Horst Kopkow

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Horst Kopkow (born November 29, 1910 in Ortelsburg , † October 13, 1996 in Gelsenkirchen ) was a German SS leader and criminal adviser . During the National Socialist era , Kopkow worked for the Gestapo and later in the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) in the field of counter-espionage . After 1945 he was in the service of the British secret service MI6 .

Life until 1945

Horst Kopkow was born in East Prussia as the youngest of six children . He completed his apprenticeship as a pharmacist, joined the NSDAP in 1931 ( membership number 607.161) and the SS in 1932 . In 1934 he began his work as a detective officer with the Gestapo in Allenstein . In his SS personnel report he is characterized as a "solid (er), ambitious (er) nerd" with a "good receptivity" as well as "good general (er) education", who qualifies as SS-Hauptsturmführer Has. In his curriculum vitae of October 16, 1936, even before giving information about school education, he “left the ranks of the Evangelical Church in 1935 because I fundamentally reject the Christian worldview ”.

In 1937 he moved to Berlin with his wife Gerda, née Lindenau, and their two children as a result of his transfer . On February 1, 1939, he was appointed detective commissioner with the task of unmasking "enemy spies and saboteurs". In 1940 SS-Hauptsturmführer Kopkow became Head of Division IV A 2 (fighting sabotage) in the newly formed Reich Security Main Office (RSHA). His promotion to the Kriminalrat took place on November 1, 1941 during World War II . The main work of Kopkow was the fight against the theft and attacks of explosives and the sabotage of the railway carried out by European resistance movements in the occupied countries. In the late summer of 1942 he took over the management of the " Red Orchestra Special Commission ". At the beginning of 1944 he was appointed head of the Gestapo special commission "National Committee Free Germany Berlin (NKFD)" formed in autumn 1943 against the resistance activities of the Saefkow-Jacob-Bästlein Organization .

In 1944 Kopkow achieved the rank of Sturmbannführer in the SS.

Kopkow was also involved in the investigation into the bomb attack on Hitler on July 20, 1944 . Until the end of the war he was responsible for the torture and death of hundreds of Allied agents as well as foreign and German resistance fighters .

Life after 1945

On May 29, 1945, the British military police captured him and took him to London . There the British secret service MI5 questioned him over the next four years about his knowledge of Soviet espionage. This knowledge protected him from possible war crimes investigations , so that he was pronounced dead in June 1948.

According to intelligence reports from MI5, which were only released in 2004, Horst Kopkow was released with a false identity between 1949 and 1950 in West Germany. He called himself Peter Cordes from then on, continued working for MI6 and returned to his family. He then worked as a managing director at a textile company. In his final years, Kopkow suffered from Parkinson's disease . Kopkow died in 1996 of pneumonia in a hospital in Gelsenkirchen .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Annette Neumann, Susanne Reveles, Bärbel Schindler Saefkow: Berlin workers resistance 1942-1945. "Away with Hitler - end the war." The Saefkow-Jacob-Bästlein-Organization. Exhibition catalog. Berlin Association of Those Persecuted by the Nazi Regime - Bund der Antifaschisten und Antifaschistinnen e. V., Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-00-027768-9 , p. 74.
  2. ^ Ernst Klee: The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 330.
personal data
SURNAME Kopkow, Horst
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Cordes, Peter
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German spy
DATE OF BIRTH November 29, 1910
PLACE OF BIRTH Ortelsburg
DATE OF DEATH October 13, 1996
Place of death Gelsenkirchen