Herbert Küssner

Herbert Johannes Ernst Küssner (born April 29, 1899 in Königsberg , East Prussia , † unknown) was a German lawyer and police officer. Since 1934 he was a senior officer in the Secret State Police Office .

Life and activity

Küssner was the second son of the accountant Friedrich Küssner and his wife Hedwig, née Bredenberg. He completed his school days at the Royal Friedrichs Collegium in Königsberg, which he left at Easter 1917. In May 1917 he joined the 1st East Prussian Field Artillery Regiment No. 16 as a war volunteer, with whom he took part in the First World War until November 1918 . At the end of the war he resigned as a lieutenant in the reserve.

From 1920 Küssner studied law and political science in Königsberg in Prussia, Würzburg , Halle and Breslau . In July 1922 his doctorate he in Würzburg with one of Christian Meurer supervised work on the international legal assessment of piracy to Dr. rer. pol . He then worked for several years as a bank clerk and economist .

In 1927 Küssner was accepted into the police service. In this he was first assigned to the criminal police in Wroclaw . Around 1930 he reached the rank of detective inspector. In 1933 at the latest, Küssner was transferred to the police institute in Berlin-Charlottenburg .

In 1933 he submitted a second - legal - dissertation, with which he became a Dr. jur. PhD. From then on he held the degree of Dr. Dr. ( Dr. jur. And Dr. rer. Pol. ).

In May 1934, Küssner was transferred to the Secret State Police Office in Berlin. His transfer was part of the general job requirements among the higher officials of this authority when Reinhard Heydrich took over the management of the Gestapo headquarters in April 1934.

In the following years Küssner was one of Josef Meisinger's closest employees . Together with Meisinger, Eberhard Schiele , Fritz Fehling and Joachim Kaintzik , Küssner formed the leadership group of those five functionaries within the Gestapo apparatus at the end of the 1930s - at that time with the rank of criminal investigator - who were assigned to the Berlin Gestapo headquarters as Section II 1 S (“Combat Homosexuality and Abortion ”) directed and coordinated the nationwide measures of the National Socialist secret police to combat homosexuality and abortion . Several 10,000 people were affected by the persecution of homosexuality, which the regime classified as "harmful".

As far as this can be seen from the official SS lists , Küssner, unlike most Gestapo officers in the higher service, did not join this organization.

After the Second World War, Küssner lived in Lower Saxony.

Fonts

• The international legal assessment of piracy with special consideration of the world war. A historical-critical study. Wuerzburg 1922.
• Fixed prices and their rights. Wroclaw 1933.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Curriculum vitae on the author in: Herbert Küssner: The fixed price and their right. 1933.
2. ^ Curriculum vitae on the author in: Herbert Küssner: The fixed price and their right. 1933.
3. ^ ^{A b} Christoph Graf: Political Police Between Democracy and Dictatorship: The Development of the Prussian Political Police from the State Protection Organ of the Weimar Republic to the Secret State Police Office of the Third Reich. 1983, p. 238.
4. ↑ Burkhard Jellonnek: Homosexuals under the swastika: The persecution of homosexuals in the Third Reich. 1990, p. 124. With reference to the business distribution plan of the Main Office of the Security Police of January 1, 1938. According to Jellonnek's presentation of the business distribution plan, Küssner was Meisinger's second man in charge of the abortion department. Other reproductions of the business distribution plan, however, name him as the second man behind Meisinger in the head of the homosexuality department, so that it is not entirely certain which groups of opponents he was mainly concerned with fighting.
5. ↑ Udo Rauchfleisch: Gays, Lesbians, Bisexuals: Lifestyles, Prejudices, Insights. Göttingen 2011, p. 127.