Heinrich Lankenau

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Heinrich Lankenau (2nd from left) between Kurt Daluege and Adolf von Bomhard (1937)

Heinrich Bernhard Lankenau (born October 11, 1891 in Hatten , Oldenburg district , † April 16, 1983 in Bad Salzuflen ) was a German police general , most recently with the rank of SS group leader and lieutenant general of the police.

Life

Heinrich Lankenau attended elementary school, high school and the grammar school in Wilhelmshaven , where he passed the Abitur in March 1911. After that, he was a one-year volunteer . From 1912 he studied philology and theology at the universities of Tübingen and Berlin. He took part in the First World War and was awarded the Iron Cross First Class in 1914. At the end of the war in 1918 he belonged to the Guard Cavalry Rifle Division , from which many Freikorps members emerged. Lankenau joined the Bahrenfeld Volunteer Guard Department , which was formed in Hamburg in March 1919 , and which included around 300 NCOs and soldiers with war experience, as well as voluntary young Hamburgers from the upper class. The Bahrenfeld guard department was converted into the Reichswehr - Jäger - Battalion "Greater Hamburg" in June 1919 . Other members of the Bahrenfeld guard, who would later make a career under National Socialism , were the Franco liaison officer Johannes Bernhardt , the police general and SS brigade leader Walther Bierkamp, and the SS group leader and task force leader Bruno Linienbach . Lankenau was connecting student and completed his studies in theology and philosophy from. He received his doctorate in 1926 from the University of Tübingen with a thesis on police history. From 1921 to 1925 he was a member of the Stahlhelm .

After leaving the army in 1919, Lankenau was involved in setting up the Oldenburg Order Police, which initially committed itself to the Weimar Republic . From 1919 to 1928 he was adjutant to the Orpo commander Oskar Wantke. From 1932 to 1933 he headed the police department in the State Ministry of the Interior . In 1932, on behalf of Carl Röver , the National Socialist Prime Minister of the State of Oldenburg, Lankenau attempted to institutionalize the SA as an auxiliary police force. Lankenau joined the NSDAP in early May 1933 after the seizure of power ( membership number 2,856,288). From autumn 1934 Lankenau was commander of the Oldenburg police force and from autumn 1935 in Bremen and from autumn 1937 in Munich . From 1936 he held the rank of colonel. From January 1933 he was State Commissioner for State Security in Oldenburg for one year and headed the Gestapo in the regions of Oldenburg, Lübeck and Birkenfeld from 1933 to 1935 .

In November 1938 Lankenau joined the SS with the rank of SS-Standartenführer , which corresponds to the military rank of colonel. His SS membership number was 310 496. From August 1939 Lankenau was assigned to the staff of the SS Upper Section "West".

From the spring of 1939 Lankenau was inspector of the Ordnungspolizei (ITE) in Münster , where he was appointed Commander of the Ordnungspolizei (BdO) in Military District VI in April 1940 . This comprised Westphalia, the northern Rhineland and eastern Belgium and was the largest and most populous of the 17 police areas (identical to the military districts) in the German Reich within the borders of 1940. His official seat was the Villa ten Hompel in Münster. At the same time as his appointment to BdO, he was promoted to SS-Oberführer . In October 1940 he was promoted to major general of the police , and in March 1941 he was promoted to SS brigade leader .

In December 1942, Lankenau was appointed as the successor to SS-Brigadführer and Major General of the Police Otto Schumann as commander of the Ordnungspolizei at the Reich Commissioner for the Occupied Dutch Territories, based in The Hague . In April 1943 he was promoted to both SS-Gruppenführer and Lieutenant General of the Police . In January 1944 Lankenau was relieved of this position by SS- Brigadführer and Major General of the Police Hellmut Mascus . He experienced the end of the war as the district administrator in Beckum in the Münsterland region .

