Hans Oelze

Hans Oelze (born September 21, 1896 in Beeskow , Brandenburg ; † May 31, 1963 in Hann. Münden ) was a German police officer and colonel . Oelze acted in the Nazi state a . a. as a department head in the Secret State Police Office in Berlin and as a regimental commander in World War II .

Life and activity

Early years and World War I

Oelze was the son of a chief customs inspector who came from a farming family from Dahlen near Stendal. The mother was the daughter of a hotel owner from Elmshorn. He attended secondary school in Küstrin (1903 to 1906), the grammar school in Küstrin (1906 to 1908) and the grammar school in Berlin (1908 to 1914), which he left in 1914.

After the beginning of the First World War , Oelze joined the Leib Grenadier Regiment "King Friedrich Wilhelm III." (1st Brandenburg) No. 8 of the Prussian Army as a volunteer on August 21, 1914 . With this he took part in the war from 1914 to 1918, where he u. a. was used in France and Russia . On May 16, 1918, Oelze passed the Abitur exam as part of a war participant examination in Berlin. When the war ended, he held the rank of lieutenant reached and was founded in 1919 with the character as a lieutenant of the reserve discharged from the army. For his achievements in the war he was awarded both classes of the Iron Cross and the Knight's Cross of the Royal House Order of Hohenzollern with Swords.

On October 18, 1918, Oelze was taken prisoner by the French . In August 1919 he managed to escape from this and return to Germany via Switzerland.

Weimar Republic

From September 1919 to September 1925, Oelze completed a commercial apprenticeship and practically worked in a sugar confectionery factory and in catering establishments. He was also employed by a bank and in the press. Politically, he belonged to the German People's Party from 1921.

In 1924 and 1925, Oelze worked in the right-wing Wehrverband Frontbann Nord , led by former Captain Paul Röhrbein , a successor organization in the Berlin area to the NSDAP's Sturmabteilung (SA), which was dissolved after the failed Hitler putsch in 1923 .

Due to the activities of the Frontbanns Nord, which was directed against the existence of the Weimar Republic - or the illegal methods with which the organization tried to achieve its goals - a series of arrests among leading functionaries of the same was carried out in autumn 1925 on suspicion of secret bundles and a trial initiated at the district court Berlin III. In addition to Röhrbein, his adjutant Karl Ernst and the three Frontbann district leaders Waldemar Geyer , Ludwig Dargel and Kurt Daluege as well as Ernst Wetzel , Oelze was also arrested for a few weeks.

Another procedure in which Oelze was involved at that time concerned a process that had taken place in 1925 during a front-line march in Zossen: A black, red and gold flag was pulled through the street, which was heavily polluted by the rain. In 1924, Oelze had also been reported in Grunewald for leading a prohibited military formation.

On November 1, 1925, Oelze joined the Prussian police force , where he initially served as a sergeant. In March 1929 he was promoted to police lieutenant in the police, making him a police officer. According to a contemporary note on the file, on December 11, 1928, he declared to the Berlin police vice-president Weiss that he had renounced his previous political position and was now internally loyal to the republic. Internally, however, it was accepted, as an assessment from the 1930s - now praised - reported, "that inwardly he still considered the anti-constitutional and open fight against the state-oriented attitude of the ban on the front to be correct and even shared it." assessment was correct that speaks Oelze within the police from the late 1920s until the coming to power of the Nazis in the spring of 1933 proved in accordance with the Nazi -operated, u. a. by running agitation in favor of the Nazi movement among his colleagues in the police force and by passing internal information to the National Socialists about actions planned by the police and directed against them (raids, house searches, etc.). In 1931 Oelze secretly joined the NSDAP ( membership number 346.936).

In 1932, at the instigation of Department I A of the Berlin Police Headquarters (Political Police), a house search was carried out both in Oelze's private apartment and in his office because of suspicion of activity for the NSDAP. In addition, he was questioned on the suspicion that the former first lieutenant, who had worked in the NSDAP's intelligence service, was D. Kurt von Possanner to have made representations to the Commerce Council Ernst Paul Lehmann in Brandenburg because of the financing of the National Socialist intelligence service . At that time Lehmann was a sponsor of the Sailors School in Germany, where Oelze had volunteered as a teacher in the spring of 1931.

Disciplinary proceedings initiated against Oelze with the aim of removing him from the police force as an enemy of the constitution did not come to an end due to the forced removal from office of the Prussian government on July 20, 1932 ( Prussian strike ), so that he could remain in the police.

Instead, Oelze founded the working group of National Socialist police officers together with Walther Wecke and Franz Nippold in 1932 .

