Oskars Dankers

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Oskars Dankers as a witness at the Nuremberg trials

Oskars Dankers (born March 14 . Jul / 26. March  1883 greg. In Irlava , district Tukums , Courland Governorate ; † 11. April 1965 in Grand Rapids , USA ) was a Latvian general and politician. He led a division in independent Latvia in the interwar period . During the German occupation in World War II, he collaborated with the National Socialist German Reich as head of the Latvian interior administration .

Life

In his youth, Dankers attended secondary school in Irmlau, Latvia. He then proposed to the officer career and was trained from 1903 to 1906 at the war school in Vilnius .

1919 Dankers commanding officer of the 7th Infantry - Regiment Sigulda and the Military District Kurland . He was the commanding officer of the Semgallian division until 1932 and was then appointed to the general staff . From 1933 to 1939 he commanded the Kurland division. At the time of the occupation of Latvia by the Red Army on June 17, 1940, Dankers was taking a cure in Karlsbad. As a result of the situation in his home country, he stayed with relatives in Germany. He lived in Poznan where he temporarily worked in the office of the Central Agricultural Cooperative for Plant Protection and Pest Control. Through his contacts with Baltic Germans, which he maintained during this time, he found the hearing of the Nazi politician Alfred Rosenberg . In 1941 Rosenberg took Dankers with a group of exiled Latvians under his protection and prepared the group for their role after the occupation of the Baltic States in the course of the planned war against the Soviet Union.

Under German occupation, he held the post of Director General for Internal Affairs of the "Latvian Self-Administration" in the Reich Commissariat Ostland from 1941 to 1944 . Dankers played a similar role in Latvia as Hjalmar Mäe in Estonia and Petras Kubiliūnas in Lithuania . As the front approached , Dankers fled to Germany in 1944. At the end of the war he was captured by the US Army in Hausham near Munich.

1947-48 he was questioned as a witness in the Nuremberg trials . He moved to the USA in 1957, where he died in 1965. His grave is in the Grand Rapids Hospital Cemetery in Michigan . His memoirs were published posthumously by Latvian publishers in exile in Canada.

literature

  • Valdis O. Lumans: Latvia in World War II . Fordham University Press, New York 2006. ISBN 0-8232-2627-1 .
  • Karl Heinz Gräfe: From the thunder cross to the swastika. The Baltic States between dictatorship and occupation . Edition Organon, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-931034-11-5 , short biography p. 432

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Entry in the baptismal register of the Irmlau community (Latvian: Irlava)
  2. ↑ Valdis O. Lumans: Latvia in World War II . Fordham University Press, New York 2006, pp. 181-183.
  3. ^ Examination on August 4, 1947 and June 24, 1948, Nuremberg Document No. NO-33000 and NO-5924.
  4. ↑ Oskars Dankers: Lai vēsture spriež tiesu . Latvis, Toronto 1965. (Newly published with a foreword by Jānis Klīdzējs in Rota, Rīga 1994. ISBN 9984-524-36-1 , title in German: The law of history will judge .)
    Oskars Dankers: No atmiņu pūra . Daugavas vanagi Kanādā, Toronto 1973. (Title in German: Ganz aus dem Gedächtnis .)
personal data
SURNAME Dankers, Oskars
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Thank you, Oskars
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Latvian general
DATE OF BIRTH March 26, 1883
PLACE OF BIRTH Irlava , Tukums County
DATE OF DEATH April 11, 1965
Place of death Grand Rapids, Michigan