After the end of the war, Lankenau was interned. In 1947 the Protestant church accepted him again, from which he had left in 1942. After his release from internment in 1948, he worked as a representative for the Beckum cement industry. In 1957 he wrote a book on the history of the Ordnungspolizei in World War II. In doing so, Lankenau tried - like other West German authors of the time - to give the impression that the police battalions had "stayed clean". His book ignores, among other things, the "murder operations" of the Police Battalion 61 from Dortmund, that is Lankenau's command area, and sometimes contains false information. Police battalion 61 was deployed in 1942 - while Lankenau was serving as BdO in Münster - for ten months as a guard around the Warsaw ghetto .

literature

  • Christoph Spieker: Traditional work. A biographical study of the character, responsibility and impact of the police officer Bernhard Heinrich Lankenau 1891–1983 . Klartext, Essen 2015. ISBN 978-3-8375-0394-4 .
  • Joachim Lilla : Senior administrative officials and functionaries in Westphalia and Lippe (1918–1945 / 46). Biographical manual. Aschendorff, Münster 2004, ISBN 3-402-06799-4 , p. 204. ( Publications of the Historical Commission for Westphalia. 22, A, 16 = historical work on Westphalian regional research. Economic and social history group. 16)

Web links

Commons : Heinrich Lankenau  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f Joachim Lilla: Senior administrative officials and functionaries in Westphalia and Lippe (1918–1945 / 46). Biographical manual. , Münster 2004, p. 204.
  2. ^ Erwin Könnemann: Freikorps 1918–1920 . In: Dieter Fricke u. a. (Ed.): The bourgeois parties in Germany , Volume II. The European Book, Berlin 1968, pp. 59–63.
    Michael Hundt (editor): History as an obligation - Hamburg, Reformation and historiography . Krämer, Hamburg 2001, ISBN 3-89622-041-1 , pp. 174f.
  3. ↑ a b Ernst Klee: The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich . Updated 2nd edition. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-596-16048-8 , p. 357.
  4. ^ Heinrich Lankenau: The police dragon corps of the Duchy of Oldenburg (1786-1811). The history of the oldest association of the Oldenburg state police . In: Oldenburger Jahrbuch of the Association for Archeology and Regional History , vol. 30, Oldenburg i. O. 1926.
  5. ↑ Christoph Spieker: Biography of a "police soldier" in the "Third Reich": Dr. Heinrich Lankenau (1891–1983), Commander of the Ordnungspolizei in Military District VI (Münster) . In: 16th Colloquium on Police History , Düsseldorf 2005. Conference report at H-Soz-u-Kult .
  6. ↑ a b c Lankenau, Heinrich . In: Andreas Schulz, Günter Wegmann, Dieter Zinke: The Generals of the Waffen-SS and the Police , Volume 3 (Lammerding – Plesch). Biblio-Verlag, Bissendorf 2008, ISBN 978-3-7648-2375-7 .
  7. ↑ Stefan Klemp: "Not determined". Police Battalions and the Post War Justice . 2nd Edition. Klartext Verlag, Essen 2011, ISBN 978-3-8375-0663-1 , p. 154.
  8. ↑ Karl-Heinz Janßen: mass murder in green . In: Die Zeit , No. 20/2001.
  9. ^ Christian Hartmann: Brown executor, good citizen . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, June 21, 2016, p. 6.
  10. ^ B. Heinrich Lankenau: Police in action during the war 1939–1945 in Rhineland-Westphalia . Hauschild, Bremen 1957.
  11. ^ Stefan Klemp: acquittal for the "murder battalion" - the Nazi order police and the post-war justice system . Lit, Münster 1998, ISBN 3-8258-3994-X , pp. 12-14.
personal data
SURNAME Lankenau, Heinrich
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Lankenau, B. Heinrich; Lankenau, Bernhard Heinrich; Lankenau, Heinrich Bernhard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German SS group leader and general in the Ordnungspolizei
DATE OF BIRTH October 11, 1891
PLACE OF BIRTH Hatten , Oldenburg district
DATE OF DEATH April 16, 1983
Place of death Bad Salzuflen