Helmut Looß

Helmut Looß (born May 31, 1910 in Eisenach ; † November 25, 1988 in Bremen ), who went into hiding as Helmut Gessert or Helmut Looss in Bremen after the end of the Second World War , was a German SS-Obersturmbannführer in the security service of the Reichsführer SS (SD ) in the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) of Department VI. He was involved in several war crimes in Lithuania , Ukraine , Belarus and Italy during World War II . Looß was never charged.

Life

Youth and education

Helmut Looß was born as the second child of a master glazier. He was a child who, after the First World War, was strongly influenced by the lost war and by a skepticism towards the Weimar Republic . He went to elementary school and then to the German advanced school , which during the Weimar Republic gave him the opportunity to acquire a university entrance qualification after seven years of elementary school. In addition, the advanced school had the status of a teacher training institution. This should help him get a teaching degree and go into hiding after the end of World War II . In 1930 he passed the Abitur.

In the same year Loos began studying law at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin , which he finished after two semesters. He then went to the University of Königsberg , where he also took two semesters of philosophy in addition to law. After three semesters of law in Königsberg , he studied two semesters of state philosophy at the University of Göttingen . As a student he quickly made contact with right-wing student groups and he was völkisch active and belonged to the German university ring . He earned his living as a house and village school teacher. This university ring was an amalgamation of all right-wing corps and fraternities of the radical ethnic and anti-Semitic movement of the Weimar Republic. During his time in Berlin and Göttingen he joined the NS student union . He did not complete a degree.

Period of National Socialism and military career

At the beginning of the National Socialist era , he was in charge of the political education office for the German student body in Königsberg. Looß became a member of the NSDAP (membership number 4,863,389). Since 1933 he was a member of the Schutzstaffel (SS No. 84.617). He worked as a training and propaganda speaker.

In 1935 he was appointed head of the NSDAP's public health office in his hometown of Eisenach. He was 25 years old then. In Eisenach he resigned from the Evangelical Church on January 30, 1935 and made himself available as a speaker for the German Faith Movement . When this movement was restricted, he withdrew and was employed as a full-time employee of the SD Security Service North, where he acted as an anti-Christian speaker.

His appointment as SS-Untersturmführer in the SD office in Berlin took place on November 9, 1937. He came to the SD probably through the manager of this community, Paul Zapp . After moving to the main SD office, he was responsible for political Catholicism and church issues. In 1938 he expressed himself on religious issues in the so-called church struggle for Thuringia with an open letter and in the same year in his folk writings "Fest- und Feiergestaltung im Deutschen Raum" and "Der Glaube des Deutschen Arbeiter".

After the beginning of the Second World War he held a leading position in the Reich Main Security Office in Department VI E (ideological and political opponents abroad).

From August 1942 he was transferred to the police attaché Herbert Kappler as chief representative of SD Office IV in Rome and had an office in the German embassy. He should also establish contacts with the Vatican and collect information. It can be assumed that Looß was known in the Vatican as the church advisor of the RSHA and therefore could not fulfill his mandate.

From December 1942, Looß was posted to commander of the Security Police and the SD in Kiev . From February to May 1943 he was subordinate to the commander of the SD in Kharkov and then to that in Dnepropetrovsk before he was ordered to Smolensk in May 1943 . He then took over the leadership of Sonderkommando 7a of Einsatzgruppe B until May 31, 1944. After the failure of the Citadel operation , Sonderkommando 7a moved west. In September it was involved with Sonderkommando 7c in the murder of around 700 people, mostly civilians unable to work, women and children in the Roslavl prison . From the late autumn of 1943 onwards, Sonderkommando 7a, led by Looß, was based in Bobruisk in Belarus to fight partisans . A specially set up “gang hunting squad” carried out “cleanup operations” in which numerous civilians were shot or burned in their homes. According to the public prosecutor's investigation into Looß in the 1960s, many hundreds of people died, Jews and non-Jews, partisans, civilians, women and children. From March 1944, the prison established by the Sonderkommando in Bobruisk was also regularly emptied by mass shootings. In the spring of 1944, the Sonderkommando was responsible for the deportation of tens of thousands of civilians classified as “useless eaters” to the Osaritschi death camp .

With the methods acquired in this way, Looß was assigned to the 16th SS Panzer Grenadier Division "Reichsführer SS" in Italy in July 1944 , which defended the Gothic line . In this SS division he was responsible for fighting gangs in the rear of the army , which was a fight against the civilian population. The division's commander, SS-Gruppenführer Max Simon, commissioned him in August 1944 to plan a fight against partisans. He worked out this concept in great detail and with a general staff. Helmut Looß is thus largely responsible for the deaths of civilians in the massacre of Fivizzano , the massacre of Sant'Anna di Stazzema and other massacres in Italy. The aforementioned massacres were carried out in Italy by SS-Sturmbannführer Walter Reder .

Life after 1945

After the end of the war, Looß managed to go into hiding. He acquired a new identity and from the summer of 1945 lived under the name Helmut Gessert , his mother's family name, in Wesermünde .

During his denazification , he claimed to have been classified as unfit for service at the front because of an injury sustained in 1939. In addition, he was never a member of the NSDAP or the SS. Rather, he declared that he was employed by Paul Schultze-Naumburg and had been busy organizing Schultze-Naumburg's work during the war. As references, he cleverly gave people and places who were all in the Soviet zone of occupation and were therefore difficult to check.

From 1946 to 1947 Helmut Looß, alias Helmut Gessert, attended a course for prospective primary school teachers at the educational seminar in Bremen. As early as January 20, 1948, he held an event on ten evenings on the subject of “Looking into the Future” at the Volkshochschule Bremen- Blumhal. After receiving his diploma in 1948, he was immediately employed as a substitute teacher and in 1952 he was accepted into the school service.

