Paul Werner (SS member)

Paul Gebhard Gustav Werner (born November 4, 1900 in Appenweier ; † February 15, 1970 in Leinfelden ) was a German administrative lawyer, criminal investigator, SS leader and ministerial advisor . At the time of National Socialism , he headed the Office Group VA (Criminal Policy and Prevention) in the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) and was Arthur Nebe's representative as head of Office V ( Reich Criminal Police Office ) (RKPA). After the end of the Second World War , he was Ministerialrat in the Baden-Württemberg Ministry of the Interior from 1951.

Origin, studies and profession

Paul Werner was the son of a Reichsbahn inspector. He grew up in Heidelberg , where his father was transferred in 1902. After graduating from high school , he was drafted in 1918 for the final months of the First World War, but no longer took part in combat operations. In Heidelberg and Freiburg Werner took after the war to study law at. He was - in his own words - "as a liaison student and fraternity member, politically always right-wing, folkish." In 1923 he passed the trainee examination with the grade “commendable”. He was employed as an auxiliary judge and auxiliary public prosecutor in Baden before he passed his assessor exam in 1926 with the grade "good". Werner completed his usual professional career as a public prosecutor in Offenburg and Pforzheim and as a civil and labor judge at the district court of Lörrach , where he was appointed district court advisor in 1933.

time of the nationalsocialism

Even as a student he felt connected to the national-folk political direction, but without being bound by party politics. He only joined the NSDAP after the National Socialist “ takeover ” on May 1, 1933 ( membership number 3.025.030). From November 1933 to May 1937 he was also a member of the SA , where he worked for three and a half years as a “welfare or shooting warden” and “troop leader”. From the SA he switched to the SS in 1937 (SS no. 290.389). In addition, he maintained memberships “in the NS-Volkswohlfahrt , in the NS-Rechtswahrerbund , in the NS-Altherrenbund , Verein ' Lebensborn ' and in the Reichsluftschutzbund ”.

At the beginning of September 1933 Werner was appointed head of the Badisches Landeskriminalamt in Karlsruhe . His successful work finally led to his appointment as deputy head of the newly formed RKPA in Berlin in May 1937 . Although colleagues later claimed that he was not a particularly “sharp” National Socialist, he was responsible for the new conception of the Reich Criminal Police Office and its implementation in an effective criminal police work. Here Werner also found the opportunity to see his own conviction that genetic dispositions are the reason for crime confirmed as a new police policy guideline at the highest level and to make it available for practice. The consequence was a preventive fight against crime through registration, observation and possible preventive detention for " professional criminals ", which Werner increasingly asserted as head of the VA office (structure, tasks and legal questions of the criminal police) of the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA).

Werner worked out the decree of the Reich Minister of the Interior of December 14, 1937 on the "Preventive fight against crime by the police". With the implementation guidelines of April 4, 1938, this decree determined the principles of police measures in future. It was an essential prerequisite for the later deportation of Sinti to concentration camps .

One of his main tasks in the Reich Criminal Police Office was the fight against juvenile delinquency. In various publications he emphasized the origin of the juveniles who had committed criminal offenses from “criminal clans”. In doing so, he pushed for the "criminal police surveillance of children and young people who appear to be hereditary criminals". It is not primarily a matter of "rendering harmless" to the individual, but rather of ending a crime-promoting "hereditary current". The establishment of a “ police youth protection camp ” was based on a meeting by Heydrich at the end of 1939, in which Werner participated as a representative of the Reich Criminal Police Office . Werner flanked such measures with numerous articles in specialist magazines and articles, where he repeatedly propagated the "making infertility in the context of fighting juvenile delinquency".

Werner also gave hereditary biology a high priority for the criminal police strategy of preventive crime prevention in the sense of clan research :

“If a criminal or antisocial has ancestors who also lived criminally or asocially [...], according to the results of genetic research it has been proven that his behavior is hereditary. Such a person […] must be tackled in a different way than a person who […] comes from a decent family […]. The criminal is no longer seen as an individual, his act no longer seen as an individual act. Rather, he is to be regarded as the offspring and ancestor of a clan, his deed as the act of a member of the clan. "

The establishment of the Criminal Biological Institute of the Security Police (KBI) in the Reich Main Security Office under Robert Ritter by decree of December 21, 1941 was largely at Werner's instigation.

Hans Hefelmann , head of the Fuehrer's office (KdF), testified during an interrogation by the Stuttgart public prosecutor's office on February 20, 1963 that Werner was the liaison of the Reich Criminal Police Office to Reinhold Vorberg , the head of the " Gemeinnützige Krankentransport GmbH (GeKraT)", the transport department of Operation T4 . Werner and Nebe had met in August 1939 in the Reich Chancellery for a discussion about the planned “euthanasia” program with Viktor Brack , the head of Office II of the KdF and organizer of the T4 campaign .

