Hermann Riecken

Hermann Riecken (born August 10, 1901 in Wankendorf ; † February 27, 1985 in Kiel ) was a member of the NSDAP from the very beginning , mayor of Heikendorf (1933–1939), from 1939 district chairman of Flensburg city, and from 1941 NS area commissioner in the Estonian district of Pärnu (German, Pärnau) and in the Latvian Dünaburg (Latvian Daugavpils) (1942–1944). After World War II, Riecken was sentenced to 1½ years in prison in 1948, but after he moved from Flensburg to Kiel (1955) and Heikendorf in October 1960, he was re-integrated as a valued citizen in his home community.

National Socialism

Political activities in the NSDAP and in Schleswig-Holstein

Hermann Riecken was the son of master tailor Hans Christian Riecken and his wife Magdalena from Wankendorf . After completing his school days in Kiel, which ended with the acquisition of the school-leaving certificate, he learned the banking subject. He then worked for eight years in various banking institutions in Kiel, Stuttgart and Donaueschingen. He also held managerial positions in various wholesale companies for another seven years. Riecken joined the NSDAP and the SA in 1930, and later also the SS, as one of the 'early days' . He started out as an SA man and block leader and quickly got to higher offices through his active participation in the SA.

A few weeks after the ' seizure of power ' (January 30, 1933), Heikendorf's last freely elected mayor, Wilhelm Ivens, was deposed and the commercial clerk Hermann Rieckens - as a candidate of the NSDAP - was given the provisional management of the community. Heikendorf was considered a strategically important position for the Nazi leadership. Not only as an important suburban and tourism community of the naval city of Kiel , from 1939 'Reichskriegsstadt', but also because the place was to be upgraded to the satellite town of Kiel with up to 20,000 inhabitants. Officially confirmed in office by the district administrator on May 1, 1933, Riecken held the mayor's office in Heikendorf until 1939. He also took on various honorary positions, such as in 1935 - after the National Socialist prohibition of the free gymnastics associations - the chairmanship of the newly founded 'Heikendorfer Turn- und Sportverein von 1924' as well as the redesign of the submarine memorial in Möltenort, which he created on June 12, 1938 was officially inaugurated.

In the meantime, Riecken volunteered for the military and became a reserve officer. He made a name for himself as a trainer and district manager in the Office for Economic Policy. a. also as a Nazi Gau speaker. In May 1939, the head of the Schleswig-Holstein Gau , Hinrich Lohse , appointed Riecken to the office of district leader of the NSDAP in Flensburg . The administrative employee and candidate of the NSDAP, Hans Burmann from Eutin, replaced Riecken as mayor of Heikendorf (1939-1945).

Acting as NS area commissioner in the Baltic States

After the outbreak of war, Riecken was briefly a soldier, but was ordered back to his office in Flensburg after just three months. In the SS he quickly rose to the rank of Hauptsturmführer eg V. Standard 50 N, SS Upper Section North Sea. On October 14, 1941, Reich Minister Rosenberg - on the recommendation of Hinrich Lohse - appointed Hermann Riecken as regional commissioner for Pärnu (German, Pärnau) in the Reichskommissariat Ostland for the purpose of performing the tasks of the German civil administration for the Pernau and Fellin districts (Estonia). The transfer corresponded to Riecken's personal wish, to whom the special structure of this area had long been known. He is therefore pleased to be able to take up his work here. Maybe Riecken was already in the first World War as a military in the conquest of the Baltic States and / or management of so-called. Upper East involved. At the beginning of January 1942, Riecken moved with his family to Pernau. Its main task consisted in the most rigorous 'valuation' of the occupied territories as well as in the administrative preparation and accompaniment of the extermination of the Jews. Only half a year later, however, it was discontinued due to massive irregularities in purchasing goods. But through the mediation of the Commissioner-General Litzmann he succeeded with the displacement as an area commissioner to Daugavpils (Latvian, Daugavpils) in Latvia a face-saving solution to the problem.

As regional commissioners in the Reichskommissariat Ostland , Riecken had an administrative apparatus with state-of-the-art facilities and a total of 190 employees, 40 of them Germans, the rest of them ethnic Germans and Latvians. Some area commissioners displayed a quasi-feudal self-image, including a pronounced self-enrichment mentality, with the tendency to view the resources they manage as their personal prey. Apparently some area commissioners, mockingly referred to as 'Ostlandritter', saw themselves as successors to the crusaders of the German Order in the Baltic States. The area commissioners wore a specially created yellow-brown uniform, stressed with gold cords, which earned them the nickname " Goldfasane ", which, however, often led to confusion with the SA, from which most of them had emerged. Riecken himself preferred to wear his gray uniform to SS-Hauptsturmführer in the 'Ostland' because it earned him a higher reputation there. Riecken was considered particularly vain and lived in high spirits. In Dünaburg, his second position as area commissioner (1942–1944), he is said to have claimed a 'country house with every comfort' in addition to a 20-room official apartment. On home leave for the golden wedding of his parents in Wankendorf in 1942, for example, he traveled specially in his gold-studded service uniform and company car from Dünaburg and brought champagne and other delicacies with him. The Wankendorfer were so impressed by the visit of the 'gold pheasant' that they told their children that Mr. To greet Riecken politely with 'Heil Hitler'.

