Herbert Lange

Herbert Lange, first commandant of Kulmhof , picture before 1939

Herbert Lange (born September 29, 1909 in Menzlin , Western Pomerania ; † April 20, 1945 near Bernau ) was a German SS leader who was involved in many crimes of the Nazi regime as a Gestapo member , operational group leader and commander of the Kulmhof extermination camp .

Life

Long studied law at the Prussian University of Greifswald . In the summer semester of 1930 he became a member of the Greifswald fraternity Rugia . He finished his studies without an exam. On May 1, 1932, he joined the NSDAP ( membership number 1,159,583). Shortly afterwards he became a member of the storm department .

In the course of the “ seizure of power ” in 1933 he switched to the Schutzstaffel (SS No. 93.501). He entered the police force at the same time with the rank of detective inspector . From 1934 he worked for the Gestapo Stettin and moved to the Gestapo Aachen the following year.

In 1938 Lange was promoted to SS-Untersturmführer, in 1941 to SS-Hauptsturmführer and in 1944 to Sturmbannführer.

personal description

Lange's wife and children lived on the grounds of the Ravensbrück concentration camp in 1945

Christabel Bielenberg (1909–2003) was interrogated on January 4, 1945 by Kriminalrat Herbert Lange in Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse . In 1968 she wrote about it:

“Now I could see him. It was no longer just a disembodied fistulous voice, but a short, stocky, even younger man with a pear-shaped head. He had dark, thinning hair over a high, narrow forehead, round cheeks and a small mouth with bulging lips. He was certainly not beautiful, but it was the look in his eyes that made him so terrifying. They were close together, were very small, very blue, very cold and stared at me intensely and vigilantly. "

Bielenberg had already seen these eyes two weeks before, in a train compartment, on the way to her husband, who was a prisoner in the Ravensbrück concentration camp , they were the eyes of two little girls, one of whom was called Edeltraut. Lange had brought his wife and daughters to safety in this crime scene before the air raids on Berlin .

Task Force VI in Poland

In September 1939, Lange was seconded from the Aachen State Police to Poland to Einsatzgruppe VI, for which he headed the Stapo Group Staff in Posen . On October 10, 1939, Lange opened a Gestapo prison called ' Posen Concentration Camp ' for Einsatzgruppe VI at Fort VII in Posen (Fort Colomb) , which he headed until October 16. When all task forces and commandos were disbanded on November 20, 1939, Lange joined the staff of the inspector of the Security Police and the SD Posen, SS-Standartenführer Ernst Damzog , to whom he remained subordinate until spring 1942.

Lange Sonderkommando

In 1939, Lange became head of the special command named after him. From the beginning of 1940 at least until at least summer 1940, but probably until summer 1941, he was busy with the so-called evacuation of sanatoriums ( psychiatric clinics ) in the Warthegau , in the annexed southern West Prussia and in the Zichenau administrative district . The sick were murdered in gas vans by his command .

The Lange Sonderkommando was responsible for the murder of at least 6,219 Polish and German patients, with a significant number of unreported cases:

Psychiatric institution Tiegenhof ( Dziekanka ) near Gnesen 1.201

Nursing facility costs / Warthegau over 1000 Germans and over 600 Poles

Psychiatric institution Kochanówka near Litzmannstadt 692

Old people's home Schrimm 126

Psychiatric institution Warta ( district Schieratz ) 792

Transit camp Soldau 1,558 Germans from East Prussian provincial institutions and at least 250 Poles from the annexed Zichenau area

At the request of the Wehrmacht , on October 4, 1941, Himmler ordered the Lange Sonderkommando to be brought to Novgorod by plane to kill the inmates of three institutions for psychiatric patients. The premises were needed to accommodate troops.

SS-Sonderkommando Chelmno

From December 1941 on, Lange was the first in command of the Chełmno extermination camp (Kulmhof), where he was responsible for the murder of tens of thousands of Jews , Roma and Sinti . It was in March 1942 by the second commander of the camp Chelmno, hans bothmann , replaced (1911-1946), which he then five weeks einarbeitete .

