of the planned ghetto . In this context, the historian Dieter Pohl points to the border location with the Carpathian Ukraine , from which the Hungarians deported thousands of Jews living there or who had fled there to the areas occupied by Germans. After the attack on the Soviet Union , in which Hungary was also involved, around 15,000 Jewish refugees from Carpathian Ukraine were deported to western Ukraine. Most of them were murdered by German police and SS troops in the Kamenets-Podolsk massacre .

Disempowerment and transfer to France

In August 1942 the rule of the "King of Stanislau" ended. Krüger had boasted to the arrested Countess Karolina Lanckorońska that he had liquidated the professors in Lemberg. Drohobych's Gestapo chief , Walter Kutschmann , reported his rival Krüger for betrayal of secrets. In addition, an examination revealed that numerous valuables belonging to the Jewish victims had not been properly booked and delivered. Krüger was recalled to Berlin and remained in SS custody for almost a year, until Heinrich Himmler stopped the investigation after Karl Eberhard Schöngarth intervened .

Krüger was demoted to SS-Untersturmführer and was transferred to France in 1943, where he headed the SD in Chalon-sur-Saône . In this role, Kruger was heavily involved in war crimes . In order to prevent attacks by the resistance movement, he had six hostages shot and several houses set on fire. Krüger was sentenced to death in absentia on February 3, 1947 in Dijon . At the beginning of September 1944 he resigned from his post due to the advance of the Allied troops. At the end of the war, Krüger was taken prisoner in the Netherlands .

post war period

Since nothing was known about his crimes in Poland and France, Hans Krüger was released from custody in October 1948. After the end of the war, Krüger lived in Lüdinghausen . He worked as a wholesale agent for hardware, became self-employed in the construction industry in 1954, and from March 1960 worked as district manager at Otto-Versand . In the early 1950s he had tried unsuccessfully to find work in the police force or with the Office for the Protection of the Constitution . From 1949 to 1956 he was state chairman of the Landsmannschaft Berlin-Mark Brandenburg and was also active in party politics until 1958; In 1954 he ran for the BHE unsuccessfully in the election to the state parliament of North Rhine-Westphalia .

After a book about the German atrocities was published in Israel, the Dortmund public prosecutor's office had been investigating Krüger since 1959, and on January 9, 1962 he was arrested. As head of the security police in Stanislau, he was charged with several acts of excess and 24,875 murders that had taken place in eight “actions” between August 2, 1941 and early summer 1942. His involvement in the Lviv professor murder was not part of the indictment. On May 6, 1968, the Münster Regional Court sentenced Hans Krüger to life imprisonment . He was released from prison in 1986.

