Kurt Lischka

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Kurt Lischka (born August 16, 1909 in Breslau ; † May 16, 1989 in Brühl ) was a German SS-Obersturmbannführer and Gestapo chief who actively participated in the persecution of Jews during the Nazi era .

Life

Career in the Third Reich

Lischka grew up as the son of a bank clerk in Breslau and graduated from high school there in 1927 . He then studied law and political science in Berlin and worked at various local and regional courts. He joined the SS on June 1, 1933 (SS no. 195.590). On September 1, 1935, he worked for the Gestapo in Berlin, initially as a consultant for church affairs. In 1938, with a doctorate in law, he became head of Gestapo Division II B (denominations, Jews, Freemasons, emigrants, pacifists). In this function he was responsible for the mass arrests of German Jews after the “Reichspogromnacht” . In 1938 alone he was promoted three times, most recently on September 11, 1938 to SS-Sturmbannführer.

For a time he headed the “ Reich Central Office for Jewish Emigration ”, which robbed Jewish emigrants of their property before they emigrated . From January to August 1940, Lischka was head of the Gestapo in the EL-DE house in Cologne .

In November 1940 he was transferred to the commander of the Security Police and the SD (BdS) in Paris , where he was head of Office II (organization, administration) and deputy of the BdS Helmut Bone for the deportation of at least 73,000 Jews via the Camp de Drancy transit camp was jointly responsible after Auschwitz . Lischka expanded the Gestapo headquarters in Paris into an effective terrorist instrument, which the Resistance fought with retaliatory measures and the shooting of a total of 29,000 hostages. On April 20, 1942 he was promoted to SS-Obersturmbannführer. From January 15 to September 10, Lischka also held the post of commander of the Security Police (KdS) and the SD in Paris.

In September 1943 Lischka was ordered back from Paris to Berlin on charges of corruption, and Hans Henschke was his successor as deputy BdS . However, the initiated criminal proceedings ended on June 27, 1944 with an acquittal.

From November 1943 he was responsible for the reprisals in the “Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia” in Section IV D 1 of the Reich Main Security Office . In 1944 Lischka was a member of the “Special Commission July 20, 1944 ”.

In April 1945 Lischka's office was evacuated to Schleswig-Holstein and closed on May 3, 1945.

After the Second World War

After the end of the war , Lischka initially stayed in St. Peter-Ording , where he began working as a farm worker under a false name. On December 10, 1945, however, he was arrested by the British and subsequently imprisoned in British and French internment camps. For his work in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia he was extradited to Prague in 1947 and imprisoned there. In August 1950 he was released to the Federal Republic of Germany without any proceedings against him having been initiated in Czechoslovakia . However, on 18 September 1950 it denounced a French military court in France in absentia to lifelong forced labor . In a denazification proceedings the prosecution Bielefeld there was an acquittal.

Unmolested by the judiciary, Lischka then worked in Cologne as an authorized signatory of a grain wholesaler, with whose owner family he was friends before the war.

In 1971 he was tracked down by Beate Klarsfeld in Cologne ; she then planned his kidnapping to France, for which Serge and Beate Klarsfeld were sentenced to two months in prison. Lischka retired in 1975.

Cologne trial

Lischka (like many others before him) was protected from the judgments of the Allied military jurisdiction in absentia, since the transfer agreement concluded in 1955 precluded a conviction on the basis of the same offense in Germany; on the other hand, as a German, he was not extradited abroad. Due to criminal charges, however, Lischka was on the Harlan list , a list of over 100 Germans who had previously worked in occupied France and was kept by the Ludwigsburg Central Office . It was not until 1975 that the Bundestag ratified a supplementary agreement to the transition treaty that made it possible for Lishkas and others to be prosecuted. The Cologne prosecutors needed a good three and a half years for their investigations. It was about the deportation and murder of 40,000 French Jews.

On October 23, 1979, a trial began before the Cologne Regional Court in which he and his co-defendants were first able to prove that he and his co-defendants had personal knowledge of the aim and purpose of the French deportation of Jews, which ended on February 11, 1980 with Lischka's conviction of ten years in prison served in the correctional facility in Bochum . His co-defendants Herbert M. Hagen , deputy military commander in France, and Ernst Heinrichsohn , employee in the Jewish department in Paris, were sentenced to twelve and six years, respectively. Lischka and Hagen served two-thirds of their sentences and were released in 1985. Lischka then lived with his wife in a senior citizens' home in Brühl and, like the two accomplices, has since passed away.

Orders and decorations

literature

Movie

Hitler's elites after 1945. Part 4: Lawyers - acquittal in their own right. Gerolf Karwath, director: Holger Hillesheim. Südwestrundfunk (SWR, 2002)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Judith Weißhaar, Anne Klein: Jens Kuchenbuch remembers his godfather Kurt Lischka , in: Anne Klein (Ed.): The Lischka process: a Jewish-French-German memory story. A picture reading book . Berlin: Metropol 2013, pp. 219–224.
personal data
SURNAME Lischka, Kurt
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German SS-Obersturmbannführer and Gestapo chief
DATE OF BIRTH August 16, 1909
PLACE OF BIRTH Wroclaw
DATE OF DEATH May 16, 1989
Place of death Bruehl