Kurt Geissler

Kurt Geißler (born September 22, 1902 in Berlin , † October 14, 1963 in Cologne ) was a German police officer. At the time of National Socialism, the detective commissioner worked as a special representative of the security police in Bucharest , head of Section IV A 2 of the Reich Security Main Office , criminal director in Riga and after the war as head of the Cologne criminal police .

Live and act

Youth, Education and Early Career

Geissler was the son of a Protestant sexton. At the age of 17 he joined the Freikorps Poensgen , with whom he took part in the fighting in the Baltic States after the end of the First World War .

After graduating from high school in 1921, Geissler had to postpone his career aspiration to become a detective chief for reasons of age. Instead, he first studied law and in 1928 joined the criminal police in Weißenfels, Saxony . Following two commissar courses, in 1930 he took over as a detective commissioner in charge of the commissariat for communist dismantling of the Reichswehr in the IA department (political police) at the police headquarters in Berlin .

time of the nationalsocialism

Because of his experience with the Political Police, Geissler was accepted into the newly founded Gestapo in May 1933 . Until at least 1942 he worked mainly in the Gestapo headquarters in Berlin, where he was one of Heinrich Müller's most important employees and was responsible for dealing with the areas of communism , Marxism , foreigners hostile to the state and remigrants from the Soviet Union . In 1937 he was promoted to the criminal councilor and later to the criminal director in this capacity.

Geissler became a member of the NSDAP on May 1, 1933 ( membership number 2,591,797) and also joined the SS . In the SS, Geissler rose to become SS-Sturmbannführer .

In 1940, Geissler was sent to Bucharest as a special representative of the security police, where he later became a police attaché at the German embassy. He was released from this position in February 1941.

In the further course of the Second World War , Geissler was deployed to the Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police and the SD in Greece , in order to move to the Reich Security Main Office in Berlin in the summer of 1941 , where he became head of Section IV D 3 (Confidential Office, Foreigners Hostile to the State) before he started 1943 was transferred to Riga as a criminal director .

In August 1943, Geissler was sentenced to two years in prison for sexual assault while interrogating a former employee. As a result, he was expelled from the SS and, in May 1944, from the NSDAP and held in various concentration camps until the end of the war .

post war period

After the end of the war, Geissler was taken prisoner by the Allies. He was interned for a few years and appeared as a witness in the Nuremberg trials . During his own denazification , he managed to cite his stay in the concentration camp as evidence of an “anti-Nazi” attitude and to be re-admitted to the criminal police , where he was employed as a detective commissioner in Cologne, where he eventually rose to the position of detective chief.

literature

• 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 .
• Christoph Graf : Political police between democracy and dictatorship. 1983, p. 343f.
• Michael Wildt : Generation of the Unconditional. The leadership corps of the Reich Security Main Office. Hamburger Edition, Hamburg 2003, ISBN 3-930908-87-5 .