From the spring of 1942, Werner carried out an inspection of the German criminal police in Paris , Brussels and The Hague . Most recently, from September 1942 to March 1943, he gained practical experience on site as an inspector of the Security Police and the SD in Stettin . In March 1943 he took over his position again as head of the VA Office (criminal policy and prevention) and representative of Office V, Arthur Nebe , in the RSHA . During his absence Werner was represented by SS-Obersturmbannführer Robert Schefe . Werner stayed in this position until the end of the war .

On 28 October 1942 he was appointed Colonel transported to the police. In January 1944 he was awarded the War Merit Cross I and II Class with Swords. On November 9, 1944, Werner rose to SS-Oberführer , the highest rank he achieved in the Schutzstaffel.

post war period

After the end of Nazism Werner came with Bernhard Wehner on May 12, 1945 in Salzburg in Allied captivity . After three years of internment, he was denazified as a “fellow traveler” in 1948 as a result of a court proceedings . Then he worked for a lawyer in Waldshut . After the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany , Werner wrote to the Federal Ministry of the Interior on October 4, 1949, advocating the establishment of an influential central criminal authority and the reinstatement of former Nazi criminal investigators in order to “fight the most dangerous criminality”. Werner also used his opinion to wash clean the Nazi-charged criminal police. On the part of the Federal Ministry of the Interior, Werner's letter was not understood as his private opinion, but as a statement by a representative of the interests of former criminal police officers, who still “enjoyed the sympathy of numerous officials”. Failed Werner though, again at the Criminal Investigation Department to be used, however, it was established in December 1951 as Councilor to the Baden Ministry of the Interior, Department of "welfare" is set. After the founding of the state of Baden-Württemberg, he moved to the Ministry of the Interior in Stuttgart in September 1952, where he was quickly promoted: in January 1953 to the senior government council and in April 1954 to government director . In this function he was “responsible for constitutional issues”. In January 1955, the Baden-Württemberg Minister of the Interior Fritz Ulrich Werner proposed to succeed Hanns Jess as President of the Federal Criminal Police Office . The Minister of the Interior also justified his proposal with the allegedly impeccable behavior of Werner during National Socialism.

“Political concerns about the use of the government director Werner as head of the Federal Criminal Police Office should not exist. His behavior in the years 1933–1945 was absolutely impeccable. "

However, this did not happen due to a negative statement by Max Hagemann , who was already retired and who had already refused to reuse Werner in the criminal investigation department in 1949 as the responsible officer in the Federal Ministry of the Interior. Hagemann's confidentially treated assessment painted a negative picture of Werner: "Werner was only just average talented, was not up to his position in the RKPA, open to the point of talkativeness, enthusiastic and convinced National Socialist, in whom feelings outweighed reason, undoubtedly misused as a decent character, unsustainable for the police force ”.

Investigations against Werner by the Stuttgart Public Prosecutor's Office were discontinued in 1963. In a statement before the Public Prosecutor's Office in Frankfurt am Main on November 16, 1961, Werner put on record:

“Of course I knew about the task forces in the east. B. from Auschwitz ”. […] Of course, in the course of time we noticed that the mortality rate in the concentration camps was very high. On my in this regard. Question [...] I was given the plausible explanation that z. B. now a large number of older preventive detainees who were used to a sedentary way of life, had now been transferred to the concentration camps and were there on a heavily energy-consuming mission. "

Werner retired in March 1966. At this point in time, too, the files still contain references to two other public prosecutor's investigations in which he is being led as a suspect: on the one hand, in the context of proceedings against former members of the Reich Security Main Office on suspicion of the murder of Poles; on the other hand, a procedure without further details that was still being conducted in 1970. These two cases were also closed, the last after he died on February 15, 1970.

