Oswald Poche

Oswald Poche (born January 28, 1908 in Brandenburg an der Havel ; † September 22, 1962 in Dannenberg ) was a German senior government councilor and SS-Obersturmbannführer who worked as head of the Gestapo in Frankfurt am Main and then as commander of the Einsatzkommando 2 on the murder the Jews was involved.

Life

Oswald Poche joined both the NSDAP and the SS (SS member number: 267.316). He reached his highest rank when he was promoted to Obersturmbannführer with effect from January 30, 1939. In December 1939, Heinrich Seetzen replaced Heinrich Seetzen as inspector of the security police and the SD (IdS) in the Stettin state police headquarters with responsibility for the province of Pomerania . Poche held the position until the spring of 1941, when Otto Hellwig was his successor .

In March 1941, Poche was appointed head of the Frankfurt am Main state police station. The Gauleiter of Hessen-Nassau, Jakob Sprenger , in whose area Frankfurt was located, pursued the policy of making Frankfurt “ Jew-free ” and even exceeded the instructions from Berlin in an extreme way. Poche implemented this policy with the resources of the Gestapo. Between October 10, 1941 and September 24, 1942, the Frankfurt State Police Department organized ten large deportations for the deportation of around 10,000 people to concentration and extermination camps. Poche, together with the head of Department II, Kriminalrat Ernst Grosse, led the forces in all of these deportations. After the deportation of Jews from Frankfurt was essentially completed in autumn 1942, the Frankfurt Gestapo took measures to deliver Jews who were (still) protected from deportation to be exterminated: Jews who lived in “ mixed marriages ”, “World War fighters” and armaments workers not be deported. Using a system of informers and the strictest surveillance, the Frankfurt Gestapo had such privileged Jews sent to the concentration camp for petty "offenses" such as covering up the Jewish star or an improper application for coal allocation , from where they were deported to the east and murdered. The leading people in Frankfurt were Oswald Poche as head of the Gestapo, department head Ernst Grosse and the Jewish advisor Heinrich Baab .

From September 1943, he was the successor to Reinhard Breder and headed Einsatzkommando 2, which was part of Einsatzgruppe A when the Soviet Union was attacked. The Einsatzkommando carried out mass murders of Jews and political commissars in the wake of Army Group North in 1941/42 . In 1943 the time of the war of movement towards the east was over on the northern eastern front. The Einsatzkommando 2 accordingly became a fixed unit, which was subordinate to the KdS Latvia / Riga. In Porchow , early in 1944, Poche was seriously wounded in a bomb attack by Soviet partisans . He returned to Frankfurt on convalescence leave to live with his wife and two sons. From May 1, 1944, he took up a new position as KdS in Tromsø , Norway , where he stayed almost until the end of the war. In April 1945 Poche was ordered to the RSHA in Berlin, wherever he went. From there he made his way west to Hamburg after a short time. There he procured false papers in the name of his wife's brother-in-law, went into hiding after the end of the war and lived under the false name "Koch" with his family in Salzwedel , where he worked as a traveling salesman. He died in a hospital in Dannenberg.

literature

• Monica Kingreen (Ed.): "After the Kristallnacht": Jewish life and anti-Jewish politics in Frankfurt am Main 1938-1945 . Campus-Verlag, Frankfurt / Main 1999, ISBN 3-593-36310-0 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Seniority list of the NSDAP Schutzstaffel (SS-Obersturmbannführer and SS-Sturmbannführer) , as of October 1, 1944. SS-Personalhauptamt, Berlin 1944.
2. ↑ ^{a b} Beate Meyer: Scope of Action for Regional Jewish Representatives (1941–1945) . In: Birthe Kundrus, Beate Meyer (ed.): "The deportation of the Jews from Germany: plans-practice-reactions 1938-1945". Wallstein, Göttingen 2004, ISBN 3892447926 , pp. 68-73.
3. ↑ Susanne Meinl, Jutta Zwilling: Legalized robbery: the plundering of the Jews under National Socialism by the Reich Finance Administration in Hesse . Campus Verlag, Frankfurt 2004, ISBN 3593376121 , pp. 479-482.
4. ↑ ^{a b c} Volker Eichler: The Jewish Department of the Frankfurt Gestapo . In: Monica Kingreen (ed.): "After the Kristallnacht" . Campus-Verlag, Frankfurt / Main 1999, p. 245.
5. ^ Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich . Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-596-16048-8 , p. 466. (Entry on Poche, Oswald .)