Kurt Amend

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Kurt Amend (born December 2, 1904 in Berlin ; † October 26, 1977 ) was a German criminal police officer and SS leader. During the Nazi era he was a chief investigator in the Reich Criminal Police Office and in the Federal Republic of Germany in the same position at the Federal Criminal Police Office .

Early years

Amend was the son of an optician. He finished his school career in 1923 at the Luisenstädter Realgymnasium in Berlin with the final examination and then began studying chemistry in Berlin, which he continued after a two-year break in Halle and Berlin . After he had finished his studies in February 1929 without a degree, he registered for the police service and in April 1929 passed the aptitude test to become a detective candidate at the Berlin police headquarters . After that he was unemployed until 1932 and made a living doing odd jobs. At the beginning of April 1932, Amend began his training as a detective inspector with the Berlin police and was promoted to a detective inspector in mid-March 1935 after passing his exam. From September 1934 until the end of the war in the spring of 1945 he worked continuously in the Prussian State Criminal Police Office and the central authority that emerged from it in 1937, the Reich Criminal Police Office (RKPA).

time of the nationalsocialism

After the handover of power to the National Socialists , he joined the SA in spring 1933 and was admitted to the NSDAP at the beginning of August 1935 despite the membership ban ( membership number 3,672,449.) In August 1937 he became a member of the SS (SS no. 290.176) and the following month he was accepted into the SD . In April 1943 he was promoted to SS-Sturmbannführer , the highest rank he achieved within the SS.

Amend was postponed from military service during World War II . At the beginning of January 1940 he was promoted to the criminal councilor and in early April 1944 to the criminal director. As the main speaker in the VC group of the RKPA, he was deputy to the group leader Richard Schulze from August 1942 . Amend was a specialist in the identification service and head of the entire manhunt system for the German Reich and the occupied territories. In his area of ​​responsibility fell the "investigation centers, the editors of the criminal police, the Reich manuscript collection, the Reich center for registration and the so-called dog system ." Amend was thus u. a. responsible for coordinating searches for people who fell under preventive crime prevention measures , who were resistance fighters or who were wanted for war ( forced laborers in hiding, prisoners of war on the run, deserters ). Amend was considered extremely capable and ideologically stable and was named in an evaluation from the end of January 1943 as one of the best officials of the RKPA. At the end of January 1944 he was awarded the War Merit Cross, First Class.

post war period

After the end of the war, Amend was arrested by soldiers of the Red Army in June 1945 and then interned in the special camps in Fünfeichen and from autumn 1948 in Buchenwald . He was released by Buchenwald in January 1950 into the British sector of Berlin. At first he was unemployed for a year and a half. From July 1951 to the end of February 1953 he was employed in the administration of the customs investigation office in West Berlin . A reinstatement in the criminal police service of West Berlin, which he operated, was rejected in 1952. In March 1953, as part of the denazification, an arbitration chamber proceedings against him were set. From the beginning of March 1953 he worked at the Federal Criminal Police Office, where he again headed the search department. In 1953 he was appointed government and criminal councilor and at the end of January 1963, shortly before his retirement, he was appointed government and criminal director. At the end of December 1964, he was retired as a government detective director.

At the end of the 1960s, Amend was investigated in the course of the Sagan case on suspicion of complicity in the murder of 50 Allied air officers. Evidence that he selected 50 of the 77 officers who were arrested for execution by order has not been provided. Amend named the head of the RKPA Arthur Nebe, who had already been executed in the spring of 1945, as the responsible author of the list . However, he himself was involved in the search. Since the Amendments showed neither malice nor base motives, the Berlin Regional Court closed the proceedings by order of March 17, 1971.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. a b c Dieter Schenk: Blind in the right eye. The brown roots of the BKA , Cologne 2001, p. 222f
  2. a b Dieter Schenk: Blind in the right eye. The brown roots of the BKA , Cologne 2001, p. 342.
  3. Dieter Schenk: Blind in the right eye. The brown roots of the BKA , Cologne 2001, p. 223f
  4. Dieter Schenk: Blind in the right eye. The brown roots of the BKA , Cologne 2001, p. 224
  5. a b c Dieter Schenk: Blind in the right eye. The brown roots of the BKA , Cologne 2001, p. 223
  6. Michael Wildt : Generation of the Unconditional. The Leadership Corps of the Reich Security Main Office Hamburger Edition , Hamburg 2003, p. 745
  7. a b Imanuel Baumann, Herbert Reinke, Andrej Stephan, Patrick Wagner: Shadows of the past. The BKA and its founding generation in the early Federal Republic , Cologne 2011, p. 33
  8. ^ Ernst Klee: Das Personenlexikon zum Third Reich , Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 15f.
  9. a b Dieter Schenk: Blind in the right eye. The brown roots of the BKA , Cologne 2001, p. 225
  10. Michael Wildt: Generation of the Unconditional. The leadership corps of the Reich Security Main Office Hamburger Edition, Hamburg 2003, p. 770.