Karl Eberhard Schöngarth

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Schöngarth

Karl Georg Eberhard Schöngarth (born April 22, 1903 in Leipzig ; † May 16, 1946 in Hameln ) was a German lawyer, SS brigade leader , major general of the police, head of the Dortmund Gestapo , commander of the security police and the SD (BdS) in the general government , Leader of the task force z. b. V. in Galicia and BdS in the Netherlands . Schöngarth was sentenced to death by a British military tribunal for war crimes and executed on May 16, 1946 in Hameln prison .

Origin and studies

His father was the manager of a brewery in Erfurt . His mother came from the rural area around Leipzig. Schöngarth had two brothers, one of whom died young. The other later worked in trade, became a professional soldier and died in Vitebsk in June 1944 . The parental home was strongly nationalistic in color.

Schöngarth visited the Urban secondary school in Erfurt and took even during his school years, at age 17, in 1920 as a free corps fighter on Kapp Putsch in part (as a member of the volunteer corps Thuringia ). In 1921 he joined the Young German Confederation , passed his Abitur in 1922 and worked from 1922 to 1924 as a bank clerk in a branch of Deutsche Bank in Erfurt. In 1922 Schöngarth became a member of the Wiking Association , in the same year (November 5, 1922) he joined the NSDAP's recently founded local group Erfurt ( membership number 43,870) and at the same time became a member of the SA . After the Hitler putsch in 1923, he was arrested, charged with preparing for high treason , and then released again as a result of the general amnesty .

He joined the Reichswehr for a short time (May - October 1924 / Inf.Reg.I / 15 in Gießen ). In the meantime, the Stresemann government had halfway got the economic crisis in which Germany found itself under control and was able to stabilize the currency. This phase of relative stability in the Weimar Republic was also reflected in the life of Karl Georg Eberhard Schöngarth.

In 1924 he began studying law and political science at the University of Leipzig . During his studies in 1924 he became a member of the Leipzig fraternity Germania , to which he belonged until 1937. He studied four semesters in Leipzig, one semester in Greifswald , one semester in Halle (Saale) and on July 12, 1928 passed the first state law examination at the Naumburg Higher Regional Court . After a half years of study at the Department of Labor in Leipzig he was on 26 June 1929 the Law Faculty of the University of Leipzig with a dissertation on "The rejection of terminations of the employment contract" doctorate .

Schoengarth was only sporadically active in politics during this time. In 1926 he also attended the party congress of the NSDAP, but training and (civil) career seemed to be very important to him during this time. From January 1929 to December 1931 he was a trainee lawyer at the district and regional court in Erfurt and at the higher regional court in Naumburg. On June 6, 1932, he passed the Great State Examination in Law in Berlin , was appointed court assessor, and then worked as an assistant judge at the district courts of Magdeburg , Erfurt and Torgau until October 1933 .

After taking power , Schöngarth rejoined the NSDAP (membership no. 2,848,857) and, for the first time, the SS (SS no. 67,174).

Ascent

From November 1933 Schöngarth was employed at the Reichspostdirektion in Erfurt. On November 1, 1935, he joined the Gestapo .

Schöngarth was then head of the state police station in Dortmund (1937–1938), Bielefeld (1937–1938), head of the Stapo (state police) control center in Münster (1938–1939), and in 1939 then inspector of the security police and the SD (IdS) of military district IV ( Saxony ) based in Dresden .

On November 9, 1936 he was appointed SS-Untersturmführer , rose to SS-Oberführer until January 30, 1941 , and in 1943 he was SS-Brigadführer .

On March 16, 1935, shortly before his 32nd birthday, he married the two years older teacher Dorothea Groß and on October 15, 1936 the older of his two sons was born. The second son was born on February 19, 1940.

BdS in the Generalgouvernement and leader of the Einsatzgruppe e.g. V. in Galicia

On January 30, 1941 Schöngarth was appointed commander of the Security Police and the SD (BdS) for the Generalgouvernement based in Krakow .

With the beginning of the war against the Soviet Union , four task forces of the Security Police and the SD were used for security police tasks behind the fighting troops and for the implementation of racial goals . In the course of the rapid advance of the army and the Einsatzgruppen that followed it, they killed hundreds of thousands of Jews and Poles , but more than a million Jews managed to escape in time. In addition, it soon became apparent that numerous Jewish communities were simply overlooked by the task forces. In order to take advantage of the surprise effect, a second wave of killing followed immediately after the first wave, with the aim of killing those who had survived so far.