Administrative map of the Reichskommissariat Ostland , 1942

Overall, the civil administration of the German occupying power in the 'Ostland' was considered ineffective. However, this did not apply to the deportation of tens of thousands of people as forced laborers into the German Reich, nor to the registration of Jews, 'communists', 'gypsies', 'mentally ill' and 'partisans', including the recording of property that was confiscated, whereby the Categories were broad and included the indiscriminate murder of civilians. The civil administration also had to take care of the registration and identification of Jews and forced them to move from their villages to the ghettos of the cities. Wehrmacht units and regional commissioners were not allowed to participate directly in the extermination of the Jews. However, this did not rule out some of them taking part in their free time until this was also banned, in order to leave the mass shootings to local aid teams and not to damage the reputation of the Wehrmacht.

From 1941 to January 1942, German troops and their Latvian volunteers murdered approx. 330,000 Jews, 8359 “communists”, 1044 “partisans” and 1644 “mentally ill (ibid.)” In the Reichskommissariat Ostland . In addition to the 670,000 Baltic Jews who survived the first wave of deaths, there were 50,000 Jews from the German Reich, including Schleswig-Holstein, who were deported to the Jewish ghettos in Riga and Minsk in the winter of 1941/42. The Riga ghetto had previously been evacuated to make room. The SS had the 27,800 'Jews' living there shot in mass murder in the Biķernieki forest near Riga. Gauleiter Lohse personally attended a shooting, "to get an idea of ​​the situation", as he explained during his court hearings after the war. The second great wave of the extermination of Jews in the 'Ostland' began in the winter of 1943. Another 570,000 Jews fell victim to it. At the same time, several hundred thousand people died of hunger and epidemics, including around 2,000 prisoners of war every day. The remaining approx. 100,000 Jews were deported to the concentration camps of Kauen, Riga-Kaiserwald, Klooga and Vaivara, and liquidated in 1944 when the Red Army approached (ibid.).

It is not known whether SS-Hauptsturmführer and District Commissioner Riecken personally participated in the murder of 'Jews' in his area of ​​responsibility, nor is any possible involvement in the capture or deportation of Jews in his previous area of ​​activity, Heikendorf or Flensburg; but it cannot be ruled out either.

After the advance of the Soviet front, most of the area commissioners and their employees returned to their homeland by the winter of 1944/45 at the latest. Riecken and his family also drove back to the Plön district in 1944. Most of the members of the civil administration of the so-called 'Ostland' managed to continue their administrative and judicial careers after the war by systematically knitting their own legends of their innocence, up to and including outrageous lies. The CDU-led state government in Schleswig-Holstein actively supported this.

Reintegration in Heikendorf after the end of the war

After the end of World War II, the British military government dismissed all heads of office and mayors who had been NSDAP members and, from April 1, 1946, introduced a new municipal law based on the British model. Riecken was arrested in July 1945 and sentenced in 1948 to a relatively mild prison term of one year and eight months, with his internment in the Neuengamme internment camp being fully taken into account. This is not least because former colleagues issued him flattering certificates of good repute and, in comparison with other district leaders, e.g. B. Claus Hahn from Flensburg, was able to stand out in the court proceedings due to his appearance. All NSDAP members of the city and municipal administrations of Schleswig-Holstein were dismissed and subjected to a denazification process. However, this only took place to a very limited extent and usually ended with a classification as 'fellow travelers' (IV) or 'relieved' (V), as was the case in Kiel and Heikendorf. Riecken also found mild judges during the denazification , who classified him as a 'fellow traveler' (IV). However, according to the verdict of his first denazification proceedings in 1947, he was not allowed to work in a managerial position for five years and not open or manage his own business for ten years. In a second denazification procedure in April 1949, the Flensburg Main Committee I softened the judgment again by withdrawing Riecken's right to stand for a short period as the only restriction and imposing a fine of 100 DM on him. Even his foster father and superior in the Baltic States, Gauleiter Hinrich Lohse , emerged from the proceedings as a 'minor' (III). He was even awarded a generous pension on July 27, 1951.

