Lorenz Hackenholt

Lorenz Hackenholt

Laurenzius Marie Hackenholt , known as Lorenz Hackenholt (born June 25, 1914 in Gelsenkirchen ; declaration of death on December 31, 1945), was SS-Hauptscharführer , bricklayer, technician and driver at the establishment and operation of the Nazi killing centers for Operation T4 and the Nazi death camps of Operation Reinhardt involved.

Origin and occupation

Hackenholt's parents were Theodor and Elisabeth Hackenholt, b. Wobriezek. After attending the local elementary school, Hackenholt took up an apprenticeship as a bricklayer at the age of 14 and, after passing his apprenticeship examination, was employed in his learned profession.

With the SS-Totenkopfverband

On April 1, 1933, Hackenholt joined the NSDAP ( membership number 1,727,962). As early as 1933 he had applied for membership in the SS , which he was accepted into in 1934. In his résumé of 1941, he stated that after his admission to the SS on January 1, 1934, he had been assigned to the leadership school of SS Section XVII and had remained there until its dissolution. During this time he received training as a driver. After leaving the driving school, due to its closure, he reported to the Wehrmacht , where he did his military service from October 1935 to October 1937 in a pioneer battalion. During this time his SS membership was suspended.

In the interrogation of Werner Dubois , a comrade of Hackenholt, after the war, he testified that they both belonged to the second SS-Totenkopfstandarte “Brandenburg” , which was stationed in Oranienburg and provided the personnel for the neighboring Sachsenhausen concentration camp . When motor vehicle mechanics and drivers with Class I to III driving licenses were sought for the vehicle fleet established there in March 1938, both were employed there as mechanics and drivers as well as security guards.

Action T4

With the start of Action T4 , the systematic killing of the mentally ill and disabled in autumn 1939, the front organization responsible for this, the Fuhrer's Chancellery (KdF), called the “Charitable Foundation for Institutional Care”, tried to recruit and hire suitable personnel. Upon request, the commandant of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, Hermann Baranowski , sent four of his men to Berlin. In addition to Hackenholt and Werner Dubois , these were Josef Oberhauser and Siegfried Graetschus , who were also employed by the fleet. In November 1939, together with six other men from different concentration camps (including Kurt Franz from Buchenwald concentration camp ) in the KdF, Viktor Brack and his representative Werner Blankenburg informed the KdF about the planned action with reference to the absolute duty of confidentiality instructed and presented their planned assignment. To illustrate this, they were shown photos of extreme cases of mentally ill people whose home is supposedly used for Wehrmacht hospitals. They were assured that they had nothing to do with the planned gassing of the sick, but "only" had to burn their corpses or drive the buses to transport the victims.

As an employee of the "Foundation", civilian clothing was required for them. The next day, Hackenholt drove the new employees to the Grafeneck Nazi killing center by bus . From the beginning of 1940 Hackenholt worked there and in all of the other six killing centers involved in the T4 campaign, both as a "corpse burner" and as a driver of the bus fleet that was operated by the cover organization " Gemeinnützige Krankentransport GmbH (Gekrat)" for transporting the victims to the Killing centers was operated. Hackenholt also worked as a driver for Viktor Brack and August Becker , the chemist and gas procurer for Aktion T4. The consequences of a joint visit to a bar with the latter in Plauen in January 1941 brought Hackenholt to disciplinary proceedings for physical abuse. When the owner of the bar verbally abused the two presumably drunk SS men in the street after they had left his bar at around 5 a.m. accompanied by two prostitutes, there was a physical argument with Hackenholt. The bar owner lost two teeth and called the police. At the guard, Hackenholt and Becker refused to provide information about their official duties in Plauen. An internal SS disciplinary procedure was opened and only put down again after a great deal of bureaucratic effort.

Action Reinhardt

After the suspension of Operation T4 in August 1941, Hackenholt, like most of the T4 personnel, was assigned to the staff of the " SS and Police Leader for the Lublin District ", SS Brigade Leader Odilo Globocnik , in the autumn of 1941 , in order to participate in the " Operation Reinhardt " to contribute to the extermination of the Jewish population of the Generalgouvernement . Shortly after arriving in Lublin, however, he was given leave again to marry 29-year-old Ilse Zillmer on November 4, 1941 in Berlin-Schmargendorf . Both were reported to the police in an apartment at Kurfürstendamm 112. After a short honeymoon, Hackenholt was deployed in the Belzec extermination camp .

Here he began his career as a gasification specialist for Aktion Reinhardt. The camp commandant Christian Wirth initially used Hackenholt as a driver who had to organize the necessary vehicles from the SS and police fleet in Lublin before the Belzec camp was later assigned suitable vehicles by the KdF. Hackenholt soon acquired the reputation of a skilled and universally applicable organizational talent with pronounced technical skills. Wirth therefore appointed him to be responsible for the vehicle fleet and the technical equipment of the extermination camp, including its installation and maintenance. At the same time as the first primitive gas chamber was being built in a woodshed, Hackenholt and his comrade Siegfried Graetschus converted a mail delivery van into a mobile gas chamber by channeling the engine exhaust gases into a closed box structure. This gas truck picked up the mentally ill and disabled from neighboring villages and killed them on the way to the camp. According to his comrade Kurt Franz, Hackenholt, who was called "Hacko" in the camp, was very proud of his invention, which also made him popular with the camp commandant.

