Johannes Thiele (police officer)

Karl Ernst Johannes Thiele (born March 22, 1890 in Dresden , † September 22, 1951 in Werl ) was a German police officer and SS leader.

Live and act

In his youth, Thiele embarked on a career as a professional soldier in 1909. In the military, he completed training as a chief fireworker. After participating in the First World War , he switched to the police service in March 1920. Thiele then belonged to the police in Bremen and Hanover and was trained as a detective inspector. After passing his exams, he worked as a detective commissioner in Hanover and Wesermünde from 1922 , where he was promoted to head of the criminal investigation department and criminal inspector in 1928. On October 1, 1931, he was transferred to the Berlin Police Headquarters. There, after the Prussian state government was overthrown in the course of the Prussian strike of July 20, 1932, he was transferred to Department I of the Presidium as the successor to Johannes Stumm as head of inspection against right-wing radicalism .

After the handover of power to the National Socialists , Thiele was appointed on February 1, 1933 as the successor to the criminal director Scherler as head of the field service of Department IA ( Political Police ). In this function he was instrumental in the wave of arrests against the left opposition after the Reichstag fire . In May 1933, Thiele took over the position of chief advisor for matters of the criminal investigation department in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior, where he was one of Kurt Daluege's most important employees . On September 1, 1933 he was appointed to the government council. On April 1, 1935, Thiele was promoted to state criminal director and, after 1936, to Reich criminal director.

Thiele, a member of the NSDAP since the beginning of April 1933 ( membership number 1,774,686), joined the SS in 1936 (SS number 280,077).

Thiele worked in the main office of the security police and, after the " Anschluss of Austria ", was entrusted with setting up the Vienna police control center.

From March 1941 Thiele headed the Hamburg criminal police and in September 1942 was appointed inspector of the security police and the SD (IdS) in Hamburg with the rank of government and criminal director. From the beginning of 1945 until the end of the war, he was police chief in Dresden . With the SS he rose to SS-Brigadführer in June 1944 and was promoted to major general of the police.

In 1946, Thiele was charged with crimes against foreign workers and prisoners of war before a British military court, together with August Hinze and Johannes Rehmke , and initially sentenced to death. His sentence was reduced to fifteen years in prison. Thiele died in September 1951 in an Allied internment in the Werl war crimes prison .

literature

• Herbert Diercks et al. (Red.): Forced labor and society (= contributions to the history of the National Socialist persecution in Northern Germany. Issue 8). Edition Temmen, Bremen 2004, ISBN 3-86108-379-5 .
• Herbert Diercks: Documentation town house. The Hamburg police under National Socialism. Texts, photos, documents. Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial, Hamburg 2012, p. 57.
• Christoph Graf : Political police between democracy and dictatorship. The development of the Prussian political police from the state security organ to the secret state police office of the Third Reich (= individual publications of the Historical Commission in Berlin. Vol. 36). Colloquium-Verlag, Berlin 1983, ISBN 3-7678-0585-5 (at the same time: Bern, University, habilitation paper, 1980), p. 387 (short biography).