Karl Haselbacher

Karl Friedrich Georg Haselbacher (wrongly often spelled Karl Hasselbacher; born October 7, 1904 in Neu-Dieringhausen , † September 13, 1940 in Cambrai , northern France) was a German lawyer, detective and SS leader. Haselbacher was, among other things, head of the Gestapo in Düsseldorf and Belgium.

Life

Youth and education

Haselbach was the son of the factory owner Georg Haselbacher and his wife Emilie, nee Wippermann. He attended the elementary school in Dieringhausen from 1910 to 1914 and from Easter 1914 the upper secondary school in Gummersbach, where he passed the school leaving examination in spring 1924.

From the summer semester of 1924 on, Haselbacher studied economics for two semesters at the University of Marburg . After changing his subject in the summer semester of 1925, he devoted himself to studying law at the same university. In the lecture-free time he worked in the factories of the Mühlenthaler Spinnerei und Weberei AG Dieringhausen, according to his own statements, in order to “get to know the work process in an industrial plant and the working conditions”. During his studies he became a member of the Arminia Marburg fraternity in 1924 .

In the winter semester of 1926/1927 Haselbacher moved to continue his studies at the University of Cologne . There he passed on May 23 and 24, 1928 before the legal examination office at the Higher Regional Court in Cologne, the first state legal examination with the grade "good" and he was appointed trainee lawyer in 1928. During his traineeship, Haselbacher worked, among other things, for a lawyer in Cologne who defended employees of the NSDAP press in court, with whom Haselbacher first came into contact in this way. In 1931 received his doctorate he with a work that was rated "very good", to Dr. jur. After Haselbacher passed the Great State Examination in 1932 - with the grade of good - he was sworn in as a court assessor on April 28, 1932. From 1932 he worked as an assessor at the local court in Gummersbach . As an examining magistrate, he is said to have led criminal trials against KPD members for an attempted coup in February 1933, as he stated in his file.

time of the nationalsocialism

Shortly after the National Socialists came to power in spring 1933, Haselbacher became a member of the NSDAP (membership number 2.102.581) and the SA on May 1, 1933 . A few weeks later, in July 1933, he was appointed to the Prussian Ministry of the Interior, where he took on tasks relating to the processing of the Law on Civil Servants. On January 1, 1934, he was appointed government assessor in the Secret State Police Office (Gestapa). There he took on a job as a government assessor in Department II F under Government Councilor Wilhelm Mäurer : In particular, he took over Department II F 2, which, according to the Gestapa's business distribution plan of January 22, 1934, was responsible for "Jews, emigrants and Freemasons ". In his study of the beginnings of the SD and the Gestapo, the historian Shlomo Aronson comes to the conclusion that Haselbacher was “decisively involved in Jewish policy in the 1930s” despite being largely unknown in this role.

The alleged former Gestapo employee Hans-Jürgen Koehler describes Haselbacher in the book Inside the Gestapo from 1940 , published in England in 1940, as head of the subdivision for “Freemasons and religious sects”, but at the same time emphasizes that he was not involved in the persecution of Catholics has been. He also claims that Haselbacher - whom he describes as a "mild little man" - tried to save "as many people as possible" and therefore lost Heydrich's favor. However, this cannot have been permanent: Haselbacher actually had to relinquish the management of his department in December 1934, but at the same time he was admitted to the SS (SS No. 107.332) and, due to his Gestapo status, to the Security Service (SD) assigned. In the SS, Haselbacher was promoted to SS-Untersturmführer (1936) and SS-Obersturmbannführer (1938) one after the other.

During his activity in Department II F of the Gestapa, Haselbacher and SD investigators had been collecting "incriminating" material against the German Masonic lodges since mid-1934, with the help of which it was to be proven that the lodges, together with other powers, were pursuing the plan, a "Jewish To bring about world government ”. The Reich Ministry of the Interior then imposed a ban on the lodges.

In 1935 Haselbacher was promoted to the government council as an administrative officer. In the assessment of Haselbacher by Reinhard Heydrich and Werner Best accompanying the promotion proposal, they praised the fact that his work as a Jewish advisor would be of particular importance. In 1936 Haselbacher became head of Department II B in the Gestapa, which was responsible for the church, Jews, Freemasons and emigrants. His official title was now "Head of the Gestapa and advisor to the Chief of the German Police for Jewish, emigrant and church matters". In this context, Shlomo Aronson emphasizes in his study on the beginnings of the Gestapo and SD that Haselbacher “although virtually unknown today [...] played a decisive role in Jewish policy in the 1930s”.

In the course of the annexation of Austria to the German Reich on March 12, 1938, he was transferred to the state police headquarters in Vienna, which was being set up, where he headed Section II b. From July 1938 he headed the state police station in Kiel and had arrests carried out as part of the November 1938 pogroms .

In September 1939 Haselbacher, meanwhile with the rank of senior government councilor, was appointed head of the state police headquarters in Düsseldorf as the successor to Kriminalrat Franz Sommer . He held this position until June 1940. Then he was appointed head of the Security Police (Sipo) and the Gestapo in Belgium, based in Brussels . He had a fatal accident in September 1940 during a business trip to France.

Fonts

• Liability for strike damage. 1931 (dissertation).

literature

• Maik Bubenzer: Dr. Karl Haselbacher (1904–1940). A career in the Nazi regime with the "high point" Düsseldorf, in: Düsseldorfer Jahrbuch 83 (2013).
• Holger Berschel: Bureaucracy and Terror. The Department of Jews of the Gestapo Düsseldorf 1935–1945. Essen 2001.
• Helge Dvorak: Biographical Lexicon of the German Burschenschaft. Volume I: Politicians. Sub-Volume 2: F-H. Winter, Heidelberg 1999, ISBN 3-8253-0809-X , pp. 247-248.
• Christoph Graf: Political police between democracy and dictatorship. Berlin 1983.
• 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 .
• Gerhard Paul : State terror and social brutality. The Gestapo in Schleswig-Holstein. With the collaboration of Erich Koch. Results, Hamburg 1996, ISBN 3-87916-037-6 .
• Michael Wildt (Ed.): Intelligence Service, Political Elite and Murder Unit - The Security Service of Reichsführer SS. Hamburg 2003 (here the name is also given as "Kurt Haselbacher").
• Michael Hagemeister : The "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" in court. The Bern Trial 1933–1937 and the “Anti-Semitic International” . Zurich: Chronos, 2017, ISBN 978-3-0340-1385-7 , short biography p. 537

Individual evidence

1. ↑ In the specialist literature, the spellings Haselbacher and Hasselbacher appear almost equally frequently. His dissertation, which was published under this name (and which can be clearly attributed to him through a curriculum vitae in the appendix to the dissertation), proves that Haselbacher's spelling is correct. Furthermore, the spelling Haselbacher is used in his SS personal files in the Federal Archives and in the official death report that was published in German newspapers in 1940.
2. ^ Rudolf Bonnet: The dead of the Marburg fraternity Arminia. Volume 3, Frankfurt am Main 1955.
3. ^ Shlomo Aronson: Heydrich and the beginnings of the SD and the Gestapo , Berlin 1967.
4. ↑ Koeheler: Inside the Gestapo. 1940, p. 35.
5. ^ Hanno Hardt: Press in Exile. P. 438.
6. ^ Shlomo Aronson: Heydrich and the early history of the Gestapo and SD. 1971, p. 178
7. ^ ^{A b} Gerhard Paul: State terror and social brutalization. The Gestapo in Schleswig-Holstein , Hamburg 1996, p. 101f.