Karl Draeger

Karl Draeger (born June 21, 1896 in Frörup , Schleswig , † after 1954) was a German criminal investigator.

Life and activity

Draeger, who came from a middle-class family, received a conservative upbringing. After visiting the Katharineum in Lübeck , he took part in the First World War from 1914 to 1918 , in which he achieved the rank of lieutenant and was awarded the Iron Cross of both classes. In April and May 1919 he was a member of a volunteer corps in Schleswig-Holstein.

From 1919 Draeger studied at the Universities of Kiel and Berlin . In the following year he joined the Berlin Criminal Police as a trainee detective, in which he was primarily entrusted with investigating murder crimes. In 1921 he was promoted to commissioner. Since 1928 he studied law for seven semesters alongside his job without obtaining a degree. During his studies, Draeger was close to the land reformer Adolf Damaschke and briefly belonged to the German Democratic Party (DDP).

Draeger became known to a broader public in May 1931 when he succeeded in solving the robbery of the mailman Gustav Schwan: he was able to identify the unemployed bricklayer Ernst Reins , who was later executed for this act, as the perpetrator. The case received a lot of attention in the German press at the time.

After the National Socialists came to power , Draeger joined the NSDAP on April 1, 1933 (membership number 1.772.610) and the Sturmabteilung (SA) on September 29, 1933 . On July 1, 1937, he switched to the Schutzstaffel (SS), in which he was quickly promoted to SS-Obersturmbannführer (SS No. 308.101). Since November 1, 1938, he has also been a volunteer member of the SS (SD) security service .

As a criminalist, Draeger was promoted to the criminal councilor in the summer of 1933 and appointed head of the state police station in Frankfurt am Main , which he headed until March 1935. During this time he built the Secret State Police in the Main metropolis and its surroundings.

In 1937 Draeger was entrusted with the management of the criminal police station in Saarbrücken . The appointment as regular head of this department took place on July 31, 1938. At the beginning of the Second World War , Draeger was drafted as field police director.

On January 28, 1942, he returned to Berlin as a government and criminal adviser. From February 1, 1943, he worked here at the criminal police headquarters. In April 1943 he was transferred to Hanover as deputy head of the criminal police control center. In the spring of 1944, according to other sources, in March 1945, he succeeded Felix Linnemann as head of this department.

In April 1945, Draeger was appointed by the commander of the security police in Hanover Rentsch as chairman of an ad hoc court martial that pronounced several death sentences for offenses such as desertion, some of which, for example against Bertram, were also carried out.

After the Second World War, Draeger lived under an assumed name for a few years. He only resumed his own name after the 1954 Amnesty Act .

literature

• Hsi-huey Liang: The Berlin Police in the Weimar Republic , 1977, p. 150.
• Thomas Klein (editor): The situation reports of the secret state police on the province of Hessen-Nassau. 1933-1936 , 1986, p. 48.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Lower Saxony Association of German Sinti: From Lower Saxony to Auschwitz , 2004, p. 37. (This is of a successor in March 1945) as well as [1] , here of an appointment as head of the crime scene in spring 1944.