Hinrich Möller (SS member)

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Hinrich Möller (born April 20, 1906 in Grevenkop ; † October 13, 1974 in Preetz ) was a German commercial assistant and early NSDAP and SS member. In 1934, as Hauptsturmführer and chief of police in Neumünster, he had two people in custody murdered. A few days later he was promoted by Heinrich Himmler to head of SS-Standarte 50 (North Sea) in Flensburg and later to police director in Flensburg. In 1941, as SS and Police Leader (SSPF) Estonia in the civil administration of the Estonia General District of the Reichskommissariat Ostland, he was one of the main people responsible for the murder of Jews in German-occupied Estonia. He ended the war as an SS brigade leader and major general of the police. For the murder of the two inmates in Neumünster, Möller was sentenced to death by a British military court in Schleswig-Holstein. The sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment . The Schleswig-Holstein judiciary released Möller ten years after the conviction. Möller was never prosecuted because of his alleged involvement in murders against Jews in Estonia.

Beginnings of National Socialism

Möller graduated from Holstenschule in 1922 and completed his commercial apprenticeship as a clerk in his parents' company in 1926.

He joined the NSDAP in early February 1929 ( membership number 113.298). After joining the SS (SS No. 5,741) on October 15, 1930, a steep career began.

Terror against others

After the National Socialists came to power in 1933, Möller became SS-Hauptsturmführer in charge of the Neumünster municipal police and resided in the town hall. In 1934, in this function, he murdered KPD members Christian Heuck and Rudolf Timm in the Neumünster prison with a few assistants .
Rudolf Timm had traveled from the Rhineland to Neumünster on January 21, 1934 on the instructions of the police. At the Neumünster train station, the police took him into so-called protective custody. He was then held in the Am haar police prison , which Möller was under. On January 23, 1934, while he was being returned from an interrogation in the town hall to his cell, Timm was shot on the street at around 7:30 p.m. by the SS people accompanying him, where he was only slightly injured. On the night of January 24th to 25th, 1934, Timm was visited in his cell by four to five SS men together with Hinrich Möller. The SS men strangled him and attempted to "do suicide", as Möller stated in the criminal case against him after the war. They hung the body on the cross window. Möller allegedly waited in front of the cell door during the murder and was not aware of the murder itself. A doctor initiated into the crime confirmed this alleged suicide. And so the Schleswig-Holstein Courier reported on January 25, 1934 about the alleged suicide of Timm.
Christian Heuck was visited in the evening of February 23, 1934 by Möller and another four to five SS men in the correctional facility on Boostedter Strasse, where he was serving a prison sentence. For this purpose, the SS men were taken to Heuck's cell by the prison administration. Again Möller allegedly stayed outside the cell while the crime was being carried out and was not aware of the murder inside the cell. Among other things, the historian Reimer Möller considers this statement to be untrue, because in 1976 a KPD man who was also in the Neumünster prison on that night of February 23, 1934, stated that he had heard loud screams from Christian Heuck's cell. Heuck was also strangled. After the crime, the prison doctor certified suicide as the cause of death. The body was handed over to the cemetery administration in Kiel and was to be cremated the next day. The wife was forbidden to look at the body, but she still managed to gain access to the body with an experienced nurse. The body was full of bruises and had large strangle marks on the neck. As the widow Heucks stated in an interrogation before the public prosecutor in 1946, she was summoned to the police headquarters the next morning and asked whether she noticed anything about the body. She replied that a suicide “couldn't beat himself up”. She was threatened with dire consequences if she gave information about what she saw. False reports were also spread in the newspapers about this murder.

Career with the SS

These murders had a positive effect on Möller's progress. Only a few days later, on March 1, 1934, Heinrich Himmler promoted him to SS-Sturmbannführer , in 1935 to Obersturmbannführer and on January 1, 1936 to Standartenführer . From July 7, 1934, Möller led the 50th SS standard in the upper section of the North Sea with its seat in the Karl-Radke-Haus at Jürgensgaarderstraße 11 in Flensburg. The house was named after the SS member Karl Radke, who died on November 9, 1931 in a confrontation provoked by the Nazis between members of a demonstration of the Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold and the National Socialists. In addition, Möller became provisional police president after 1937 and finally in May 1938 police director in Flensburg (cf. Police headquarters in Flensburg ). His deputy in both functions was Standartenführer Hans Hinsch . After some time, Möller put the Flensburg police under direct control of Reichsführer SS Himmler, while until then they had been subordinate to the district president Wilhelm Hamkens in Schleswig.