After completion of the first gas chamber building at the end of February 1942, these gas chambers were tested by murdering three transports with 400 to 600 Jews each. Initially, they used carbon monoxide gas from bottles, with which they had already gained experience in the T4 campaign. Not least because of Hackenholt's experience with his gas truck, Wirth decided to use engine exhaust. With the help of Ukrainian Trawniki men, Hackenholt installed a Russian tank engine, the exhaust gases of which were led into the three chambers of the gassing building. Hackenholt was finally given the supervision of the gassing of the groups of victims transported to Belzec. The work was done by Ukrainian helpers and Jewish victims. Karl Schluch, who was acquitted in the Belzec trial , testified in an interrogation on November 10, 1961:

“[…] After the Jews had entered the gas chamber, the doors were locked tightly by Hackenholt himself or by the Ukrainians assigned to him. Hackenholt then started the engine with which the gasification was carried out. After about 5 to 7 minutes - and this is the period of time I estimate - a peephole was taken into the gas chamber to see if everyone had died. Only then were the external gates opened and the gas chamber ventilated. Today I cannot say with certainty who carried out the check. Besides Hackenholt and Hering , Wirth, Schwarz it could possibly also have been Oberhauser. "

Organized factory mass murder began with a transport on March 17, 1942. During this major operation, which lasted four weeks, 80,000 Jews were killed in Belzec. Another 16,000 Jews were murdered by mid-June 1942; then the gas chambers were converted. The wooden building was demolished and a solid building 24 m long and 10 m wide was built in its place. It contained six gas chambers of different sizes, which were hardly higher than 2 m. These new gas chambers could hold 1,500 people. In the Belzec trial, Werner Dubois testified that Hackenholt was the draftsman for the new gas chamber. Accordingly, a sign with the cynical inscription "Hackenholt Foundation", crowned by a Star of David , was also placed above the entrance .

In his report of May 4, 1945, SS-Untersturmführer Kurt Gerstein, who traveled to Belzec as a hygiene specialist for the Waffen-SS, described as an eyewitness the gassing process during a visit to the camp on August 18, 1942. He remarked on the roof of a building as "sensible, little joke "the Star of David and in front of the building the inscription:" Heckenholt Foundation "[correct Hackenholt, dV]. Gerstein learned that there were three gas chambers there and wrote: “Now I finally understand why the whole facility is called the Heckenholt Foundation. Heckenholt is the chauffeur of the diesel engine [with a high degree of probability it was a gasoline engine, i. V.], a small technician who also built the system. With the diesel exhaust gases, people should be brought to death ... "

It happened again and again that victims who were no longer able to walk arrived at the camp. After the transport from the train station had been gassed by the Jewish work detachment, they were carried on stretchers to a separate pit, where they were shot in the back of the head by Hackenholt during the first days of the camp. The extermination campaign ended in Belzec in early December 1942.

In September 1942, Hackenholt von Wirth, who in the meantime had risen from the camp commandant in Belzec to inspector of the extermination camps of Aktion Reinhardt, was transferred to the Treblinka extermination camp . Here, too, he was employed as a planner for a new gas chamber based on the model of the "Hackenholt Foundation" in Belzec. The planning was carried out by Erwin Lambert , who had already set up the gas chambers for Action T4. In the Sobibor extermination camp , too , an enlargement and improvement of the killing facility was necessary, so that the specialists Hackenholt and Lambert were transferred there with a trained squad of Ukrainian auxiliaries around October 1942.

At the beginning of winter, Hackenholt returned to Belzec. There he had to exhume the corpses buried in large pits with an excavator in order to enable them to be cremated on a grate of railroad tracks. According to the former SS-Oberscharführer Heinrich Gley in the Belzec trial, around 4,000 corpses were burned daily on two large cremation grates, so that between November 1942 and March 1943 almost half a million corpses were cremated in this way.

Hackenholt spent Christmas 1942 and New Year 1942/43 with his wife in Berlin. He was then used again in Treblinka, where he monitored the cremation, which was carried out immediately after the victims were killed. Here, too, Hackenholt had to open the mortuary pits with an excavator and enable these corpses to be cremated.

He stayed there again in Belzec until the cremation of the exhumed corpses was completed around March 1943 and the camp was closed in May 1943 and most of the traces of it had been removed. In recognition of his performance at Aktion Reinhardt, he was promoted to SS-Hauptscharführer on June 21, 1943, along with many other participants.

After Belzec was closed, Hackenholt came to the Lublin airport camp, where the remains of the victims of Aktion Reinhardt were sorted, cleaned and prepared for further use by Jewish prisoners in the hangars. Particularly valuable fur goods were disinfected with Zyklon B in a gas chamber set up for this purpose . In this chamber, Hackenholt gassed prisoners who were no longer fit for work.

