Paul Opitz

Paul Opitz (born September 17, 1897 in Schmiedeberg , Wittenberg district , † after 1967) was a German civil servant. During the Nazi era he was a consultant at the Secret State Police Office and after the war he worked for the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution . He is not to be confused with Paul Opitz (born June 1, 1898; SS-No. 40,404) who worked in the RSHA ( Reich Security Main Office ).

Life and activity

Youth and early career

Opitz was the second son of the forest administrator Edmund Opitz and his wife Marie, née Baltz.

After attending elementary school and the secondary school in Eilenburg , Opitz took part in the First World War from 1915 with the 136 and 143 infantry regiments . During the war he was only used on the Western Front : in 1917 he was wounded near Cambrai , then in 1918 he worked as an intelligence service for close-up reconnaissance before he was taken prisoner by the British on October 8, 1918 , from which he was captured on October 22 or 31. December 1919 was released.

After his return to Germany, Opitz belonged to a voluntary corps with which he took part in the German-Polish border fighting that broke out after the war . On February 1, 1923, Opitz joined the police force.

time of the nationalsocialism

Around 1936 Opitz was transferred to the Secret State Police Office in Berlin as a civil servant . At this time he also joined the Schutzstaffel (SS) (SS no. 332.024). Since January 1, 1938, at the latest, he was entrusted with the processing of subject area II A 5 (passport forgery matters) in Section II A (“Communism, Marxism, Soviet Russians, anti-subversive foreigners”) of the Secret State Police Office. In the following year, according to the business distribution plan of the Secret State Police Office of July 1, 1939, he had already risen to the position of deputy head of this department and, in addition to working on subject area II A 5, with the deputy processing of subject areas II A 2 ("Monitoring and Combating the Marxist Movement") and II A 4. Regular speakers were Bruno Sattler and Josef Vogt . During judicial interrogations in the 1960s, he claimed that these attributions of jurisdiction were "misprints".

At the end of 1939 Opitz was transferred to the Poznan immigrant headquarters. In 1941 he took over a "flying command" of the RSHA for border surveillance. In 1943 he returned to Berlin as an advisor for the border police at the Reich Security Main Office (Referat IV F 1). After the assassination attempt on Hitler on July 20, 1944 , Opitz was a member of the special commission of the secret state police set up to investigate the crime .

At the end of 1944 Opitz was assigned to the newly appointed General Inspector for the remaining borders.

post war period

After the end of the war, Opitz went to Northern Germany. In the following years he worked for the American occupation forces. In 1951, on the recommendation of Gustav Halswick - who praised him as an "expert on communism" - he was employed by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and at the same time accepted back into the civil service. In the following years he worked at the Office for the Protection of the Constitution in Cologne . On July 1, 1961, he retired for health reasons.

Opitz's role during the Nazi era first became known to a broader public when he was "denounced" as one of the high-ranking personalities in the state apparatus of the West German state in the Brown Book published by the GDR on "War and Nazi Criminals in the Federal Republic" the crimes of the Nazi era were entangled (p. 97).

In 1967 Opitz was involved by the public prosecutor at the Higher Regional Court in West Berlin in the then pending investigation against former RSHA members for the mass murders of parts of the Polish population during the German occupation of Poland during World War II. The background was that in the course of the investigation it was established that subject area II A 4 of the Secret State Police Office had been one of those places in the RSHA that had created wanted lists of leading Polish personalities ("intellectuals, teachers, officers, etc.") who had created the so-called Task forces that were charged with carrying out the mass murders in Poland were given to "process" and thus formed one of the bases of the killing measures carried out by the task forces. According to the surviving business distribution plans of the Gestapo headquarters , Opitz had been the deputy of the officer involved in the processing of the mentioned subject area, so that an involvement or at least knowledge of Opitz about the task force activities was assumed. In his interrogations by the public prosecutor's office and later in court, Opitz denied that he had knowledge that members of the Polish intelligentsia and other sections of the Polish population such as communists, Marxists, and union members had been persecuted and that wanted lists had been drawn up and used for this purpose. The court came to the conclusion that, on the one hand, there was only evidence of a general, fundamental function of Opitz as a representative of the employees responsible for the areas II A 2 and II A 4 of the Secret State Police Office, on the other hand it could not be proven that this deputy was on during the attack Poland went beyond the passive stand-by-as-a-substitute-in-case-the-actually-responsible-official-in-principle-ready-to-act-actively-in-the-management-of-his-business and secondly No evidence could be provided that Opitz knew that the purpose of the wanted lists drawn up in his work environment was not just to name people to be arrested, but to compile death row inmates. On January 12, 1968, the Berlin (West) chamber court finally informed the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution that Opitz could not prove any criminal behavior.

Promotions

• April 20, 1940: SS-Sturmbannführer

literature

• Siegfried Grundmann: The secret apparatus of the KPD in the sights of the Gestapo. The BB department: functionaries, civil servants, informers and spies , Dietz, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-320-02113-9 , pp. 127-130.
• Michael Wildt : Generation of the Unconditional: Leadership Corps of the Reich Security Main Office , 2002.
• Constantin Goschler , Michael Wala: "No new Gestapo". The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and the Nazi past . Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2015, ISBN 978-3-498-02438-3