Reich Security Main Office

After that, Lange worked in the Reich Criminal Police Office under Arthur Nebe in the Reich Main Security Office in Berlin . He persecuted the members of the Solf circle , into which he was able to smuggle in 1943 the informer Paul Reckzeh . In 1943 he was Deputy Head of Division IV E 3 (Defense West France, Switzerland, Belgium). Carl Langbehn and Marie-Louise Sarre were interrogated before July 1944, when he was entrusted with the management of the "Lange" commission for the prosecution of the assassins of July 20, 1944 , Walter Huppenkothen was also on this commission. It was in this role that Bielenberg met him.

Herbert Lange allegedly died as an SS-Sturmbannführer on April 20, 1945 near Bernau during the Battle of Berlin .

literature

Mathias Beer: The development of gas vans during the murder of the Jews . In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 35 (1987), pp. 403–417 ( PDF ).
Volker Rieß: The beginnings of the annihilation of "life unworthy of life" in the Reichsgauen of Danzig-West Prussia and Wartheland 1939/40 . Peter Lang Verlag, Frankfurt am Main and other places. 1993, ISBN 3-631-47784-8 .
Ernst Klee (Ed.): Documents on "Euthanasia" , Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag 4327, Frankfurt am Main 1985, ISBN 3-596-24327-0 .
Ernst Klee: The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich . Who was what before and after 1945? Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2003, ISBN 3-596-16048-0 .
Eugen Kogon , Hermann Langbein , Adalbert Rückerl (ed.): National Socialist mass killings by poison gas. A documentation . S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1988, ISBN 3-10-039304-X .
Ernst Klee, Willi Dreßen , Volker Rieß (eds.): "Nice times". Murder of Jews from the point of view of the perpetrators and gawkers . S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1983, ISBN 3-10-040402-5 .
Janusz Gulczyński: Obóz śmierci w Chełmnie nad Nerem . Konin 1991.
Christabel Bielenberg: When I was German. 1934-1945. An English woman tells (authorized German version by Christian Spiel), Beck, Munich 1987. ISBN 3-406-31919-X .
Patrick Montague, Christopher R. Browning : Chelmo and the Holocaust: A History of Hitler's First Death Camp . Univ. of North Carolina Press, New York 2012 Excerpts from google books

Web links

Individual evidence

↑ Helma Brunck, Harald Lönnecker , Klaus Oldenhage (eds.): "... a large whole ..., even if different in its parts" - contributions to the history of the fraternity (= representations and sources on the history of the German unity movement in the nineteenth and twentieth century, vol. 19), Universitätsverlag Winter , Heidelberg 2012, X u. 673 pp., ISBN 978-3-8253-5961-4 , p. 505.

↑ Bielenberg, p. 255; Hermann Pünder's personal description is also not very flattering. On “Edeltraut”, ibid., P. 235.

^ Peter Longerich : Heinrich Himmler: Biography. Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-88680-859-5 , p. 555.

↑ The "Lange" commission may have included 400 police officers

↑ There are contradicting statements by Huppenkothen after the war

↑ Alexander Groß remembers his father ( Memento from May 25, 2008 in the Internet Archive )

personal data
SURNAME	Long, Herbert
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	German detective commissioner, SS member and commandant of the Chelmo extermination camp
DATE OF BIRTH	September 29, 1909
PLACE OF BIRTH	Menzlin , Western Pomerania
DATE OF DEATH	April 20, 1945
Place of death	near Bernau

[1] Helma Brunck, Harald Lönnecker , Klaus Oldenhage (eds.): "... a large whole ..., even if different in its parts" - contributions to the history of the fraternity (= representations and sources on the history of the German unity movement in the nineteenth and twentieth century, vol. 19), Universitätsverlag Winter , Heidelberg 2012, X u. 673 pp., ISBN 978-3-8253-5961-4 , p. 505.