Persecution of Jews in Schleswig-Holstein

During the Reichspogromnacht Möller was one of the main actors in the crimes committed against "Jews" in Schleswig-Holstein. For example, on November 10, 1938, around 3 a.m., Möller and his SS men attacked the Jägerslust estate near Flensburg and its defenseless residents and guests. The Jägerslust estate belonged to the Wolff family from Flensburg, who belonged to the Danish minority and were partly of Jewish faith. Wolffs had made the property available for preparatory courses for emigration projects of persecuted Jews to Palestine, the Hachschara , and they practiced life in a kibuzz. The Nazis proceeded conspiratorially. They came without uniform at three o'clock at night, a police car that was in use had covered license plates. They mistreated the residents and their guests, then arrested them and took them to the Norderhofenden prison in Flensburg. The host, Alexander Wolff, was spared the arrest. He was badly beaten. Then the Nazis drove him in the car to a lonely place in the border area with Denmark to murder him there. With a lightning-fast reaction, Wolff managed to disappear into the dark after getting out of the car. He saved himself seriously injured in nearby Denmark. When the work was done, Möller let his teams sit up and drove with them to Friedrichstadt. Around nine o'clock in the morning he and his people arrived in Friedrichstadt and there began the second pogrom of the day. He announced that he wanted to “complete” the nightly work of destruction and allowed himself to be led to the synagogue and the “Jewish houses”. There were repeated attacks. In the synagogue , Möller tried to pull down the chandelier by holding onto it. Before Möller left Friedrichstadt again, he ordered the arrest of all Jewish citizens.

In the Reichskommissariat Ostland

After the attack on the Soviet Union , Möller acted as SS and Police Leader Estonia in Estonia's capital Reval / Tallinn from August 1941 and apparently played a leading role in the extermination of Estonian Jews. According to the Higher SS and Police Leader HSSPF Friedrich Jeckeln , who resided in the capital of the Reichskommissariat Riga as Möller's superior, Möller was very likely involved in the extermination of the 3,000 to 5,000 Estonian Jews, most of whom were murdered in Tallinn. At the end of January 1944 he was promoted to SS Brigadefuhrer and Major General of the Police.

As a result of the advance of the Red Army , Möller's office was closed in autumn 1944. He was then transferred to the upper section Ostland and in mid-February 1945 commanded to Army Group Vistula for special use of the RFSS.

After the end of the Third Reich

After 1945, Möller was sentenced to three years in prison for his terrorist measures against Jewish citizens in Schleswig-Holstein . Because of the murder of the two KPD functionaries, Möller was sentenced to death in a two-day hearing on December 4, 1947 by the Kiel Regional Court . The higher regional court upheld this sentence. Möller had some outside supporters. The Neumünster Provost Steffen and Kiel Bishop Wilhelm Halfmann campaigned for Möller that, among other things, the sentence should not be carried out. The sentence was also commuted to life in 1948 and reduced to 15 years by pardon in 1954. In 1958 Möller was released, although he had refused in court to reveal his accomplices and to help properly solve the crime. No criminal case has been initiated for his actions in Estonia.

