Karl Zindel

Karl Zindel (born December 26, 1894 in Palermo , Sicily , † April 19, 1945 in Stuttgart ) was a German lawyer and police officer. Zindel became known as the German representative at Interpol during the Second World War and as one of the protagonists of the police organization of the persecution of the so-called Gypsies during the Nazi era .

Life

Early career

After attending grammar school, which he left with the Abitur in 1912, Zindel studied law in Tübingen and was there since 1913 a member of the student association Akademische Gesellschaft Stuttgardia Tübingen . When the First World War broke out , he joined the Prussian army as a flagjunker , where he served in the war until 1918. During the war, he received the Iron Cross of both classes and achieved the rank of lieutenant . In 1919 he retired from the army with the rank of first lieutenant .

In 1919 Zindel resumed his legal studies. In 1922 he received his doctorate as Dr. jur. In December 1923 he entered the civil service. First he worked from December 1923 to January 1925 as a deputy bailiff at the Marbach District Office. He then belonged to the Stuttgart police headquarters until 1926. During this time he was promoted to bailiff on July 1, 1925.

From 1926 to 1928 Zindel worked as a police officer in the police office of the Württemberg Ministry of the Interior. Here he was promoted to government councilor in 1928. From 1928 to April 7, 1933, Zindel was the reporter for Department IIb ("Criminal and Political Police") at the police headquarters in Stuttgart.

time of the nationalsocialism

Shortly after the National Socialists came to power , on April 7, 1933, Zindel was appointed deputy head of the crime department of the Stuttgart police headquarters. He held this post until August 1933. At this time he joined the NSDAP on May 1, 1933 ( membership number 3.226.421). He also became a member of the NSKK and a supporting member of the SS .

In August 1933, Zindel took over the management of Department IV (traffic and air police) of the Stuttgart police headquarters. He kept this until 1934. In September 1934 he and Arthur Nebe were appointed German representatives at the "International Criminal Police Commission" (Interpol). He held this position until December 1941. As a liaison of the German government to Interpol, he was transferred to the Reich Ministry of the Interior at that time and immediately after the transfer to this post he was promoted to the Upper Government Council with effect from October 19, 1934 .

Since 1936 Zindel was employed in a leading position in the main office of the security police within the secret state police office. In the business distribution plan of the Main Office of the Security Police from July 1, 1936, he can be proven as head of Division V1 (Organization and Law) in Office V (Administration and Law) headed by Werner Best , with responsibility for a large number of subject areas. Probably because of this abundance of his functions within the administration of the Gestapo headquarters, the journalist Peter-Ferdinand Koch Zindel called the Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller a “ factotum ” . In this position he was promoted to Ministerial Council in 1938 .

In his capacity as head of the organizational and legal department of the Gestapo headquarters, Zindel thought in 1936 about which provisions a law directed against “Gypsyism” (“Reichszigeunergesetz”) should contain, as well as which practical organizational measures with regard to the centralization of data collection , Identification and registration of "gypsies" would be useful in order to solve the "gypsy problem" in the German territory as effectively as possible, d. H. to ban the "gypsies" as an undesirable minority from public life and to remove them as supposed foreign bodies from the homogeneous national community . Schmidt-Degenhard therefore describes Zindel as one of the “pacemakers” of the centralization and synchronization of the police persecution of the “gypsies” by the Nazi regime that began in the second half of the 1930s.

On July 15, 1937, Zindel officially joined the SS (SS no. 290.114). In this he received on November 1 with effect from September 11, 1938 the rank of SS-Standartenführer .

From September 27, 1939 to December 1941, Zindel served as group leader of Department Ia (Law) in the Reich Main Security Office . During this time he was sent to North Africa on November 18, 1940 as "representative of the chief of the security police and the SD [= Reinhard Heydrich] at the Corpo di Polizia dell Afrika Italiana". His task in this position was to organize the training of the security police officers deployed in the German and Italian-occupied areas of North Africa. He officially ended this mission on March 31, 1941.

In December 1941 Zindel was appointed by Reinhard Heydrich as his special representative to the President of the International Criminal Police Commission. This position, in which Zindel was directly subordinate to Reinhard Heydrich (or later his successor Ernst Kaltenbrunner ), he retained until 1944. Zindel was also chairman of the International Criminal Police Commission. He held this position until 1945. From October 28, 1944 to 1945, he was also entrusted with the management of the head of the attach group of the Reich Security Police.

Shortly before the end of the war, Zindel fled to southern Germany in a car full of Interpol files, probably in the hope of getting through to Switzerland with his documents . He was arrested by French troops in the Stuttgart area. Since the Interpol files that Zindel took with him on his journey could be secured on this occasion, at least these - unlike most of the archives of the German Interpol Section, which are considered lost - have been preserved for posterity. Relevant publications consistently state about Zindel that he died in 1945.

Promotions

In civil service:

• July 1, 1925: bailiff
• 1928: Councilor
• October 19, 1934: Upper Government Council
• 1938: Ministerial Director

In the SS:

• November 9, 1938: SS Standartenführer

Fonts

• The spouses' maintenance entitlement during the marriage. 1922.
• Questions of co-perpetrators and sideline perpetrators: with special consideration of the draft from 1919. Tübingen 1923.
• Order of the Ministry of the Interior on the protection of people against dogs. January 15, 1929; Text output with annotations. Stuttgart 1929.
• The ordinances of the Reich President to combat political excesses: their implementing provisions and their implementation in Württemberg. Stuttgart 1932.
• The political emergency ordinances of the Reich of June 1932, their implementation and enforcement provisions in Württemberg and other relevant legal provisions. Stuttgart 1932.

literature

• Götz Aly , Wolf Gruner : The persecution and murder of European Jews by National Socialist Germany, 1933–1945. Volume 2, De Gruyter Oldenbourg, Berlin et al. 2009, ISBN 978-3-486-58523-0 , p. 690.
• Michael Wildt : Generation of the Unconditional: Leadership Corps of the Reich Security Main Office. Hamburger Ed., Hamburg 2002, ISBN 3-930908-75-1 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ The subject areas supervised by Zindel are listed as follows: establishment of the main security police office, responsibility of the secret state police and the criminal police in the Reich and in the federal states; State examination; Business distribution plan, identification; Confiscation of property; Determination of public hostility; Abuse of national symbols; Penalty cancellation; Information from police officers, general regulations on tampering with postal and telecommunications secrecy and confiscated postal check accounts; Legal affairs; Claims for damages; Police prisons and prisoner transport; Female police prison officers personnel matters; Cooperation of the main office of the security police with the upper Reich authorities and party offices with the other departments of the ministry, with the main office of the order police .
2. ↑ Peter-Ferdinand Koch: The financial affairs of the SS. How German banks financed black terror. Hoffmann and Campe, 2000, ISBN 3-455-11285-4 , p. 78.
3. ↑ Tobias Joachim Schmidt-Degenhard: Robert Ritter (1901-1951). On the life and work of the Nazi "gypsy researcher". Tübingen 2008, DNB 989749533 , p. 191.
4. ↑ Simon Wiesenthal : Right, not revenge: memories. 2nd Edition. Ullstein, Frankfurt am Main / Berlin 1992, ISBN 3-548-22381-8 , p. 315.