Nazi era

Career in the Nazi police force (1933 to 1935)

Shortly after the National Socialists came to power in February 1933, Oelze was accepted into the newly established special police group of the Prussian Ministry of the Interior ( Landespolizeigruppe Wecke z. B.V. ) led by Walther Wecke , one of the Prussian Interior Minister since January 30, 1933 (and from April also as a Prime Minister) incumbent Nazi politician Hermann Göring subordinate police special unit. Oelze took over the leadership of a hundred in this . On April 1, 1933, he was promoted to police captain in this unit because of his "special services to the resurrection of the national state" . Heinrich Himmler also awarded Oelze the SS civil badge on April 29, 1933 as an “outward sign of camaraderie and solidarity with the SS ”, which he had demonstrated “for years” through his actions , without which Oelze belonged to the SS himself.

On July 1, 1933, Oelze moved to the Secret State Police Office , where he headed Department IV (treason and espionage) until November 15 of the same year. His successor in this position was Günther Patschowsky in November 1933 .

After the violent smashing of the Berlin SA leadership in the course of the Röhm affair of June 30, 1934, Oelze von Wecke, who was entrusted with the provisional leadership of the Berlin SA on July 2, 1934 , was appointed provisional staff leader of the SA group Berlin- Brandenburg deployed without being a member of the SA.

Career in the Wehrmacht (1935 to 1945)

At the beginning of 1935, Oelze was assigned to the Wehrmacht by the police . In this he was assigned to the engineer battalion 4 in Magdeburg on July 1, 1935 as a captain and company commander . In October 1937 he was promoted to major there .

By order of May 13, 1935, Oelze was excluded from the NSDAP by the Berlin-Westend local group for "lack of interest". In 1937 he was accepted back into the party by a decision of the Supreme Party Court of the NSDAP , which overturned the decision of 1935, after Oelze had demonstrated that he had neglected his party relations due to frequent training courses and transfers and he also made recommendations from a number of high-ranking personalities ( including Daluege, Sepp Dietrich , Walter Jurk and Dietrich von Jagow ).

During the Second World War, Oelze was initially used from September 1, 1939 to December 31, 1940 as a battalion commander in the 95th Infantry Division. He was then used from January 1, 1941 to November 30, 1942 battalion commander in the 191st Reserve Division. During this time he took part in fighting in Russia from June 22, 1941 to March 31, 1942, and then from October 1, 1942 to November 30, 1942, he was a member of the German occupation forces in Belgium. From December 1, 1942 to May 31, 1943, Oelze then served as a section commander in the Corps Holland. In this position, he was in charge of the Haag-Scheweningen defense section, with the tactical troops of all parts of the armed forces as well as the police and Waffen-SS subordinate to him. After his replacement at this post he served from June 1, 1943 to February 28, 1945 as regimental commander in the 319th Infantry Division, with which he was a member of the occupation force on the Channel Island of Guerney. Most recently, Oelze was infantry leader at the Atlantic fortress Gironde Estuary from March 4, 1945 to April 16, 1945 .

During the war years, Oelze was promoted to lieutenant colonel (January 1, 1941) and colonel (July 1, 1942).

On April 16, 1945, contrary to the orders given to him, Oelze ordered the surrender of the troops under his control, for which he was sentenced to death in absentia on April 18, 1945 by a German naval court at the Atlantic base in La Rochelle. The sentence was not carried out because he was already a prisoner of war at the time.

post war period

At the end of the war, Oelze fell into French captivity , from which he was released on March 16, 1946. He then settled in Lower Saxony. There he initially worked as a laborer in a carpentry shop.

In his arbitration chamber proceedings, Oelze was assigned to denazification category V (exonerated) by a decision of the 3rd award committee at the Hildesheim-Stadt denazification main committee in a written procedure of March 5, 1949 (legally binding since March 23, 1949). It was subsequently discovered in 1951 that Oelze had falsified questionnaires in the course of his judicial chamber proceedings. He had done this by not mentioning his activities in right-wing associations in the 1920s in his questionnaire from 1946 and by postponing his entry into the NSDAP, which had actually taken place in 1930, to 1933 on paper, as well as by his Work in the Wecke police department in 1933, his work as head of department in the Secret State Police Office in the same year, his preferred promotion by Hermann Göring in April 1933 and his temporary entrustment with the post of staff leader of the Berlin SA in the summer of 1934. However, the authorities decided to leave the matter alone.

1967 was posthumously determined against Oelze in connection with the murder of the "clairvoyant" Erik Jan Hanussen in the spring of 1933 as a potential accomplice of the circumstances under which the act took place.

family

Oelze was married to Margot Manthey.

literature

• Hsi-huey Liang: The Berlin police in the Weimar Republic. 1977.
• Bernhard Sauer: Goebbels «Rabauken». On the history of the SA in Berlin-Brandenburg. in: Uwe Schaper (Ed.): Berlin in past and present. Yearbook of the Berlin State Archives 2006. Berlin 2006, pp. 107–164.