In the meantime, the law enforcement authorities had become aware of him in the war crimes trials in Italy against Max Simon and later against Walter Reder. Despite serious allegations, he escaped charges because, according to witness statements, he died at the end of the war and the veracity of this statement was not further verified.

He did not reveal his true identity until 1954 in a letter to the then Bremen Education Senator Willy Dehnkamp . The subsequent inquiries about his past at the RSHA did not burden him any further, which is why the Hanseatic city did not take any disciplinary steps. Only his surname was changed to "Looss" in his personnel file.

As a result, he continued to work as a teacher in a school in Bremen in the Horn district . In 1961 he ran unsuccessfully in the federal election for the FDP . He was only given leave of absence in the late 1960s, when German law enforcement agencies began to take an interest in him because of his activities on the Eastern Front. In 1968 he was interrogated by the Bremen Public Prosecutor's Office as head of Sonderkommando 7a. The Bremen Regional Court suspended prosecution in 1969 due to the statute of limitations, although its involvement in the unlawful killing of large numbers of people was considered proven. An appeal brought by him against his leave of absence was not granted. He died in 1988 without any charge against him.

character

The historian Carlo Gentile describes Helmut Looß as an "intellectual in the [so-called]" gang fight "" with regard to his military activity. The division commander of the 16th SS Panzer Grenadier Division Max Simon deployed him as an IC officer who was responsible for the enemy situation and the fight against partisans. Looß drew on his experience as an officer who led the SD special command in Ukraine and Belarus from 1943 to 1944. His brutal and cruel methods from there, shaped by the Nazi Weltanschauung war, he introduced into the 16th SS Panzer Grenadier Division from July 1944.

literature

• Carlo Gentile: Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS in Partisan War: Italy 1943–1945. Schöningh, Paderborn 2012, ISBN 978-3-506-76520-8 . (Cologne, Univ., Diss., 2008.)
• Hans-Christian Harten: The ideological training of the police in National Socialism. Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn 2018, ISBN 978-3-657-78836-1 .

Individual evidence

1. ^ Carlo Gentile: Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS in Partisan War: Italy 1943–1945 . Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn 2012, ISBN 978-3-506-76520-8 . P. 297
2. ↑ ^{a b c} Wolfgang Dierker : Himmler's religious warriors . The Security Service of the SS and its Religious Policy 1933–1941 (Publications of the Commission for Contemporary History, Series B: Research, Vol. 92), 2. durchges. Ed., Paderborn [ua] 2003, p. 555 (appendix)
3. ↑ Helmut Looß (1910-1986) , on Memorial Sites Europe 1939-1945 . Retrieved August 29, 2019
4. ^ ^{A b c} Hans-Christian Harten: The ideological training of the police in National Socialism , Paderborn 2018, p. 149
5. ^ Carlo Gentile: Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS in Partisan War: Italy 1943–1945 . Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn 2012, ISBN 978-3-506-76520-8 . P. 298
6. ^ Carlo Gentile: Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS in Partisan War: Italy 1943–1945 . Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn 2012, ISBN 978-3-506-76520-8 . Pp. 298/299
7. ^ Marie Begas: Documents in the Thuringian Church Struggle 1932-1938 , ed. from the Historical Commission Thuringia, p. 425ff. Accessed August 31, 2019
8. ↑ Helmut Looß , on DNB . Accessed August 31, 2019
9. ^ Carlo Gentile: Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS in Partisan War: Italy 1943–1945 . Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn 2012, ISBN 978-3-506-76520-8 . P. 299/300
10. ↑ Ernst Klee: The Personal Lexicon for the Third Reich - Who Was What Before and After 1945 . S. Fischer Verlag. Frankfurt am Main 2003. p. 379
11. ↑ ^{a b} Historical report in the preliminary investigation of the Stuttgart public prosecutor's office against members of the 16th SS-Pz.Gren.Div. "Reichsführer-SS" for murder in Sant'Anna di Stazzema on August 12, 1944 by Dr. Carlo Gentile (PDF; 1 MB), accessed on September 27, 2019.
12. ^ Carlo Gentile: Reconstruction of a massacre (PDF), on Academia. Retrieved August 29, 2019 p. 127
13. ^ Carlo Gentile: Political Soldiers. The 16th SS Panzer Grenadier Division "Reichsführer-SS" in Italy in 1944. In: Sources and research from Italian archives and libraries. Edited by Historical German Institute in Rome ( available online ), 2001, pp. 529–561, here p. 558.
14. ↑ Carlo Gentile: I crimini di guerra tedeschi in Italia 1943-1945. Einaudi, Turin 2015 ISBN 978-88-06-21721-1 pp. 324-325
15. ↑ Carlo Gentile: I crimini di guerra tedeschi in Italia 1943-1945. Einaudi, Turin 2015 ISBN 978-88-06-21721-1 p. 325
16. ^ ^{A b c} Carlo Gentile: I crimini di guerra tedeschi in Italia 1943-1945. Einaudi, Turin 2015 ISBN 978-88-06-21721-1 p. 326
17. ↑ A look into the future , at the Bremen adult education center. In: Program 1st trimester 1948. P. 71.
18. ↑ Carlo Gentile: I crimini di guerra tedeschi in Italia 1943-1945. Einaudi, Turin 2015 ISBN 978-88-06-21721-1 p. 324
19. ^ Carlo Gentile: Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS in Partisan War: Italy 1943–1945 . Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn 2012, ISBN 978-3-506-76520-8 . P. 297