Herbert Mehlhorn

Georg Herbert Mehlhorn (born March 24, 1903 in Chemnitz , † October 30, 1968 in Tübingen ) was a German lawyer, SS leader and Gestapo officer .

Live and act

Mehlhorn was the son of the Protestant merchant Georg Anton Mehlhorn. His school career, he graduated at the higher elementary school and the town's grammar school in his hometown. After passing his school leaving examination at Easter 1923, he studied law and economics at the Universities of Göttingen , Munich and Leipzig . He received his doctorate in 1929 in Leipzig with magna cum laude for Dr. jur. After two years of preparatory service, he settled in Chemnitz as a lawyer in 1931, where he opened a law firm with a partner. His clients included National Socialists, whom he defended in political trials as a well-known brown lawyer. For these "merits" he was appointed by Reich Commissioner Manfred von Killinger to the board of the Saxon Bar Association in Dresden after the seizure of power .

At the end of the 1920s, Mehlhorn joined the SA . He joined the NSDAP ( membership number 599.865) in 1931. In 1932 he began to work for the SS and the newly established security service . Although he officially joined both organizations on March 5, 1933 (SS No. 36.054) (SS candidate since September 1932), he was de facto employee of the intelligence service as early as 1932 as an employee of the "Press Information Service (PI) of Reichstag deputy Heinrich Himmler " the SS. Because of the work for the Reichstag deputy Himmler, Mehlhorn shared his immunity from police measures. After his admission to the SS, he was promoted to SS-Scharführer on March 5, 1933 and to SS-Sturmführer on July 1, 1933 in quick succession. Since April 6, 1933, he was also a member of the board of the Saxon Bar Association in Dresden . On September 1, 1933, Mehlhorn - as SD-Obersturmführer since September 9, 1933 - was appointed Chief of Staff and Deputy President of the Gestapo Office in Dresden Friedrich Schlegel at Himmler's request . At the same time he was appointed the leading SD leader in the newly established SD upper section center. In this capacity he played a decisive role in the penetration of the Political Police of Saxony by the SD and their takeover by Himmler and Heydrich . During the Röhm putsch , Mehlhorn was head of the State Police Office in Dresden.

In 1935 Mehlhorn came to the SD main office in Berlin as a member of the government . In 1936 he was promoted to SS-Obersturmbannführer and in 1937 to squadron leader. At the beginning of 1937 he became head of the SD main office, but soon afterwards he was deported to the general Prussian administration because of an alleged intrigue against Heydrich.

In 1939 Mehlhorn was promoted to SS-Oberführer . Shortly afterwards, Heydrich appointed him alongside Werner Best , Walter Schellenberg , Kurt Pomme and Karl Wilhelm Albert as one of five directors of the Nordhav Foundation . Later that year, Mehlhorn helped organize the raid on the Gleiwitz transmitter .

After the attack on Poland , Mehlhorn was a member of the staff of the head of civil administration in the military district of Poznan Arthur Greiser and headed the legal office at the district administration in Wartheland . In February 1941 he was entrusted with the management of the economic department and department I (general, internal and financial affairs) of the Reichststatthalterei in Reichsgau Wartheland as a senior government councilor. In this context, he was also responsible for handling all Jewish affairs in the Warthegau and, from 1941, the implementation of the regional processing of the " final solution " in organizational and financial terms. On September 20, 1941, Mehlhorn gave the order “to take all steps to deal with the questions relating to the accommodation and work of the Jews and Gypsies in the Warthegau.” In connection with this directive, he also dealt with the question of camouflaging the Mass graves in the Kulmhof extermination camp .

Mehlhorn was appointed provisional government president in Opole at the end of 1943 . In January 1944 he was awarded the War Merit Cross, First Class, probably for his participation in the extermination of Jews in the Wartheland. Herbert Reischauer succeeded him as head of department in Poznan .

After the Second World War , Mehlhorn lived as a legal advisor in Oberndorf am Neckar . In 1961 he became a legal advisor to Mauser Werke AG .

Fonts

• Determining the penalty for poaching , Teplitz, 1929. (Dissertation)

literature

• Shlomo Aronson : Heydrich and the beginnings of the SD and the Gestapo. 1931-1935 , Ernst Reuter Society, Berlin 1967
• Peter Klein: The "Litzmannstadt ghetto administration" 1940 to 1944: an office in the field of tension between local bureaucracy and state policy of persecution. Hamburger Edition , 2009 ISBN 978-3-86854-203-5
• Christian Ingrao : Hitler's Elite. The pioneers of the National Socialist mass murder. Translated by Enrico Heinemann & Ursel Schäfer. Propylaeen, Berlin 2012 ISBN 9783549074206 ; again Federal Agency for Civic Education BpB, Bonn 2012 ISBN 9783838902579 (first Paris 2010)

Web links

• Literature by and about Herbert Mehlhorn in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Registry Office No. 1135/1968.
2. ↑ ^{a b} Shlomo Aronson: Heydrich and the beginnings of the SD and the Gestapo. 1931-1935 , Ernst Reuter Society, Berlin 1967, p. 87.
3. ↑ Carsten Schreiber: Elite in Hidden - Ideology and Regional Rule Practice of the Security Service of the SS and its Network Using the Example of Saxony , Munich 2008, p. 417.
4. ^ Extract from the SS seniority list
5. ^ ^{A b c} Michael Alberti: The persecution and extermination of Jews in Reichsgau Wartheland 1939–1945 ; Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2006, ISBN 978-3-447-05167-5 , p. 59.
6. ↑ George C. Browder : Foundations of the Nazi Police State. The Formation of Sipo and SD , p. 112.
7. ↑ Steven Lehrer: Wannsee house and the Holocaust , 2000, p. 60.
8. ^ Manfred Struck: Chelmno / Kulmhof. A forgotten place of the Holocaust? , 2001, p. 27.