During their 'debt relief', Nazi perpetrators found willing helpers at all levels of politics, administration and society. Even after 1949, the CDU-led Schleswig-Holstein state government felt particularly responsible for the 'winding up' of the Reichskommissariat Ostland , which Gauleiter Lohse had administered like Schleswig-Holstein's colony until 1944. Most of his colleagues in the Ostland administration were given posts in Schleswig-Holstein again. And this, although the public prosecutor's offices in the trials against the 'Ostland' administrative staff clearly succeeded in demonstrating and specifying the responsibility and involvement of the civil administrations in the Holocaust. The latter played a central coordinating role: it defined and recorded 'Jews', set up ghettos for them (in Schaulen , Kauen , Wilna , Libau , Dünaburg and Riga ) and regulated their supplies. In addition, she assigned the ghetto inmates to forced labor for the German armed forces, business and administration, appointed and supervised the Jewish 'councils of elders'. Eventually, she confiscated their stolen property and even provided vehicle fleets for clearing the ghettos and the subsequent firing squads. In doing so, some area commissioners helped themselves. B. to transport Jews from their homes to the ghettos or to carry out raids and body searches.

Many area commissioners, however, were visibly shocked by the bloody "solution" to the Jewish question that was unfolding before their eyes. Not only because the indiscriminate shootings deprived them of urgently needed skilled workers for the economic production of war-essential goods, but also because they feared that the bloody mass murders could endanger the acceptance of the occupying power and the mood of the population in the occupied territories. Ultimately, these attacks endangered the area commissioners' claim to power and led to conflicting goals between the SS and the security police on the one hand and the civil administration on the other. In the end, however, the civil administration was defeated because the extermination of the 'Jews' in the 'Ostland' after the 'Führer decision' clearly had priority. On the other hand, the daily violence experienced in public also produced a habituation effect, which meant that some area commissioners, including their families, lost all inhibitions. The wife of area manager Hans Gewecke , NSDAP district leader in Lauenburg and area commissioner in Schaulen, openly boasted at a working lunch at the end of 1941 that she had killed her 'house Jew'. As a diligent house servant, he gradually knew too much about the family and what was going on in the General Commissariat, which is why she considered it better to have him liquidated - together with his wife.

Through their decision-making power over the question of who was considered a 'Jew' or other persecuted person of the Nazi regime and who was obliged to perform forced labor, the area commissioners and their accomplices became masters of life and death. For example in the fatal selections of Jews who are still 'useful' for the German war economy from those Jews who are no longer needed. After the war, the administrative cadre involved and accused were often so brazen as to reinterpret this in their favor as actions of resistance against the Holocaust. In contrast to the usual excuses of those concerned that they had no choice but to follow the official instructions (emergency action), the public prosecutor's office in the first criminal trials in 1968 usually clearly identified the existence of individual room for maneuver of the area commissioners. The latter ranged from demonstrative disapproval to personal participation in the murders. This included, for example, the raising of mostly Jewish work detachments to dig up the mass graves, the provision of transport capacities for the firing squads and for the transport of the victims to the execution sites. Individual regional commissariats also appeared regularly at the planning rounds of the police leadership in preparation for the mass executions and during the shootings themselves, giving the actions a quasi-official appearance.

After the war, the imaginative invention of legends about 'debt relief' was actively supported by the 'perpetrators' through social networks of the accused and by the Schleswig-Holstein state government. During the Cold War against communism in the Eastern Bloc , the latter did everything possible to protect the administrative officials concerned from criminal prosecution. State and society treated the area commanders and their employees both criminally and in terms of their moral assessment as if they had been nothing more than district administrators in the occupied territories, just like other district administrators in the German Reich during the Nazi era. Not a few even succeeded - especially in Schleswig-Holstein - in profiting from the climate of cover-up and denial and climbing the career ladder further (ibid).

This applied not least to their participation in the persecution of the Jews. Some could - tolerated or supported by the communities in which they had regained a foothold - even issue their ' clean bill of health ' themselves afterwards. Hermann Riecken summarized life in Heikendorf from 1933 to 1939, that is, during the time when he was NSDAP mayor himself, as follows: “The fight against Judaism affected us little in Heikendorf. There were 3 or 4 Jews in our church, people who were known to be Jews. For a while the zealous National Socialists also read the magazine 'Der Stürmer' and spread it around a little, but the Heikendorfer were not interested and they took no notice of it. Something like that did not arrive here. We didn't feel anything from the so-called 'Kristallnacht' in Heikendorf. "

Such legends were typical. It was kept secret, for example, that when the Jews were recorded, e. B. by the Dt. Minorities census of 1939, not the creed but the descent that mattered. This was to be given in detail on the supplementary census cards for the purpose of creating a so-called Jewish card index , which was to be kept at the district level, in the present case in the Plön district . That is, according to the Nazi definition, Jews or "Jewish descent" included all people who lived in a household in which at least one person had a Jewish grandparent; they could e.g. B. be baptized as a Christian. So in Heikendorf 1939 not only three or four, but 24 people based on the German. Minorities census recorded as Jews. It is currently not known whether some of them suffered the same fate as the three native Heikendorfer who were murdered in the Sachsenhausen and Mauthausen concentration camps.

