Heinz Maurer

Heinz Wolfgang Maurer (born February 17, 1906 in Baden-Baden , † July 17, 1945 in Vorarlberg ) was a German civil servant at the time of National Socialism . He was a member of the SS and most recently held the rank of SS-Hauptsturmführer . As head of the police department in Lemberg (today: Lviv) from 1942 to 1944 and as a functionary in the staff of the SS and Police Leader East, he was involved in the persecution of Jews in Eastern Galicia during the occupation of Poland in World War II . After an unsuccessful escape from French internment, he committed suicide in 1945.

Life

School and education

Heinz Wolfgang Maurer was the youngest of four children of chief engineer Eugen Maurer and his wife Anne. In accordance with the ideals of the educated bourgeoisie of the time, he enjoyed an education based on the principles of humanism. After satisfactory performance, he passed his Abitur at the Hohenbaden Baden-Baden grammar school in 1924 and then studied law in Freiburg , Munich and Frankfurt am Main . In 1928 he passed the first state examination in Karlsruhe ; The second state examination followed in 1932. In 1931 he received his doctorate with a dissertation on the "attitude of the socialists to the fundamental questions of the criminal court constitution and criminal procedure reform" at the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg (grade "rite" ).

Professional stagnation despite NSDAP and SS membership

In 1933 Maurer settled down as a lawyer in Baden-Baden, but because business was bad, he soon took a position as in-house counsel and managing director of the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts , Baden-Baden regional office. On May 1, 1933, he joined the NSDAP and on June 1, 1933, the SS, from which he received membership number 103,688. His immediate superior was Sturmführer Rudolf Christ, who played a major role in the destruction of the Baden-Baden synagogue in November 1938 . Maurer also took on legal advice for the local SS-Sturmbann. After receiving his marriage permit from the Race and Settlement Main Office , Maurer married Gertrud Strauch, the daughter of a Baden-Baden merchant, at the end of 1934. The couple hired the master hairdresser Michl Huber, an old fighter and SS storm leader , who had been involved in an explosives attack on the Baden-Baden police headquarters in 1932, as witnesses. Maurer's networking in high NS and SS circles soon bore fruit: through mediation from the environment of the Baden Minister of Justice and Education, Otto Wacker , he took up a position as a chamber assessor at the Princely Fürstenberg Administration in Donaueschingen in early 1935 . Here he led the negotiations on the sale of large princely properties and iron ore concessions to Doggererz AG , which wanted to build an ironworks on the Baar as part of the National Socialist war preparations . However, Maurer's career hopes did not come true: After the Princely Chamber had terminated his existing employment contract at the end of 1937, he had to work as a freelance lawyer again. In 1939 Maurer applied as a lawyer in the regional service of the Lower Danube region . His hopes for a new start in his career were dashed after he was drafted into the Wehrmacht at the end of August 1939. Until mid-1941 he served as a sergeant in the flak .

SS and police career in occupied Lemberg

Maurer escaped service at the front in the German-Soviet War with the help of his influential relative, SS-Obersturmbannführer Ludwig Losacker . Since the occupation of Poland in 1939, he was one of the central figures of the German administration in the Generalgouvernement (GG). After the attack on the USSR , Losacker took over the post of head of office and deputy governor in the Galicia district, which had previously belonged to Stalin's share of the booty, but was to be incorporated into the GG from August 1941. The establishment of a new administration that had become necessary opened up new career opportunities for ambitious lawyers. Whoever got this decided Losacker, luckily for Maurer. At the end of 1941, Maurer took up a new position in Lemberg as senior government councilor and head of the police department in the internal administration department, which was headed by the lawyer Otto Bauer . Over 100,000 Jews lived in Lemberg in mid-1941, almost all of whom fell victim to the Holocaust in the years that followed under German rule . Maurer now became part of this murderous system that killed more than half a million people in Eastern Galicia alone. His police department was responsible for the following areas of activity in 1941/42.

• Participation in "Jewish actions",

• Function as "Jewish police",

• peripheral participation in the so-called "March Action", a paraphrase for the first mass deportation in the Lviv ghetto,

• Clarification of individual questions such as the scope of the "shooting order",

• Placement of orders to prepare for the deportations.

In June 1942 the police administration came under the command of SS Brigade Leader Fritz Katzmann , who played a key role in the extermination of the Jews in Galicia until his replacement in April 1943. Katzmann was so satisfied with Maurer that in October 1942 he proposed to the SS Personnel Main Office that Maurer should be promoted "preferentially" and that on January 30, 1944, he be appointed Hauptsturmführer and Führer in the staff of the SS Upper Section East. The staff of the SS and Police Leader (SSPF) had been the “leading body of the mass murder in the Eastern Galicia District” since the spring of 1942. Katzmann's superior in Krakow, SS-Obergruppenführer and Police General Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger , left the request for months. When Maximilian von Herff , the head of the Berlin SS Personnel Main Office, came to Lemberg for an inspection, the SS and police leadership there stood up for Maurer again. At the end of 1943, Wilhelm Koppe , Krüger's successor in the office of Higher Police Leader East, forwarded the proposal to the Berlin SS Personnel Main Office with a positive comment . At the beginning of 1944, Maurer was promoted to Hauptsturmführer in the staff of the SS Upper Section East. At that time he was working as the head of the police department in Lviv. Maurer's wife Gertrud later transformed her husband's involvement in the persecution of the Jews in Eastern Galicia into an act of internal resistance and claimed that her husband was “very shocked by the treatment of the Jews and tried to help Jews as far as he could. [...] Because I always protested against the leadership of the SS leaders and took offense at their behavior and expressed myself accordingly, we had to vacate our official apartment, which had been assigned to us in the so-called SS quarter, and move to the Polish one Forgotten district of Lviv. We then had the opportunity to move into the apartment of a former Polish clergyman who had been murdered by the Russians before the occupation of Lviv. "