literature

  • Uwe Danker, Astrid Schwabe: Schleswig-Holstein and National Socialism. Neumünster 2005.
  • Irene Dittrich: Local history guide to places of resistance and persecution 1933–1945. Volume 7: Schleswig-Holstein. 1: Northern part of the country. VAS, Frankfurt am Main 1993, ISBN 3-88864-046-6 .
  • Tôviyyā Friedman (Ed.): The three SS and Police Leaders in Eastern Germany, in Latvia-Riga: SS-Brigadführer Schröder, in Lithuania-Kovno: SS-Brigadführer Wysocki, in Estonia-Reval: SS-Brigadführer Möller, who were responsible for the murder of the Jews in the Ostland 1941–1944 . Document collection. Institute for Documentation in Israel, Haifa 1998. (Original documents about the murderous activities of Hinrich Lohse , Walther Schröder and Lucian Wysocki in the "Ostland").
  • Alfred Heggen; Hartmut Kunkel Ed .: Neumünster under the sign of the swastika - A documentation of the years 1933/1934 . Published by the "Seizure of Power" working group at the Neumünster Adult Education Center, Neumünster 1983.
  • Ernst Klee : Personal Lexicon for the Third Reich . Frankfurt am Main 2005, p. 414.
  • Stephan Linck: Committed to order. German police 1933–1949. The Flensburg case. F. Schöningh, Paderborn 2000, ISBN 3-506-77512-X .
  • Reimer Möller: The SS murders of KPD functionaries Rudolf Timm and Christian Heuck in Neumünster in 1934 . In Informations zur Schleswig-Holsteinische Zeitgeschichte 41/42, ed. Working group for research into National Socialism in Schleswig-Holstein, Kiel 2003.
  • Bernd Philipsen: Jägerslust: manor, kibbutz, refugee camp, military area . Society for City History, Flensburg 2008, ISBN 978-3-925856-59-4 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Stephan Linck: Committed to order. German police 1933–1949. The Flensburg case. Paderborn 2000, p. 61.
  2. ^ Reimer Möller: The murders of the SS of the KPD functionaries Rudolf Timm and Christian Heuck in Neumünster in 1934 . Information on Schleswig-Holstein Contemporary History 41/42, Kiel 2003, p. 159.
  3. ↑ Alfred Heggen; Hartmut Kunkel, Ed .: Neumünster under the sign of the swastika - A documentation of the years 1933/1934 . Published by the "Seizure of Power" working group at the Neumünster Adult Education Center, Neumünster 1983, p. 175.
  4. ^ Reimer Möller: The murders of the SS of the KPD functionaries Rudolf Timm and Christian Heuck in Neumünster in 1934 . Information on Schleswig-Holstein Contemporary History 41/42, Kiel 2003, p. 165.
  5. ^ A b Reimer Möller: The murders of the SS on the KPD functionaries Rudolf Timm and Christian Heuck in Neumünster in 1934 . Information on Schleswig-Holstein Contemporary History 41/42, Kiel 2003, p. 160.
  6. ↑ Stephan Linck: Committed to order. German police 1933–1949. The Flensburg case. F. Schöningh, Paderborn 2000, ISBN 3-506-77512-X , p. 61.
  7. ↑ Lawrence D. Stokes: "My little town stands for a thousand others ...". Studies on the history of Eutin in Holstein, 1918–1945 . Struve's Buchdruckerei, Eutin 2004, ISBN 3-923457-72-3 , p. 290.
  8. ↑ See: Bernd Philipsen: Jägerslust: Gutshof, Kibbutz, refugee camp, military area. Flensburg 2008.
  9. ↑ Bernd Philipsen: "A respite on the flight into a life with a future". The kibbuzz on Gutshof Jägerslust near Flensburg (1934-1938.) In Gerhard Paul, Miriam Gillis-Carlebach: Menorah and swastika. Neumünster 1998, p. 419 ff.
  10. ↑ See on this: Gerhard Paul, Miriam Gillis-Carlebach: Menora and Hakenkreuz. Neumünster 1998.
  11. ^ Bettina Goldberg: Away from the metropolises: the Jewish minority in Schleswig-Holstein. Wachholtz, Neumünster 2011, ISBN 978-3-529-06111-0 , p. 445.
  12. ↑ See this: Irene Dittrich: Heimatgeschichtlicher Wegweiser to the places of resistance and persecution. Pp. 115/116.
  13. ↑ Stephan Linck: The heads of the police authority . In Broder Schwensen: seduced, persecuted, kidnapped. Aspects of National Socialist Rule in Flensburg . Society for Flensburg City History, Flensburg 2003. Contributions to Contemporary History Volume 1
  14. ↑ Stephan Linck: Committed to order. German police 1933–1949. The Flensburg case. Paderborn 2000, p. 116.
  15. ↑ See this: Irene Dittrich: Heimatgeschichtlicher Wegweiser to the places of resistance and persecution
  16. ^ Churches in the north covered Nazi careers. Sponsorships for war criminals - church historian reveals. Hamburg Church. Service portal of the Evangelical Lutheran Church - News October 16, 2012, accessed Thursday August 8, 2019
  17. ↑ See on this: Uwe Danker, Astrid Schwabe: Schleswig-Holstein and National Socialism. P. 37.
  18. ↑ Ruth Bettina Birn : The higher SS and police leaders. Himmler's representative in the Reich and in the occupied territories. Droste Verlag, Düsseldorf, 1986, ISBN 3-7700-0710-7 , p. 245.
  19. ↑ Proof of the number at H / Soz / Kult [1]
personal data
SURNAME Möller, Hinrich
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German SS brigade leader and SS and police leader for Estonia
DATE OF BIRTH April 20, 1906
PLACE OF BIRTH Grevenkop
DATE OF DEATH October 13, 1974
Place of death Preetz