The processing of the persecution of the Jews in Heikendorf only began in 2019 with the discovery of an exemplary case, the fate of the family of the painter Nathan Israel Cohn (born in 1862). His wife Hanna Cohn (née Lunczer) died in the Neustadt mental hospital in April 1941 'of old age', and her sister, Sarah Hedwig Lunczer, committed suicide as an 84-year-old widow after she received her deportation order on June 17, 1942. In this way she escaped the fate of another 801 fellow sufferers who were deported from the Hamburg, Lüneburg and Schleswig-Holstein area to the extermination camp on July 19, 1942, where they arrived two days later. According to the official version, master painter Cohn himself died on March 13, 1942 of "bladder cancer and cysts of the bladder".

After his release from prison (1950), Riecken began his new professional career as a warehouse worker in Flensburg. Like many other former colleagues of the Nazi elite, however, he quickly succeeded in re-entering the society's honor circles. Hermann Riecken also returned to local politics at the place of his previous work as the NSDAP citizens' monastery in Heikendorf (1933–1939). From 1966 to 1971 he was a member of the electoral alliance 'Rathausgemeinschaft' (town hall community) and was widely valued as the founder (1959) and long-time director of the local tourism and municipal association.

literature

• Danker, Uwe (1998): The murder of Jews in the Reich Commissariat Ostland. In: "Schleswig-Holstein and the crimes of the Wehrmacht". , Kiel: November 1998, '' Gegenwind '', Heinrich Böll Foundation, Schleswig-Holstein, pp. 46–55.
• Danker, Uwe & Sebastian Lehmann & Robert Bohm (2011): Reichskommissariat Ostland. Crime scene and souvenir. Flensburg: Institute for Schleswig-Holstein Contemporary and Regional History, University of Flensburg and Military History Research Office, Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 373 pages, ISBN 3-506-77188-4
• Endlich, Stefanie & Beate Rossié (2019): "Nazi perpetrators and war criminals under the protection of the Church, New Beginnings after 1945? (Part 3), Hamburg: Evangelical Lutheran Church in Northern Germany (Northern Church)
• Klinger, Klaus (1998): Ignorance Instead of Justice - The Schleswig-Holstein Post-War Justice and the Persecution of the Jews. In: Paul & Carlebach (1998), pp. 723-728
• Lehmann, Sebastian (2007): District leader of the NSDAP in Schleswig-Holstein: résumés and rulership practice of a regional power elite. Bielefeld: Publishing house for regional history, IZRG series of publications, Volume 13, ISBN 3-89534-653-5
• Lehmann, Sebastian (2007a): 'Documented for the first time: résumés of district leaders in the north - Interview with Sebastian Lehmann about his pioneering work on Nazi research in Schleswig-Holstein'. Flensburger Tageblatt, July 5th, 2007
• Paul, Gerhard & Gillis Carelbach (eds.) (1998): '' Menorah and swastika: On the history of the Jews in and from Schleswig-Holstein, Lübeck and Altona: 1918–1998 '', Neumünster: Wachholtz, 1998, ISBN 3- 529-06149-2
• Pohl, Reinhard (1998): Reichskommissariat Ostland: Schleswig-Holstein's Colony. In: "Schleswig-Holstein and the crimes of the Wehrmacht". , Kiel: November 1998, '' Gegenwind '', Heinrich Böll Foundation, Schleswig-Holstein, pp. 10–12.
• Sätje, Herbert (Ed.) (1983): Heikendorf: Chronicle of a community on the Kiel Fjord, rural and urban at the same time. Hamburg: Hans Christians Verlag, ISBN 3-7672-0815-6