As a BdS in the Generalgouvernement, Schöngarth therefore applied to the head of the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA) Reinhard Heydrich to create additional "task forces or task forces" for Galicia . At the beginning of July 1941 he reported to Heydrich that "Einsatzkommandos" had been stationed in Lemberg , Brest-Litowsk and Białystok , while "Einsatztrupps" had been deployed for the cities of Pinsk , Lutsk , Rivne , Kowel , Rawa Ruska , Nawahradak , Baranavichy and Hrodna . Schöngarth headed these units with a small staff from Lemberg. Later these units were referred to as "special use task force".

The task force z. b. V. documented executions in the tens of thousands in the event reports (No. 32, 38, 43, 44, 47, 56, 58, 66, 67 and 78). The unit was dissolved again in autumn 1941.

In November 1941 Schöngarth issued an "order to shoot", after the Jews outside the ghetto were encountered, martial law should be shot.

In June 1943 Schöngarth was involved in the “Entdungsaktion”, ie the destruction of traces left by the Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police and the SD by opening the mass graves and burning the bodies. The special command 1005 under the leadership of SS-Standartenführer Paul Blobel was entrusted with this .

Schöngarth held his function as BdS in the Generalgouvernement until July 9, 1943.

Participation in the Wannsee Conference

On January 20, 1942, the Wannsee Conference on the “ Final Solution of the Jewish Question ” took place in a villa on Großer Wannsee No. 56/58 , in which the leading representatives of the highest Reich and party authorities took part. The host was the head of the RSHA Reinhard Heydrich , recorder Adolf Eichmann .

From the General Government, not the originally planned top representatives, but subordinates of these functionaries took part. Schöngarth was sent to Berlin as BdS of the General Government for the police. In terms of rank, however, it was not he, but the Higher SS and Police Leader East, Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger , who should have participated. But this was not invited. Historians suspect that this could have resulted from the well-known animosities between Krüger and the civil administration of the Generalgouvernement or the subordination of Schöngarth to Heydrich, while Krüger as HSSPF was directly responsible to Himmler.

BdS in the Netherlands

After his replacement as BdS in the Generalgouvernement on July 9, 1943, Schöngarth was temporarily transferred to the Waffen SS in September 1943 and from October 1943 to the beginning of 1944 he joined the 4th SS Police Panzer Grenadier Division to “ fight partisans ” in Northern Greece and Yugoslavia .

At the end of March 1944 Ernst Kaltenbrunner or Heinrich Himmler himself called him back to the security police and in mid-1944 Schöngarth moved to the Netherlands ("Reichskommissariat Netherlands"), to The Hague , in order to take over the office of BdS at the Reichskommissar for the occupied on June 1, 1944 occupy the Dutch territories - Arthur Seyß-Inquart - as successor to Erich Naumann . His immediate superior was the General Commissioner for Security, the HSSPF Hanns Albin Rauter , who was the central Nazi figure in the occupied Netherlands due to his strong position and the pushing back of Seyss-Inquart.

Immediately after taking office, Schöngarth found himself caught between the increased external military pressure after the Allies landed in northern France ( Operation Overlord ) and the increasing resistance of the Dutch population. He responded by introducing “Polish conditions” in the occupied Netherlands. In August / September he had 450 resistance fighters shot in the Herzogenbusch concentration camp . His subordinate Erich Deppner (at that time head of Dept. IV: Combating Terrorism) was given the task of doing this. On September 11, 1944, he gave the order to strike hard: "Whenever it becomes known that any illegal gathering is being held or that resistance centers can be identified, these gatherings are to be ruthlessly broken up and the participants to be cut down." ("Commitment order"). Executions were carried out for every attack or act of sabotage by resistance groups (“retaliatory actions”).

When on the night of 6./7. In March 1945, a Dutch resistance group attacked his superior Rauter and he was seriously injured, 263 prisoners were executed as a "reprisal measure": 117 in Woeste Hoeve (the site of the attack near Apeldoorn ), 38 in The Hague ( Waalsdorpervlakte ), 53 in Amsterdam , 49 in the Amersfoort transit camp and 6 in Utrecht .