literature

  • Elisabeth Freundlich: The murder of a city called Stanislau. Nazi extermination policy in Poland, 1939–1945. Vienna 1986, ISBN 3-215-06077-9 .
  • Dieter Pohl: Hans Krüger - the 'King of Stanislau'. In: Klaus-Michael Mallmann, Gerhard Paul: Careers of violence. National Socialist perpetrator biographies. Darmstadt 2004, ISBN 3-534-16654-X , pp. 135-144 - first version from 1998 (English; PDF; 127 kB).
  • Christiaan Rüter u. a .: Justice and Nazi crimes. Collection of German criminal convictions for Nazi homicide crimes 1945–1999. Volume 28. The criminal judgments issued from April 29, 1968 to May 11, 1968, serial no. No. 672-677. Amsterdam 2003, ISBN 3-598-23819-3 - Case 675, pp. 220-682 s. Kruger, Hans
  • Dieter Schenk: The Lviv professor murder and the Holocaust in East Galicia. Bonn 2007, ISBN 978-3-8012-5033-1 .
  • Roland Tatreaux: Hans Krüger, chef de la SIPO-SD à Chalon-sur-Saône, 1943–1944: le roi de Stanislau, le Barbie chalonnais , 2012, ISBN 978-2-7466-4074-0 (not viewed).
  • Thomas Sandkühler: Final solution in Galicia. The murder of Jews in Eastern Poland and the rescue initiatives of Berthold Beitz 1941–1944 . Dietz Successor, Bonn 1996, ISBN 3-8012-5022-9 , pp. 440f.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Dieter Pohl: Hans Krüger - the 'King of Stanislau'. In: Klaus-Michael Mallmann, Gerhard Paul: Careers of violence. National Socialist perpetrator biographies. Darmstadt 2004, ISBN 3-534-16654-X , p. 135.
  2. ↑ Figures 800 or 200 according to Dieter Pohl: Hans Krüger - the 'King of Stanislau'. In: Klaus-Michael Mallmann, Gerhard Paul: Careers of violence. National Socialist perpetrator biographies. Darmstadt 2004, ISBN 3-534-16654-X , p. 135 / Numbers 1000 or 100 from Elisabeth Freundlich: The murder of a city called Stanislau. Nazi extermination policy in Poland, 1939-1945. Vienna 1986, ISBN 3-215-06077-9 , pp. 140-143.
  3. ↑ These figures in the literature, the judgment against Krüger assumes at least 6,000 victims: Christiaan Rüter u. a .: Justice and Nazi crimes. Collection of German criminal convictions for Nazi homicide crimes 1945–1999. Volume 28. The criminal judgments issued from April 29, 1968 to May 11, 1968, serial no. No. 672-677. Amsterdam 2003, ISBN 3-598-23819-3 , pp. 322-323.
  4. ↑ Klaus-Peter Friedrich (edit.): The persecution and murder of European Jews by National Socialist Germany 1933–1945 (collection of sources) Volume 9: Poland: Generalgouvernement August 1941–1945 , Munich 2013, ISBN 978-3-486-71530- 9 , p. 21 / see Dieter Pohl: Hans Krüger - the 'King of Stanislau'. ISBN 3-534-16654-X , p. 135.
  5. ↑ Dieter Pohl: Hans Krüger - the 'King of Stanislau'. In: Klaus-Michael Mallmann, Gerhard Paul: Careers of violence. National Socialist perpetrator biographies. Darmstadt 2004, ISBN 3-534-16654-X , p. 136.
  6. ↑ Dieter Schenk: The Lviv Professors Murder and the Holocaust in East Galicia. Bonn 2007, ISBN 978-3-8012-5033-1 , pp. 130 and 191.
  7. ↑ Dieter Pohl: Hans Krüger - the 'King of Stanislau'. In: Klaus-Michael Mallmann, Gerhard Paul: Careers of violence. National Socialist perpetrator biographies. Darmstadt 2004, ISBN 3-534-16654-X , p. 140.
  8. ↑ Dieter Schenk: The Lviv Professors Murder and the Holocaust in East Galicia. Bonn 2007, ISBN 978-3-8012-5033-1 , p. 185.
  9. ↑ THE TRIAL OF FRANZ HOLSTEIN AND TWENTY-THREE OTHERS. Permanent Military Tribunal at Dijon (Completed 3rd February 1947) ( Memento of April 25, 2012 in the Internet Archive ). Source: United Nations War Crimes Commission. Law Reports of Trials of War Criminals. Volume VIII, 1949
  10. ^ A b Westfälische Nachrichten : Tens of thousands of Jews murdered - 50 years ago: “Stanislau trial” at the Münster district court / main defendant receives life sentence , Münster, Münster, Martin Kalitschke, April 23, 2016
  11. ↑ Dieter Schenk: The Lviv Professors Murder and the Holocaust in East Galicia. Bonn 2007, ISBN 978-3-8012-5033-1 , p. 186.
  12. ↑ Repeated discontinuation orders in 1964, 1966, 1967 and 1983 - see Dieter Schenk: The Lemberger Professorenmord and the Holocaust in East Galicia. Bonn 2007, ISBN 978-3-8012-5033-1 , pp. 224-237.
personal data
SURNAME Kruger, Hans
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German agricultural inspector, SS leader and perpetrator of the Holocaust
DATE OF BIRTH July 1, 1909
PLACE OF BIRTH Poses
DATE OF DEATH February 8, 1988
Place of death Wasserburg (Lake Constance)