Herbert Zimmermann (SS member)

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Herbert Zimmermann (born August 22, 1907 in Eisleben ; died December 31, 1965 in Bielefeld ) was a German lawyer , lawyer and SS-Obersturmbannführer .

Life

Origin and school

Zimmermann was the son of a middle-class civil servant and grew up in Merseburg . He attended the Domgymnasium Merseburg and began studying theology at the University of Marburg in 1927 , but switched to lawyers after one semester and passed the first state examination in 1932. On May 31, 1933, he received his doctorate in Marburg . He was married and had two children.

Pre-war period

In 1933 he joined the NSDAP (membership number 3.065.231) and the SS (membership number 118.240). After completing his legal traineeship, he became a court assessor at the Magdeburg public prosecutor and in the Merseburg provincial administration . At the end of 1937 he switched to the Reichsführer SS in the Reich Ministry of the Interior . Here he worked on the expatriation of Jewish emigrants.

Second World War

In 1939 he was appointed to the government council of the Gestapo control center in Münster , and from 1940 he headed the Gestapo in Bremen . In May 1943 he replaced Wilhelm Altenloh as commander of the security police and SD (KdS) in the Białystok district . He was the deputy head of Einsatzgruppe B and played a leading role in the extermination of the Jews . In July 1944 he had to flee from the Red Army to Königsberg . He was commanded to the Western Front in November 1944 and appointed KdS Westmark . In April 1945 he set up his office in St. Peter north of Freiburg im Breisgau .

post war period

After the end of the war he lived for a while under the false name of “customs officer” and worked as a farm worker. In autumn 1945 he was taken prisoner by the French, from which he escaped in early 1946. He retrained to become a carpenter in Thuringia and studied at the Hagen Building School with an examination as a civil engineer. His false name protected him from an extradition request from the Polish authorities who had put Commander Białystok on the Allied wanted list for the shooting of 1,125 Poles and the murder of the inhabitants of two villages. His family had also fled the Eastern Zone to the West in 1949, Zimmermann divorced in 1952 and married a Westphalian landowner. According to the first amnesty laws in the Federal Republic of Germany, Zimmermann allowed himself to be admitted by the Justice Minister of Schleswig-Holstein in July 1953 as an associate lawyer and in December 1954 as an attorney at the Kiel District Court . In January 1957 he was admitted to the bar at the Bielefeld District and Regional Court and practiced as a lawyer in Bielefeld from February 1957.

Trial and death

After World War II , Zimmermann was charged with a number of war crimes . He has been under investigation since 1959 because he was responsible for the shooting of 1,125 Poles and for the “cremation” of three villages and that he knowingly in a number of cases involving the insidious, cruel or low-motive killing of people Help ”. As KdS, he organized the violent dissolution of the Białystok ghetto . He had sick Jews killed on the spot and transported unfit for work to extermination camps for " special treatment ", of which at least 15,000 were murdered in the Treblinka extermination camp . He also had several hundred Białystok children transported to the Theresienstadt ghetto , from where they were sent to the Auschwitz extermination camp . From spring 1944 Zimmermann had mass graves with around 40,000 corpses in the Bialystok district digested and burned . The 30 or so Jews who were used as forced labor were then shot. In 1954 he and other accused were charged with shooting the commander of the Freiburg im Breisgau police force, who had been executed in early 1945 for refusing to help set up a local werewolf organization . The District Court of Munich II acquitted all the accused on July 7, 1954. The Munich public prosecutor's office had since been aware of Zimmermann's activities in occupied Poland , but did not draw any conclusions from it. As a result of the findings from the Ulm Einsatzgruppen trial , Zimmermann was indicted before the Bielefeld Regional Court in 1959 for having ordered the execution of the last hundred prison inmates in Białystok in July 1944, but was acquitted. In 1964, further investigations led to a lawsuit being brought before the Bielefeld district court for murder and accessory to the murder of at least 16,000 people. Zimmermann refused to give any testimony during the investigation: he did not comment on the allegations made against him, nor was he prepared to provide information as a witness. On December 29, 1965, a warrant for Zimmermann, who just before his arrest was issued on 31 December suicide committed. In the trial that bore his name, Wilhelm Altenloh and three other defendants were sentenced to several years' imprisonment by the Bielefeld Regional Court.

literature

  • Katrin Stoll : Establishing the truth: criminal proceedings against former members of the security police for the Białystok district . Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 2012. Vita on p. 198f.
  • Katrin Stoll: "... for lack of evidence". The proceedings against Dr. Herbert Zimmermann before the Bielefeld district court 1958/1959. In: Freia Anders (Ed.): Białystok in Bielefeld: National Socialist crimes before the Bielefeld Regional Court 1958 to 1967 . Publishing house for regional history, Bielefeld 2003, pp. 54–75.
  • LG Munich II, July 7, 1954. In: Justice and Nazi crimes . Collection of German convictions for Nazi homicidal crimes 1945–1966. Volume XII, edited by Adelheid L Rüter-Ehlermann, HH Fuchs and CF Rüter . University Press, Amsterdam 1974, No. 402, pp. 543-571. jur.uva.nl
  • LG Bielefeld, November 25, 1959 . In: Justice and Nazi crimes . Collection of German criminal judgments for Nazi homicidal crimes 1945–1966, Vol. XVI, edited by Irene Sagel-Grande, HH Fuchs, CF Rüter . Amsterdam: University Press, 1976, No. 487, pp. 251–273 Subject matter of the proceedings: shooting of around 100 inmates of the police prison in Bialystok shortly before the city was evacuated

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Biographical information from LG Munich II, July 7, 1954
  2. ↑ Herbert Zimmermann , at Marburg University Archives
  3. ↑ Doc. VEJ 2/132 In: Susanne Heim (edit.): The persecution and murder of European Jews by National Socialist Germany 1933–1945. (Collection of sources) Volume 2: German Reich 1938 - August 1939. Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-486-58523-0 , pp. 383-384.
  4. ↑ Katrin Stoll: The production of truth. 2012, p. 299.
  5. ↑ Katrin Stoll: The production of truth. 2012, p. 200.
  6. ↑ Katrin Stoll: The production of truth. 2012, p. 233, p. 252.
  7. ^ LG Bielefeld: Nazi violent crimes in detention centers. ( Memento of the original from February 21, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: Justice and Nazi crimes . 487, November 25, 1959. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www1.jur.uva.nl
  8. ↑ Katrin Stoll: for lack of evidence. 2003, pp. 54-75.
  9. ↑ Katrin Stoll: The production of truth. 2012, p. 299.
  10. ↑ Katrin Stoll: The production of truth. 2012, p. 234.
  11. ↑ Katrin Stoll: for lack of evidence. 2003, pp. 54–75, here p. 74.
  12. ^ Andreas Eichmüller: No general amnesty. The prosecution of Nazi crimes in the early Federal Republic. Oldenbourg, Munich 2012, p. 356, fn. 56
personal data
SURNAME Carpenter, Herbert
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German lawyer, attorney and SS-Obersturmbannführer
DATE OF BIRTH August 22, 1907
PLACE OF BIRTH Eisleben
DATE OF DEATH December 31, 1965
Place of death Bielefeld