Helmut Heisig

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Helmut Heisig (born August 1, 1902 in Ratiborhammer , Upper Silesia, † 1954 ) was a German detective and SS-Sturmbannführer .

Live and act

Helmut Heisig became involved in the Upper Silesian self-protection after the First World War . In 1921 he fled during the third Polish uprising in Upper Silesia in Katowice . He later started studying, which he had to break off in 1928 for economic reasons. Instead, he joined the criminal service in November of the same year as a trainee detective at the Wroclaw Police Headquarters . He was initially trained as a detective in Breslau and at the Charlottenburg Police Institute and then worked for the criminal police in Breslau until October 1931. There he passed the commissioner examination in 1930.

In October 1931 Heisig was transferred to Berlin , where he initially worked in the Capital Crimes Department at the Central Police Office. Later he came to Division IA ( Political Police ), where he was primarily concerned with combating the KPD . From the beginning of 1932 Heisig was also used to monitor political events of the NSDAP . In this function he allegedly had to cut off the word at a meeting in the Berlin Sports Palace Hermann Göring , who appeared there as the spokesman for his party. This is said to have brought Heisig a negative entry in the files of the National Socialist Working Group , the secret Nazi organization in the police, as reported by the news magazine Der Spiegel in 1959. Der Spiegel  - whose editors at that time, however, included numerous former members of the criminal police from before 1945 who tried to present their colleagues positively - tied in with the conclusion that Heisig was by no means, as was later often claimed, a "confidant of the NSDAP". Against the variant that Heisig was critical of the NSDAP before 1933, speaks a self-written curriculum vitae Heisig, from which it is clear that he himself belonged to the National Socialist working group - allegedly persecuting him - since 1932. It was also found that Heisig, as a confidante of his superior Heinrich Schnitzler, took part in secret contacts between the Political Police and the Berlin NS and SA leadership in August 1932 , with the aim of establishing a mutual intelligence service and combating Marxism together. The result was a secret, regular exchange of documents between the police and the NSDAP and an increasing rapprochement between the two sides in the months before the National Socialist " seizure of power ".

A few weeks after the National Socialists came into power, Heisig was one of the first officials to be accepted into the Secret State Police (Gestapo) in the spring of 1933 . The reason for this may have been his acquaintance with Rudolf Diels , the first head of the Gestapo and a former colleague of Heisig in Department IA. In February / March 1933 Heisig was, alongside Rudolf Braschwitz , Reinhold Heller and Walter Zirpins, one of four members of the special commission set up by Hermann Göring to investigate the fire in the Reichstag on 27/28. February this year. Among other things, Heisig was the first to interrogate the alleged arsonist Marinus van der Lubbe , who was found in the Reichstag building, a few hours after the fire. In March 1933, as part of the fire investigation, Heisig traveled to Leiden in the Netherlands for a few days to investigate the person Lubbes - who came from Leiden - there. So he interrogated u. a. some like-minded people and relatives of Lubbe and obtained information on Lubbe's personal career and political activities, especially from the Dutch authorities.

On May 1, 1933, Heisig also joined the NSDAP ( membership number 2,634,974). In 1934 he was transferred to Dessau as head of the police and criminal investigation department , where he was promoted to chief criminal inspector on September 1, 1934. In 1937 he became head of the criminal police and the political police in Bonn with the rank of criminal councilor. On May 1, 1938, he was finally transferred to the State Criminal Police in Chemnitz .

During the Second World War, Heisig worked for the Stapostellen in Hohensalza , Karlsbad, Nuremberg and Klagenfurt , among others . On April 20, 1940, he joined the Schutzstaffel (SS) (membership number 353.254), in which he was assigned to the SD main office in terms of formation and was promoted to SS-Sturmbannführer in 1942.

At the end of the war, Heisig was interned until 1948.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Fritz Tobias: "Stand up, van der Lubbe!", In: Der Spiegel , No. 43/1959 of October 21, 1959, pp. 45-60. ( Online , accessed February 18, 2011.)
personal data
SURNAME Heisig, Helmut
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German detective
DATE OF BIRTH August 1, 1902
PLACE OF BIRTH Ratibor hammer
DATE OF DEATH 1954