Paul Zapp

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Paul Johannes Zapp (born April 18, 1904 in Hersfeld , † February 4, 1999 in Bad Arolsen ) was a German SS-Obersturmbannführer and private secretary of the Tübingen Indologist Wilhelm Hauer ; Reich manager of the neo-pagan “ German Faith Movement ”, SS and SD member and from June 1941 to July 1942 as leader of Sonderkommando 11a responsible for mass murders of Ukrainian civilians.

Life

Zapp was born in 1904 in Hersfeld (Hessen) as the son of a factory owner. He spent his youth in Kassel . After graduating from high school , he completed an apprenticeship at Deutsche Bank and then worked in a commercial position at various companies. Before his unemployment in 1931, he worked as a deputy head of department in the A. Borsig Lokomotivenwerke secretariat in Berlin . As an unemployed person, he studied philosophy and history for a few semesters at the University of Berlin . In the summer of 1933, as private secretary to the Indologist Jakob Wilhelm Hauer, he also took over the management of the German Faith Movement in Tübingen, which was founded by Hauer . Under Hauer's influence, Zapp left the church and in 1934 joined the SS and SD . He owed his employment as a part-time employee to his acquaintance with Werner Best , one of the leading ideologues and organizers of the SS and SD. In February 1936 Zapp left the German Faith Movement . The motives for this are both religious conviction and the desire for professional advancement, which would have been opposed to membership in the religious movement, which was no longer supported by the National Socialists at that time. In 1936 he moved to the SD main office in Berlin . In the SD school in Bernau near Berlin , Zapp acted as an instructor and was busy with the ideological training of the SD staff until the outbreak of the war .

With the beginning of the war against the Soviet Union Zapp took the lead 11a of detail within the insert group D . Task Force D, led by SS-Gruppenführer Otto Ohlendorf , followed Army Group South through southern Ukraine , the Crimea and into the Caucasus .

"The trail of blood of his [Zapp] almost 100 man embracing commandos ran across eastern Romania , about Barlad , Chisinau , Nikolayev , Kherson , Nowa Majatschka up to Simferopol . Zapp not only selected suitable locations for liquidation, he also determined the date and personnel for the shootings. As soon as Zapp moved into a larger town, he had the Jewish population called together under a pretext and brought to the already prepared pits. There the Jews had to step forward in groups and were executed row by row. They were shot in the chest or head with a carbine from a distance of 3 to 5 meters. Smaller children were taken from their parents and shot separately or on their parents' arms. The tissue-strewn floor was dripping with blood everywhere. Especially when those to be killed saw those who had already been killed lying in front of them, tumultuous scenes ensued. [...] Because of the enormous emotional strain on the shooters, Zapp had to persuade his people well or threaten them if they let up in their efforts. "

From April 1944, Zapp was the last leader of the SD in Dresden .

After 1945

In 1967, Zapp - who had previously lived under the name Friedrich Böhm in Bebra , Hesse - was arrested and sentenced to life in prison by the Munich Regional Court on February 26, 1970 . In court, Zapp stated that it was his concern to make death as easy as possible for the victims - since they have to die:

“On the occasion of a major execution in Nikolayev, he had tried to shoot a Jew who had jumped into the pit unhurt, but this was not out of racial hatred, but out of pity. He wanted to spare the man from suffocating miserably under the mountains of corpses. "

Paul Zapp was released from prison on January 27, 1986 and lived in Bebra until the death of his second wife Marianne Braun in 1988. Until his death in 1999 he lived in Bad Arolsen or Rhoden, he was buried in Niederaula.

Gravestone PZ.jpg

After the end of the war , Zapp's writings Germanic-German Christmas (Gutbrod, Stuttgart 1934), Religious Decay and German Faith (Röth, Eisenach 1935) and German Consecration (Widukind-Verlag, Berlin 1936) were placed on the list of literature to be segregated in the Soviet occupation zone . In the German Democratic Republic , this list was followed by the “Confirmation” or German Youth Leader that he published? (Widukind-Verlag, Berlin 1935).

literature

  • Andrej Angrick : Occupation Policy and Mass Murder. Task Force D in the southern Soviet Union 1941-1943 . Hamburger Edition , Hamburg 2003, ISBN 3-930908-91-3 .
  • Schaul Baumann: The German Belief Movement and its founder Jakob Wilhelm Hauer (1881–1962) , diagonal-Verlag, Religionswissenschaftliche Reihe Volume 22, Marburg 2005.
  • Wolfgang Dierker : Himmler's religious warrior . The SS Security Service and its Religious Policy 1933–1941 . [= Publications of the Commission for Contemporary History. Row B: Research. Vol. 92]. Schöningh, Paderborn 2002, ISBN 3-506-79997-5 (Zugl .: Bonn, Univ., Diss., 2000). With short biography, p. 560.
  • Konrad Kwiet : Paul Zapp: thought leader and executor of the extermination of the Jews . In: Klaus-Michael Mallmann , Gerhard Paul Hgg .: Careers of violence. National Socialist perpetrator biographies. WBG Darmstadt 2004, ISBN 3-534-16654-X ; New edition Primus 2011, ISBN 9783896787262 & WBG 2011.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Wolfgang Benz : Handbook of Antisemitism: Anti-Semitism in Past and Present. Volume 2: People, Part 2, L – Z. Berlin: De Gruyter Saur. 2009, p. 896, ISBN 978-3-598-24072-0 .
  2. ↑ a b c Carsten Schreiber: Elite in Hidden: Ideology and Regional Rule Practice of the Security Service of the SS and its Network Using the Example of Saxony , Munich 2008, p. 60.
  3. ↑ Horst Junginger: Tübingen executors of the final solution. (pdf; 61 kB), p. 1.
  4. ↑ Ernst Klee: Personal Lexicon for the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. Fischer Taschenbuch, Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 3-596-16048-0 , p. 690.
  5. ↑ Horst Junginger: Tübingen executors of the final solution. (pdf; 61 kB), p. 2.
  6. ^ German administration for popular education in the Soviet occupation zone, list of literature to be sorted out. Letters Y and Z Zentralverlag, Berlin 1946
  7. ^ German administration for popular education in the Soviet occupation zone, list of literature to be sorted out. Letters X, Y and Z. Zentralverlag, Berlin 1947
  8. ^ Ministry of National Education of the German Democratic Republic, list of the literature to be sorted out. Letter K . VEB Deutscher Zentralverlag, Berlin 1953.
personal data
SURNAME Zapp, Paul
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Zapp, Paul Johannes
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German war criminal, leader of Sonderkommando 11a of Einsatzgruppe D
DATE OF BIRTH April 18, 1904
PLACE OF BIRTH Hersfeld , Hessen
DATE OF DEATH February 4, 1999
Place of death Bad Arolsen