Suicide after internment and posthumous denazification as a minor

In late 1944 Maurer was the commander of the Order Police Krakow seconded to the state police administration Karlsruhe, where he was on duty on April 4, 1945 to engage French associations. Maurer's later fate is only known from verbal reports from earlier colleagues: According to this, he was taken to an internment camp in Vorarlberg, from which he tried to escape on July 17, 1945 and took his own life in a hopeless situation. His grave is said to be in “St. Bartholomä ”near Schruns , which should mean St. Bartholomäberg.

For years, Maurer's family remained in the dark about his fate. His wife divorced in mid-1946 and resumed her maiden name in October. The divorce was later declared invalid by order of the Offenburg District Court. It was not until 1948 that Maurer's suicide became known. His mother then stated: "Unfortunately we have to thank God today that he found his grave and [nd] was not extradited to Poland." The situation of the bereaved in the first post-war years was marked by great material hardship. The family's hopes were directed towards receiving state benefits for survivors, for which a posthumous denazification of Maurer was necessary. The Offenburg Spruchkammer classified those involved in the Lviv persecution of the Jews in October 1949 into the group of minor offenders. The verdict was based on the following reasoning: “Without a doubt, the person concerned was a staunch National Socialist. However, it could not be proven that through his fault a politically dissenting person suffered damage and that he denounced such damage. He personally does not seem to have taken part in actions against Jews. His wife was not a member of the NSDAP or one of these affiliated groups. She also always seems to have been an upright anti-fascist, who used all her influence on her husband to ensure that he was not guilty of anything wrong. ”The mild sentence did not achieve its purpose. The state of Baden and its legal successor did not pay the family any pensions. The reasons were formal, civil service law.

literature

• Wolf-Ingo Seidelmann: Dr. Heinz Maurer, FF Chamber Assessor and SS Hauptsturmführer, 1942–1944 head of the police administration in Lemberg . In: Writings of the Association for History and Natural History of the Baar . tape 39 , 2016, ISSN  0340-4765 , p. 73-82 .
• Dieter Pohl: National Socialist Persecution of Jews in Eastern Galicia 1941–1944. Organization and implementation of a state mass crime (=  studies on contemporary history . Volume 50 ). Oldenbourg, Munich 1997.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Wolf-Ingo Seidelmann: Dr. Heinz Maurer, FF Chamber Assessor and SS Hauptsturmführer, 1942–1944 head of the police administration in Lemberg . In: Writings of the Association for History and Natural History of the Baar . tape 39 , 2016, ISSN  0340-4765 , p. 73–82 , here p. 73f. .
2. ↑ Wolf-Ingo Seidelmann: 'Create iron for the fighting army! - The Doggererz AG - a contribution of the Otto Wolff Group and the Saarland steel industry to the National Socialist autarky and armaments policy on the Baar in Baden. UVK Verlag Konstanz and Munich, 2016, ISBN 978-3-86764-653-6 , p. 411 .
3. ↑ Wolf-Ingo Seidelmann: Making iron for the fighting army! S. 160-164 .
4. ↑ Losacker's role in filling top positions in Eastern Galicia is described by contemporary witness Gerhard Jordan in his monograph: Polish Years , Privatdruck, n.d. n.d., p. 11 ff.
5. ↑ Dieter Pohl: National Socialist Persecution of Jews in East Galicia 1941–1944. Organization and implementation of a state mass crime (=  studies on contemporary history . Volume 50 ). Oldenbourg, Munich 1997, p. 281 .
6. ↑ Dieter Pohl: National Socialist Persecution of Jews in East Galicia 1941–1944. Organization and execution of a state mass crime . S. 267 .
7. ^ Statement by Gertrud Maurer in front of the Freiburg Spruchkammer on October 19, 1949. Quoted from: Wolf-Ingo Seidelmann: Dr. Heinz Maurer, FF Chamber Assessor and SS Hauptsturmführer, 1942–1944 head of the police administration in Lemberg . 2016, p. 73–82, here p. 78 f .
8. ↑ Anne Maurer to Maximilian Egon zu Fürstenberg v. 11/13/1948. Quoted from: Wolf-Ingo Seidelmann: Dr. Heinz Maurer, FF Chamber Assessor and SS Hauptsturmführer, 1942–1944 head of the police administration in Lemberg . 2016, p. 73–82, here p. 73 .
9. ↑ Justification for the proposal of the Offenburg Investigative Committee of October 19, 1949 to denazify Maurer as a minor offender. The Offenburg Spruchkammer followed this proposal on December 2nd, 1949. Quoted from: Wolf-Ingo Seidelmann: Dr. Heinz Maurer, FF Chamber Assessor and SS Hauptsturmführer, 1942–1944 head of the police administration in Lemberg . 2016, p. 73–82, here p. 80 .