From the end of October to the beginning of November 1943, Ilse Hackenholt visited her husband in Lublin and then left hastily when, on November 3, 1943, the harvest festival resulted in the liquidation of over 40,000 men, women and children from the three remaining concentration camps in the General Government of Poland, Trawniki, Poniatowa and Majdanek began.

At the RI special department in Trieste

Probably in September 1943 Christian Wirth was transferred to Trieste together with other members of the Aktion Reinhardt staff . Odilo Globocnik had been appointed Higher SS and Police Leader in the Adriatic Coastal Operation Zone . Wirth became the commander of the " Special Department Operation R ", a special department affiliated with Globocnik's office. The Risiera di San Sabba concentration camp was established in a suburb of Trieste, where an estimated 3,000 to 5,000 people were killed. For a much larger number of Jews in particular, San Sabba served as a collection camp for the deportations to the extermination camps.

After Christmas 1943, Hackenholt was transferred to the RI unit in San Sabba under the leadership of Gottlieb Hering . In May 1944 Globocnik stopped the extermination of the Jews and used the special department to fight partisans.

In 1944, Hackenholt was awarded the Iron Cross Second Class for his unconditional commitment to Aktion Reinhardt . For Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler , Hackenholt was one of the “most deserving men” of Aktion Reinhardt.

According to statements by his comrades Josef Oberhauser, Hans Girtzig and Heinrich Gley, Hackenholt was allegedly killed by partisans in a fight near Trieste in the spring of 1945. Werner Dubois claims to have seen him in Kirchbach / Austria at the beginning of May 1945.

After the war

A few years after the war, his wife filed a motion to have her missing husband pronounced dead. This happened on April 1, 1954 by the Berlin-Schöneberg District Court on December 31, 1945. Despite individual indications that Hackenholt was still alive, an investigation by a special commission of the Munich criminal police from 1959 to 1963 ended with no result.

literature

• Ernst Klee , Willi Dreßen , Volker Rieß: “Nice times.” S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1988, ISBN 3-10-039304-X .
• Ernst Klee, entry "Lorenz Hackenholt" in: The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich: Who was what before and after 1945 . Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2005. ISBN 3-596-16048-0 .
• Ernst Klee: What they did - what they became. Doctors, lawyers and others involved in the murder of the sick or Jews . 12th edition. Fischer-TB, Frankfurt / M. 2004, ISBN 3-596-24364-5 .
• Ernst Klee (Ed.): Documents on "Euthanasia" ; Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1985; ISBN 3-596-24327-0 .
• Eugen Kogon , Hermann Langbein , Adalbert Rückerl a . a. (Ed.): National Socialist mass killings by poison gas. Frankfurt 1986, Fischer-Verlag, ISBN 3-596-24353-X .
• Adalbert Rückerl (Ed.): National Socialist Extermination Camps in the Mirror of German Criminal Trials. Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Chelmno . dtv 2904, Munich 1977, ISBN 3-423-02904-8 .

Web links

• The Hackenholt photo story at www.deathscamps.org
• Biography at www.gelsenzentrum.de
• Michael Tregenza: " The 'Disappearance' of SS-Hauptscharfuhrer Lorenz Hackenholt " at www.mazal.org

Individual evidence

1. ^ Federal Archives Koblenz, Berlin-Zehlendorf branch, Lorenz Hackenholt personnel file.
2. ↑ NSDAP index card Lorenz Hackenholt.
3. ↑ Central Office of the State Justice Administrations Ludwigsburg , 208 AR-Z, statement by Werner Dubois from September 7, 1961 in Schwelm in connection with the Sobibor trial (Hagen Regional Court) against Kurt Bolender et al., P. 703.
4. ^ Federal Archives Koblenz, Berlin-Zehlendorf branch, August Becker personnel file. Disciplinary proceedings Becker / Hackenholt due to assault.
5. ↑ Central Office of the State Justice Administration Ludwigsburg, 208 AR-Z 74/60, proceedings against Georg Michalsen as an employee of the SS and Police Leader Lublin, page 9280.
6. ↑ Gas truck on www.deathcamps.org
7. ↑ Central Office of the State Justice Administrations Ludwigsburg, 208 AR-Z 25/59, statement by Kurt Franz from September 14, 1961 in Düsseldorf in connection with the Belzec trial (Munich Regional Court) against Kurt Bolender and others. a., page 1421.
8. ↑ Central Office of the State Judicial Administrations Ludwigsburg, 208 AR-Z 252/59, Volume VIII, pages 1511 ff.
9. ^ Gerstein report .
10. ↑ Central Office of the State Judicial Administrations Ludwigsburg, 208 AR-Z 25/59, statement by Karl Schluch from November 11, 1961 in Kleve in connection with the Belzec trial (Munich Regional Court) page 1515.
11. ↑ Central Office of the State Justice Administration Ludwigsburg, 208 AR-Z 251/59, statement by Erwin Lambert of October 2, 1962 in Stuttgart in connection with the Sobibor trial , page 1542.
12. ↑ Central Office of the State Justice Administration Ludwigsburg, 208 AR-Z 74/60, employee of the SS and Police Leader Lublin, pages 6120/6121.
13. ↑ Klee, Personal Lexicon.