Heinrich Wessel (SS member)

Heinrich Otto Wessel (born April 13, 1904 in Lotte-Osterberg ; † February 6, 1996 in Fallingbostel ) was a German SS-Obersturmführer and adjutant of the camp commandant in Sachsenhausen concentration camp .

Life

Heinrich Wessel was the son of a farmer. He attended secondary school and then a commercial school in the nearby city of Osnabrück , which he left in 1921 with secondary school leaving certificate. He then completed a commercial apprenticeship at a private bank in Osnabrück, where he worked as an employee. In 1925 he was fired due to the economic crisis.

In 1933 he joined the NSDAP and in 1934 the SS . In 1939 he was drafted into the Waffen SS and then transferred to the guard battalion in Sachsenhausen concentration camp under Gustav Wegner. On September 1, 1942, he became the adjutant of the concentration camp commandant Anton Kaindl . In this role he was involved in the organization and implementation of many measures against the prisoners and remained so until the end of the war. For example, he initiated the shooting of 27 political prisoners on October 11, 1944.

After the war he went underground under the wrong name. In 1951 he assumed the identity of a relative missing in the war. As Werner Bierbaum he found a job as an accountant again. In February 1960 he was in custody taken. In 1962 he was sentenced to seven and a half years imprisonment by the District Court of Verden only for complicity in murder in 16 cases and complicity in manslaughter in one case. He was serving his imprisonment in Celle . In April 1966 he was paroled. He retired in 1969.

literature

Günter Morsch (Ed.): The concentration camp SS 1936–1945: Work-sharing perpetrators in Sachsenhausen concentration camp . Metropol Verlag, Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-86331-403-3

Web links

Mass murder with pedantic organization . Die Welt , June 25, 2017.

Individual evidence

^ ^A ^b ^c Günter Morsch: The Concentration Camp SS 1936-1945: Division of labor in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Berlin 2018. pp. 353–356.
^ Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich . Who was what before and after 1945 . Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-596-16048-8 , p. 671.

personal data
SURNAME	Wessel, Heinrich
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Wessel, Heinrich Otto (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	German SS-Obersturmführer
DATE OF BIRTH	April 13, 1904
PLACE OF BIRTH	Osterberg
DATE OF DEATH	February 6, 1996
Place of death	Fallingbostel

[Morsch-1] A ^b ^c Günter Morsch: The Concentration Camp SS 1936-1945: Division of labor in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Berlin 2018. pp. 353–356.

[2] Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich . Who was what before and after 1945 . Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-596-16048-8 , p. 671.