literature

• Michael Wildt : Generation of the Unconditional. The leadership corps of the Reich Security Main Office. Hamburg 2003 a. ö., ISBN 3-930908-87-5 .
• Daniel Stange / Ingo Wirth: Paul Werner (1900–1970). Deputy Head of Office in the Reich Security Main Office . In: Journal of History . Volume 61 (2013), Issue 7/8, pp. 621-641.
• Katrin Seybold : Paul Werner: Grand Master of the extermination camps, Ministerialrat in FRG times . In: Hermann G. Abmayer (ed.): Stuttgart Nazi perpetrators. From fellow travelers to mass murderers . Butterfly Verlag, Stuttgart, 2nd edition 2009, ISBN 978-3-89657-136-6 , pp. 74-81.
• Patrick Wagner : Hitler's Criminalists: The German Criminal Police and National Socialism between 1920 and 1960 . CH Beck, Munich 2002, ISBN 3-406-49402-1 .
• Wolfgang Proske (Ed.): Perpetrators - helpers - free riders. Nazi victims from southern Baden (=  perpetrators - helpers - free riders . Band 6 ). 1st edition. Kugelberg, Gerstetten 2017, ISBN 978-3-945893-06-7 , pp. 371 ff .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Michael Wildt: Generation of the Unconditional. The Leadership Corps of the Reich Security Main Office , Hamburger Edition , Hamburg 2003, p. 315.
2. ↑ Michael Wildt: Generation of the Unconditional. The leadership corps of the Reich Security Main Office , Hamburger Edition , Hamburg 2003, p. 314f.
3. ↑ Michael Wildt: Generation of the Unconditional. The leadership corps of the Reich Security Main Office Hamburger Edition HIS, Hamburg 2003, p. 315.
4. ^ Daniel Stange / Ingo Wirth: Paul Werner (1900-1970) . In: Journal of History. Issue 7/8 2013, p. 623f.
5. ^ ^{A b} Andreas Seeger: Gestapo-Müller: The career of a desk offender . Metropol Verlag, Berlin 1996, ISBN 3-926893-28-1 , p. 163.
6. ^ Daniel Stange / Ingo Wirth: Paul Werner (1900-1970) . In: Journal of History. Issue 7/8 2013, p. 624.
7. ↑ Michael Wildt: Generation of the Unconditional. The leadership corps of the Reich Main Security Office, Hamburger Edition HIS, Hamburg 2003, p. 65.
8. ↑ See Wolfgang Ayaß (edit.): "Community foreigners". Sources for the persecution of "anti-social" 1933-1945 , Koblenz 1998, pp. 94, 216, 250, 258 f., 271, 274, 280, 290, 301, 303, 330-332, 352 f., 366, 380.
9. ↑ Michael Wildt: Generation of the Unconditional. The leadership corps of the Reich Main Security Office, Hamburger Edition HIS, Hamburg 2003, p. 315f.
10. ↑ Printed by Wolfgang Ayaß (arr.): "Community foreigners". Sources on the persecution of "anti-social" 1933–1945 , Koblenz 1998, no. 50.
11. ↑ Printed by Wolfgang Ayaß: "Gemeinschaftfremde" , No. 62.
12. ^ Katrin Seybold: Paul Werner: Grand Master of the extermination camps, Ministerialrat in FRG times . In: Hermann G. Abmayer (ed.): Stuttgart Nazi perpetrators . Stuttgart 2009, p. 75f .; see also Daniel Stange / Ingo Wirth: Paul Werner (1900–1970) . In: Journal of History. Issue 7/8 2013, p. 626f.
13. ^ Daniel Stange / Ingo Wirth: Paul Werner (1900-1970) . In: Journal of History. Issue 7/8 2013, p. 631f.
14. ↑ Quoted from Michael Wildt: Generation des Unbedingten ... Hamburg 2003, ISBN 3-930908-87-5 , p. 320.
15. ↑ Michael Wildt: Generation of the Unconditional. The leadership corps of the Reich Security Main Office Hamburger Edition HIS, Hamburg 2003, p. 319.
16. ↑ Michael Wildt: Generation of the Unconditional. The leadership corps of the Reich Security Main Office Hamburger Edition HIS, Hamburg 2003, p. 328f.
17. ↑ ^{a b} Michael Wildt: Generation of the Unconditional. The leadership corps of the Reich Security Main Office Hamburger Edition HIS, Hamburg 2003, p. 316.
18. ↑ Patrick Wagner: Hitler's Criminalists: The German Criminal Police and National Socialism between 1920 and 1960 , Munich 2002, p. 131.
19. ↑ Patrick Wagner: Hitler's Criminalists: The German Criminal Police and National Socialism between 1920 and 1960 , Munich 2002, p. 158.
20. ↑ Patrick Wagner: The rehabilitation of Nazi criminalists . In: Ulrich Herbert (Ed.): Change processes in West Germany. Burden , integration, liberalization, 1945 to 1980. Göttingen 2002. ISBN 3-892-446091 , pp. 184ff.
21. ^ Daniel Stange / Ingo Wirth: Paul Werner (1900-1970) . In: Journal of History. Issue 7/8 2013, p. 638.
22. ^ Katrin Seybold: Paul Werner: Grand Master of the extermination camps, Ministerialrat in FRG times . In: Hermann G. Abmayer (ed.): Stuttgart Nazi perpetrators . Stuttgart 2009, p. 80.
23. ↑ Michael Wildt: Generation of the Unconditional. The leadership corps of the Reich Main Security Office, Hamburger Edition HIS, Hamburg 2003, p. 771.
24. ↑ Fritz Ulrich in January 1955. Quoted from Daniel Stange / Ingo Wirth: Paul Werner (1900–1970) . In: Journal of History. Issue 7/8 2013, p. 638f.
25. ↑ Quoted from Dieter Schenk : Blind in the right eye - The brown roots of the BKA. , Frankfurt am Main 2001, p. 52.
26. ^ Daniel Stange / Ingo Wirth: Paul Werner (1900-1970) . In: Journal of History. Issue 7/8 2013, p. 641.
27. ^ Daniel Stange / Ingo Wirth: Paul Werner (1900-1970) . In: Journal of History. Issue 7/8 2013, pp. 640f.