During the negotiations before the International Nuremberg Court of Justice , Schöngarth's clear responsibility for this retaliatory action could not be clarified, and so he was not convicted for this crime, not even for the last deportations of Jews from the Westerbork transit camp to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp , which were also in his area of ​​responsibility.

After the war

The International Military Tribunal was unable to prove Schöngarth's direct involvement in the numerous mass murders or to clearly assign responsibility, although he was responsible for the arrest of the professors of the Jagiellonian University as part of the Krakow special campaign in 1939 and for the murder of Polish professors of the Lviv universities in 1941 was responsible.

However, a British military tribunal meeting in Burgsteinfurt took up a case in which Schöngarth was directly involved or present and gave the order to kill himself. On November 21, 1944, the crew of an Allied aircraft near Enschede jumped off with a parachute. One of these groups happened to land near a building that housed the local Gestapo headquarters. The pilot was captured and taken to the Gestapo . Schöngarth, who was present during these incidents, apparently gave the order that the Allied soldiers be treated as a saboteur and executed (although this was denied by him during the trial). The Allied soldier was killed by a shot in the neck in a nearby forest (compare aviation murders ).

A total of seven people were charged with disregarding the laws of war by the British Military Tribunal in connection with this murder:

Schöngarth, Beeck, Hadler, Knop and Gernoth were sentenced to death for this crime and hanged in Hameln prison on May 16, 1946 . Lebing was sentenced to 15 years, Boehm to 10 years.

SS career

Awards

literature

  • Helge Dvorak: Biographical Lexicon of the German Burschenschaft. Volume I: Politicians. Volume 8: Supplement L – Z. Winter, Heidelberg 2014, ISBN 978-3-8253-6051-1 , pp. 261-264.
  • Helmut Krausnick / Hans-Heinrich Wilhelm: The troops of the Weltanschauung war. The Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police and SD 1938–1942 . Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1981, ISBN 3-421-01987-8 .
  • Pohl, Dieter: From “Jewish Policy” to the Murder of Jews. The Lublin District of the General Government 1939–1944 , Frankfurt a. M./Berlin 1993.
  • Herbert, Ulrich (ed.): National Socialist Extermination Policy 1939–1945. New research and controversy , Frankfurt a. M. 1998.
  • Hirschfeld, Gerhard: Foreign rule and collaboration. The Netherlands under German occupation 1940–1945 , Stuttgart (DVA) 1984.
  • Dieter Schenk: The Lviv Professors Murder and the Holocaust in East Galicia , Verlag JHW Dietz Nachf., Bonn 2007 ISBN 978-3-8012-5033-1 .
  • Law-Reports of Trials of War Criminals, Selected and prepared by The United Nations War Crimes Commission, Volume XI, London, HMSO. 1948. TRIAL OF EBERHARD SCHOENGRATH AND SIX OTHERS. RITISH MILITARY COURT, BURGSTEINFURT, GERMANY (FEBRUARY 7TH-11TH, 1946), PDF.
  • Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich . Who was what before and after 1945 . 2nd Edition. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-596-16048-8 .

Web links

Commons : Karl Eberhard Schöngarth  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Footnotes

  1. ^ Ernst Klee: Das Personenlexikon zum Third Reich , Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 555 f.
  2. ↑ The names of the 38 who were executed in The Hague on March 8, 1945.
  3. ↑ , Article on the executions on March 8, 1945 in Amersfoort. ( Memento of the original from February 26, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.kampamersfoort.nl
  4. ↑ Detailed article on the course of the attack and the subsequent retaliation (Dutch).
  5. ↑ According to the IPN investigation, the bridge leader of the SS, Eberhard Schöngarth, and the Hauptsturmführer Hans Krüger (Gestapo) , who led the Secret Field Police unit (in Lemberg), were directly responsible.
personal data
SURNAME Schöngarth, Karl Eberhard
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Schöngarth, Karl Georg Eberhard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German lawyer, commander of the security police and the security service
DATE OF BIRTH April 22, 1903
PLACE OF BIRTH Leipzig
DATE OF DEATH May 16, 1946
Place of death Hamelin