Paul Riege

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Paul Riege as a witness at the Nuremberg trials

Paul Riege (born April 27, 1888 in Lüdingworth ; † 1980 ) was a German police general and SS group leader in World War II . He was in command of the Ordnungspolizei (BdO), including in occupied Norway , Poland and Czechoslovakia . He wrote a guide for police officers as well as popular scientific treatises on police history , which were printed in many editions both in the time of National Socialism and in the Federal Republic.

Life

Paul Riege took part in the First World War from 1914, and was awarded the Iron Cross First Class , among other things . In the Prussian police in Berlin he made it up to major. After the " seizure of power " he joined the NSDAP (NSDAP membership number 2,658,727), and later also in the SS (SS membership number 323,872).

Riege was BdO in Oslo from April 1940 - immediately after the occupation of Norway . In October 1940 he was replaced there by Major General of the Police August Meyszner . His direct superior was the HSSPF North / Norway , SS-Obergruppenführer Fritz Weitzel , who was replaced in June 1940 by HSSPF SS-Obergruppenführer Wilhelm Redieß , who held this position until the end of the war.

Riege (2nd from right) at a police parade in Krakow (1939)

From October 1940, Riege replaced Major General of the Police Herbert Becker as BdO East / Generalgouvernement based in Krakow . His superior HSSPF was SS-Obergruppenführer Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger . In August 1941 Riege was transferred as BdO to the HSSPF Böhmen-Moravia, SS-Obergruppenführer Karl Hermann Frank , in Prague , his successor as BdO in Cracow was Colonel Rudolf Mueller-Boenigk.

Riege's predecessor in Prague was Major General of the Police Otto von Oelhafen . After the assassination attempt on Heydrich, Riege's service in Prague was marked by internal friction between Frank and Daluge , the latter had been appointed Heydrich's successor. In Frank's judgment, Riege was “a good police officer, but a very bad politician and a political child”. Riege supported the Lidice massacre that followed Heydrich's killing by detaching over 200 men from the police . In September 1943, after differences with Frank, Riege was relieved of his office and replaced by Lieutenant General Ernst Hitzegrad .

After the end of the war, Riege was questioned several times during the Nuremberg Trials in 1947. He lived in northern Lower Saxony . In the Confederation of Displaced Officials in the German Association of Officials (Verbaost), founded in 1948 , an association of officials who had lost their jobs as a result of flight and displacement or as part of denazification , Riege was chairman of the “Police History” committee in the police department. The formation of this technical committee was probably suggested by the former SS-Gruppenführer and Lieutenant General of the Ordnungspolizei Adolf von Bomhard . Especially with his Little Police Story , which appeared in at least three editions between 1954 and 1966, Riege tried to paint a picture of the “clean police force”.

Rieges, together with Karl Lautenschläger, wrote the work Police: Protection, Order, Security; Official signs for the street police officer (Kameradschaft, Berlin 1942) were placed on the list of literature to be sorted out in the Soviet occupation zone after the end of the war .

Web links

Commons : Paul Riege  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Eric A. Johnson: Urbanization and crime: Germany 1871-1914 . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1995, p. 21 and footnote 19. ISBN 0-521-47017-X .
  2. ↑ Stefan Klemp: "Not determined". Police Battalions and the Post War Justice . 2nd edition, Klartext Verlag, Essen 2011, ISBN 978-3-8375-0663-1 , p. 60.
  3. ^ A b Jan Björn Potthast: The Jewish Central Museum of the SS in Prague - Opponent Research and Genocide in National Socialism . Campus-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2002, p. 248 and footnote 204. ISBN 3-593-37060-3 .
  4. ^ Records of the United States Nuernberg War Crimes trials Interrogations, 1946-1949. Date Published: 1977 (PDF; 186 kB)
  5. ^ Stefan Noethen: Old comrades and new colleagues: Police in North Rhine-Westphalia 1945–1953 . Klartext-Verlag, Essen 2003, p. 488. ISBN 3-89861-110-8 .
  6. ↑ Paul Riege: Small police story . Verlag für Polizeiliches Fachschrifttum, Lübeck 1954. (New and extended editions 1959 and 1966.)
  7. ↑ Dieter Schenk: Blind in the right eye: the brown roots of the BKA . Kiepenheuer and Witsch, Cologne 2001, p. 296. ISBN 3-462-03034-5 .
  8. ↑ http://www.polunbi.de/bibliothek/1948-nslit-q.html
personal data
SURNAME Riege, Paul
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German SS group leader and general in the Ordnungspolizei in the Third Reich
DATE OF BIRTH April 27, 1888
PLACE OF BIRTH Ludingworth
DATE OF DEATH 1980