Otto Lasarzik

Otto Lasarzik (born December 8, 1903 in Grapendorf in the Oletzko district in East Prussia ; † January 8, 1965 in Tolk by suicide ) was a German farmer and, as SS-Obersturmführer, head of the SS and police base Rachow in the Lublin district .

Education and Nazi career

With his parents, the farmer Gustav Lasarzik and his wife Auguste, he moved to Schleswig-Holstein in 1905 . In Kiel he attended the community school from 1910 to 1918. On January 31, 1926, he married. From April 1, 1927, he started working as an independent farmer near Eckernförde . He joined the SS in October 1930. He became a member of the NSDAP on February 1, 1932. In Gosefeld , from July 1933, he headed a base of the NSDAP that he had built there. A year later he became mayor and head of the school association there.

In 1938 he became a member of a settlement of the SS in Mehrow in the Niederbarnim district , which was set up directly by the Race and Settlement Main Office (RuSHA). In this company cooperative Mehrow eGmbH he was responsible for the waterworks and the water charges.

Service in the SS

On August 27, 1939, Lasarzik joined the Wehrmacht , where he served on the Western Front until May 18, 1940 . On February 1, 1941, he received the order from the SS to run the Rachow estate near Lublin in Poland, which covered an area of ​​480 hectares. The estate was also used as an SS and police base.

In the surroundings of Annopol it developed into the "horror of the inhabitants" and the neighboring areas. In an official certificate from August 19, 1942, the SS and police leader in the Lublin district, the later SS group leader Odilo Globocnik , certified that he had "repeatedly repulsed attacks by bandits, pursued bandits and brought them down". He also managed to “surprise a gang of 15 men at the black meal”. Globocnik made a recommendation for "public commendation in the order of the day" and advocated a corresponding note in his personnel file. In his actions against "bandits" he used Ukrainians who were under his command.

Criminal proceedings before the SS court

On June 26, 1943, there was a criminal case against Lasarzik before the SS and Police Court VI in Krakow . The hearing was conducted by the chairman SS-Hauptsturmführer and SS judge Hans Lauffs . Lasarzik was accused of having "illicit sexual intercourse " with a Polish cook who worked in a restaurant in Annopol soon after he took up his post in Rachow . His efforts to let his family come to Poland failed because his wife was supposed to continue farming. Lauffs admitted to the defendant that the defendant was "in a sexual emergency". For the accused Lauffs had also cited other mitigating circumstances: "The accused is known in gang circles as a feared opponent ... All of this shows that the accused is an SS leader, who in general in his convictions and ideological orientation as can be described perfectly and exemplary. "

For military disobedience, the sentence was six weeks of strict room arrest . Heinrich Himmler confirmed the sentence on January 6, 1944, converting three weeks of the sentence to probation. He served the sentence in April 1944 in the RuSHA in Berlin.

Lasarzik appeared on February 3, 1944 at the Borów massacre in the emergency room with his Ukrainian helpers. According to testimony before the commission for the investigation of Hitlerist crimes, his people searched the houses, took parts of the inventory and set fires on the houses. Wherever they met living injured residents, they were shot. They also rounded up the cattle and took them towards Krasnik .

Investigations

After the war, the Hamburg public prosecutor started investigations against Lasarzik. The Hamburg District Court issued an arrest warrant against him on May 3, 1965, because he was suspected of having shot Jews several times by hand or in any other way. In the Goscieradów cemetery he had 25 Jews shot for no reason.

In January 1965, Lasarzik, now based in Tolk, had received a summons to the police in Schleswig over a fire matter. In the meantime, the criminal police in Tolk knew that Lasarzik feared prosecution for his actions in Poland. Assuming that he would be summoned for questioning because of this, he apparently hanged himself on the morning of January 8, 1965. The Central Office for the Processing of National Socialist Mass Crimes at the Dortmund Public Prosecutor's Office put the proceedings against him on June 1, 1983 of his death.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Konrad Schuller: The last day of Borów - Polish farmers, German soldiers and an unprecedented war . Freiburg 2009, p. 156.
2. ↑ Isabel Heinemann: "Race, settlement, German blood" - The race and settlement main office of the SS and the racial reorganization of Europe . Göttingen 2003, p. 625.
3. ^ Lasarzik in the Mehrow cooperative from 1938
4. ↑ Black meal of grain was the death penalty. The 15 men were then also shot dead. See Heinemann 2003, p. 396.
5. ↑ Schuller 2009, p. 157.
6. ↑ Heinemann 2003, p. 396; Note: the name is given there as Laufs , in other sources the name is referred to as Lauffs .
7. ^ Norbert Podewin (ed.): Braunbuch - war and Nazi criminals in the Federal Republic and Berlin (West) . 3rd edition, Berlin 1968, p. 374.
8. ↑ On March 26, 1965 Lauffs testified as a witness in the Auschwitz trial . The then 53-year-old became Ministerialrat in the Federal Ministry of Treasury after the war , see Hermann Langbein: The Auschwitz Process, A Documentation . Volume 2, Frankfurt / Main 1995, p. 982.
9. ↑ Quoting from the judgment of the field court of July 4, 1943, see Schuller 2009, p. 160.
10. ↑ Schuller 2009, p. 155.
11. ↑ File number 141 Js 573/60, in: Heinemann 2003, p. 396.
12. ↑ Schuller 2009, p. 164.