Karl Gustav Lerche

Karl Gustav Lerche , also Karl-Gustav Lerche (* 1912 in Mühlhausen , † after 1955) was a German journalist, SS propagandist and convicted war criminal .

Life

Lerche trained as an electronics technician before joining the Hitler Youth and working as an author in the National Socialist environment. In 1930 he joined the NSDAP ( membership number 232.388) and became secretary of the HJ in Weimar . In the Propaganda Office of the Reich Youth Leader he was later a department head in the writing and publishing department. In this position he should also act as a liaison to the publishers for propaganda material. In 1934 he married. From 1939 he was a production assistant at UFA . As a member of a propaganda company , he acted as a war correspondent u. a. the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler in the western campaign . In 1940 his work Vom Pimpf zum Flieger was published by Eher-Verlag . This was followed by missions on the Eastern Front , in Italy and finally on the Western Front . He achieved the rank of SS-Oberscharführer . In September 1944 he was deployed with the Skorpion-West unit of the SS-Standarte Kurt Eggers during Operation Market Garden in Arnhem . He shot and killed the British military doctor Captain Brian Brownscombe while drinking at his unit's accommodation . He was captured during his assignment with the 181 Airlanding Field Ambulance , then helped in a prison hospital and was invited to the German quarters by the Danish SS sergeant Knud Flemming Helweg-Larsen.

Lerche was subsequently not held accountable for this crime and after the end of the war went underground as Günther Breede in Munich . At times he was able to pretend to be a former Wehrmacht soldier and served as a driver in the British Army . After separating from his wife, he entered into a relationship with Charlotte Bormann, an ex-wife of Martin Bormann's nephew . In 1952 she finally reported him to the police as a war criminal. Lerche was arrested and stated at his trial at the Munich District Court I to have shot Brownscombe on the orders of an unknown Obersturmführer of the Feldgendarmerie . On December 16, 1955, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison, only 5 of which he served in prison.

literature

• Ortwin Buchbender: The sounding ore . German propaganda against the Red Army in World War II. Seewald-Verlag, Stuttgart 1978, ISBN 3-512-00473-3 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Michael Buddrus : Total education for total war: Hitler Youth and National Socialist Youth Policy , Munich 2003, part 2, p. 1178.
2. ^ Unraveling a World War Two Murder Mystery
3. ^ Regional Court Munich I , December 16, 1955 . In: Justice and Nazi crimes . Collection of German criminal judgments for Nazi homicidal crimes 1945–1966, Vol. XIII, edited by Irene Sagel-Grande, HH Fuchs, CF Rüter . Amsterdam: University Press, 1975, No. 424, pp. 443–450 Subject matter of the proceedings: Shooting of a British prisoner of war after a feast with SS officers in the accommodation of the SS unit 'Skorpion-West' in Arnhem ( Memento des original from 4. March 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.