Individual evidence

1. ^ Tallinn Revaler Zeitung, Newspaper Archives, February 3, 1942, p. 4
2. ↑ Sätje, Herbert (Ed.) (1983): Heikendorf: Chronicle of a community on the Kiel Fjord, rural and urban at the same time. Hamburg: Hans Christians Verlag, pp. 127-133
3. ↑ Sätje, Herbert (Ed.) (1983): 286, 364
4. ↑ "Area Commissioner Riecken - Inauguration by the General Commissioner today", Tallinn Revaler Zeitung, Newspaper Archives, February 3, 1942, p. 4
5. ^ Tallinn Revaler Zeitung, Newspaper Archives, February 3, 1942, p. 4
6. ↑ s. Interview with H. Riecken in the Estonian daily newspaper UUS ELU (1941): Area Commissioner Riecken. Reval: UUS ELU (New Life), No. 70, Neljapäeval, December 11, 1941, p. 1
7. ↑ Lehmann, Sebastian (2007): District leader of the NSDAP in Schleswig-Holstein: résumés and ruling practice of a regional power elite. Bielefeld: Publishing House for Regional History, p. 402
8. ^ Danker, Uwe (1998): Der Judenmord im Reichskommissariat Ostland. In: Schleswig-Holstein and the crimes of the Wehrmacht. Kiel: November 1998, "Gegenwind", Heinrich Böll Foundation, Schleswig-Holstein, p. 49
9. ↑ Lehmann, (2007), p. 402
10. ↑ Griese, Volker & Hermann Griese (2018): Wankendorf through the ages: A Chronicle. Books on Demand, p. 80, ISBN 3-7481-3008-2
11. ^ Pohl, Reinhard (1998) Reichskommissariat Ostland: Schleswig-Holstein's colony. In: Schleswig-Holstein and the crimes of the Wehrmacht. Kiel: November 1998, "Gegenwind", Heinrich Böll Foundation, Schleswig-Holstein, pp. 10–12
12. ^ Pohl, Reinhard (1998) Reichskommissariat Ostland: Schleswig-Holstein's colony. In: Schleswig-Holstein and the crimes of the Wehrmacht. Kiel: November 1998, "Gegenwind", Heinrich Böll Foundation, Schleswig-Holstein, pp. 10-12
13. ↑ Danker, (1998), pp. 47-48
14. ↑ Sätje, Herbert (Ed.) (1983): Heikendorf: Chronicle of a community on the Kiel Fjord, rural and urban at the same time. Hamburg: Hans Christians Verlag, ISBN 3-7672-0815-6 , pp. 127-139, 152-153
15. ↑ Lehmann, (2007), p. 435
16. ↑ Lehmann (2007), p. 451
17. ↑ Lehmann (2007), p. 453
18. ↑ Lehmann, Sebastian (2007a): "Documented for the first time: CVs of district leaders in the north - Interview with Sebastian Lehmann about his pioneering work on Nazi research in Schleswig-Holstein, Flensburger Tageblatt, July 5th, 2007
19. ↑ Pohl, Reinhard (1998): `` Reichskommissariat Ostland: Schleswig-Holsteins Kolonie. '' In: Schleswig-Holstein and the crimes of the Wehrmacht. Kiel: November 1998, "Gegenwind", Heinrich Böll Foundation, Schleswig-Holstein, p. 12
20. ↑ Pohl, Reinhard (1998): `` Reichskommissariat Ostland: Schleswig-Holsteins Kolonie. '' In: Schleswig-Holstein and the crimes of the Wehrmacht. Kiel: November 1998, "Gegenwind", Heinrich Böll Foundation, Schleswig-Holstein, p. 12
21. ↑ Lehmann, (2007), pp. 396–341
22. ↑ Danker, (1998), p. 50.
23. ↑ Danker, (1998), p. 52.
24. ^ Riecken, Hermann (1977): situation report on life in the period from 1933–1939, Heikendorf 1977, community archive; cited in Sätje, H. (1983), Heikendorf: Chronik einer Gemeinde. Hamburg: Christians, 1983: 153
25. ↑ Danker, (1998), pp. 46-55
26. ↑ It's about Arthur Langenhagen, born December 1, 1902 in Altheikendorf, baptized Protestant, who was sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp on June 21, 1938 as part of the “Arbeitsscheu Reich” campaign; Date of death: January 19, 1939, inmate number: 4048 (Sachsenhausen concentration camp) and Heinrich Forche (1911-1943), died February 27, 1943, and Josef Seibert, 1893-1943, died December 17, 1943, both murdered in Mauthausen / Gusen concentration camp, presumably because they belonged to the KPD.
27. ↑ Schättler, Nadine (2019): Memorial stone commemorates Nazi victims. Kieler Nachrichten, November 10, 2019 ; Statistics and deportation of the Jewish population from the German Reich, district office Northwest Germany, deportation lists
28. ↑ Lehmann (2007), p. 466
29. ↑ Sätje (1983): 131