Ludwig Rehn (SS member)

Ludwig Rehn (born July 7, 1910 in Saarbrücken , † September 1, 1982 in Kleinblittersdorf ) was a German SS-Untersturmführer and labor leader in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp .

Life

Ludwig Rehn was the second of four children of a train driver . From 1920 he attended Catholic middle school, which he left prematurely in 1925 to do an apprenticeship as a locksmith. Then he passed a journeyman's examination. From 1930 he was unemployed.

In the spring of 1935 he joined the NSDAP and the General SS . After completing his labor service, he found a position as a locksmith in a metal casting plant in Saarbrücken. In October 1935 he took up a position in the security service of Saar-Gruben AG. In 1937 he resigned from the Catholic Church .

In 1939 Rehn was drafted into the SS disposable troops, apparently because of his unsuitability for the front, assigned to the security team of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. From there he was sent to East Westphalia at the end of 1939 as an escort to a sixty-strong prisoner detachment, which was supposed to convert the Wewelsburg near Paderborn into an SS meeting place. In the newly created camp, he worked his way up from security guard to labor service officer. He was also personally involved in the mistreatment of prisoners.

In August 1942, Rehn was transferred to the Neuengamme concentration camp , where he worked as a temporary labor service leader. At the beginning of 1943 he was sent to the SS Junker School in Braunschweig for several months , but Rehn left the course. The inspection of the concentration camps then sent him to the Majdanek extermination camp for a few months , where he was able to gain further experience in the field of labor service management.

In August 1943, Rehn was finally transferred back to Sachsenhausen, where he held the position of labor officer until the end of the war. In the autumn of 1944 he graduated from the SS administration leadership school in Arolsen . In the function of the labor officer, Rehn only rarely came into personal contact with prisoners , apart from the few prison functionaries in his department. Rehn participated in the murder and mass murder by reporting prisoners who were no longer able to work to the protective custody camp department . In the Below Forest at Wittstock , where the prisoners were contracted in late April 1945, he shot several witnesses, according to a group of exhausted prisoners who wanted to quench their thirst at a river.

In May 1945 he was taken prisoner by the Americans and later by the British and was taken to the Neuengamme internment camp . In June 1946 he was extradited to the Soviet military authorities. Subsequently, Rehn was indicted in a Soviet military tribunal in the Sachsenhausen trial and sentenced on October 31, 1947 to life imprisonment with forced labor. He was serving part of his imprisonment in the gulag in Vorkuta .

At the beginning of 1956 Rehn returned to Germany as a non-amnestied war criminal . He successfully applied for financial compensation for the Soviet imprisonment he had suffered and rejoined his old employer Saar-Gruben AG, where he worked until his retirement in October 1967. A preliminary investigation into murder on the death march of the Sachsenhausen prisoners, which began in Saarbrücken in 1959 , was discontinued in 1962. In 1971 he was acquitted of murder in the Niederhagen concentration camp in the Paderborn regional court .

literature

• Günter Morsch (Ed.): The concentration camp SS 1936–1945: Work-sharing perpetrators in Sachsenhausen concentration camp . Metropol Verlag, Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-86331-403-3

Individual evidence

1. ^ Günter Morsch: The Concentration Camp SS 1936–1945: Work-sharing perpetrators in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp . Berlin 2018, p. 324.
2. ^ ^{A b c d} Günter Morsch: The Concentration Camp SS 1936-1945: Division of labor in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp . Berlin 2018, p. 325.
3. ^ ^{A b c d} Günter Morsch: The Concentration Camp SS 1936-1945: Division of labor in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp . Berlin 2018, p. 326.