Philipp Schmitt (SS member)

Philipp Johann Adolf Schmitt (* 20th November 1902 in Bad Kissingen ; † 9. August 1950 in Hoboken ) was a German sturmbannführer who in World War II as commander of the detention center in Belgium Fort Breendonk and SS assembly camp Mechelen worked well the only war criminal to be executed in Belgium .

Life

Philipp Schmitt comes from a middle-class family from Bad Kissingen. He attended secondary school in his hometown until 1918, after which he began an apprenticeship in banking. In 1919 he joined a Bavarian volunteer corps , in which he experienced his right-wing extremist character. From 1922 to 1923 and 1925 to 1930 he was a member of the Federal Oberland . This grouping took u. a. in the march on the Feldherrnhalle on November 9, 1923 in Munich . Schmitt was convicted of brawls three times during this period. Several employment relationships were short-lived.

In September 1925 he joined the NSDAP for the first time ( membership number 19.192), but only paid his membership fees until August 1926. After the successes of Hitler's party in the Reichstag election in 1930 , Schmitt was again a party member and a member of the SA . At the end of March 1932 he joined the SS (SS No. 44.291), where he was promoted to Untersturmführer in September 1935 and to Obersturmführer in September 1936. In the same year he was transferred to the SD Main Office in Berlin and on April 20, 1938, he was appointed Head of Department as SS Hauptsturmführer. Its most important task was the preparation of political reports.

Shortly before the start of the Second World War, Schmitt was transferred to Wiesbaden , where he supervised road construction by the Todt organization .

On September 23, 1939, Schmitt married Ilse Birkholz, who was born on April 5, 1914 in Hoboken, New Jersey .

During his SS career Schmitt was awarded the sword of honor of the Reich SS and skull ring of SS .

Shortly after the occupation of Belgium by the Wehrmacht , Schmitt came to the SD in Brussels on August 1, 1940 as SS-Sturmbannführer . In the same month he was commissioned to set up Fort Breendonk as a so-called reception camp, which he took over on September 20, 1940. He remained in command of this camp until November 1943, where he led a brutal regime and became the terror of the prisoners. According to some unconfirmed statements after the end of the war, even his own comrades avoided him when he came to visit from Brussels. Schmitt was also notorious for his shepherd dog , which he always accompanied him and which he also chased on prisoners. He was even violent when he was drunk. He left the chastisements or punishments of prisoners to his also extremely brutal assistant SS-Untersturmführer Arthur Prauss .

When the SS assembly camp in Mechelen for Jews and Gypsies was built in July 1942 , Schmitt took over its management. He commanded this assembly camp, which was used for deportation to the extermination camp, next to the reception camp at Fort Breendonk. Schmitt, however, was deposed in April 1943 because he was involved in black market deals with Jews. These illegal deals also earned him a sharp reprimand from the head of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), Ernst Kaltenbrunner . His successor in Mechelen was SS-Sturmbannführer Karl Schönwetter .

In November 1943 Schmitt was also deposed as Commander of Breendonk. Here too, Schönwetter succeeded him. After a short illness, Schmitt came to Denmark to take part in the fight against the local resistance against the German occupation. His wife was transferred to the Berlin Gestapo headquarters.

In the final skirmishes of the war, Schmitt suffered a serious leg injury from an artillery shell on the Western Front near Roermond . In May 1945 he was arrested in the Netherlands. Paul Levy, a former prisoner in Breendonk, recognized him in a Rotterdam prison. On November 20, 1945, the Netherlands extradited him to Belgium. There he was imprisoned in Fort Breendonk, now used as an internment camp for collaborators. Former inmates took revenge there by humiliating their former guard.

The military court in Antwerp charged Schmitt among other crimes with 83 murders, which he had not committed personally, but for which he was responsible as camp commandant. The trial began on August 2, 1949 and ended on November 25, 1949 with the pronouncement of the death sentence . The appeal against the judgment was rejected as was a petition for clemency . Schmitt was shot dead on August 8, 1950 at 6:00 a.m. in the former military bakery in Hoboken (now part of Antwerp) by a command of the Belgian gendarmerie . Schmitt was the last defendant to be executed in Belgium before Belgium suspended the use of the death penalty and abolished it in 1996.

literature

• Paul MG Levy: "The 'reception camp' Breendonk" in Dachauer booklet 5 "The forgotten camps", Dachau 1989
• Markus Meckl: Waiting room in front of Auschwitz: The Mechelen (Malines) camp, in: Terror in the West. National Socialist concentration camps in the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg 1940–1945, edited by Wolfgang Benz and Barbara Distel, Berlin 2004, pp. 39–49, ISBN 3-936411-53-0

Web links

• De Beulen van "Auffanglager BREENDONK" en het proces van Mechelen - maart 1946 (Dutch)