Police Battalion 320

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The Police Battalion 320 was a military unit of the Ordnungspolizei in World War II . After it was set up in February 1941, it was mainly used in the war of extermination and the murder of Jews in the Soviet Union until it was dissolved in 1944 . The number of victims of the shootings in which the unit was involved is estimated at 45,000.

Installation and area of ​​application

The police battalion 320 was set up in Berlin-Spandau in February 1941 . In addition to the battalion staff, it consisted of three companies and a truck squadron. Under the command of Major Kurt Franz Dall (1905-1949), the unit was relocated to the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia on February 19, 1941 and stationed in Jungbunzlau and Kolín . From April 2 to May 26, 1941, the 1st and 2nd companies were deployed in Yugoslavia , while the staff and the 3rd company remained in Kolin. After the attack on the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, the battalion was moved to Jaslo in occupied Poland . In mid-August 1941, the unit marched via Przemyśl , Lemberg and Tarnopol to Proskurow in the Ukraine , where, in addition to battalions 304 and 315, as Police Battalion 320 for special use (e.g. V.) the Higher SS and Police Leader Russia South, Friedrich Jeckeln , was assumed.

On September 7th, the battalion was stationed in Rovno , where the staff, vehicle squadron and 3rd company remained, while the 1st company was transferred to Sarny and the 2nd to Lutsk . From October 1941 to February 1942 the 1st Company ("Ostland") of Police Battalion 33 was subordinate to the police battalion , which consisted mainly of Germans from Latvia . On February 24, 1942, the battalion came to the Mius front near Taganrog , from where it was relocated to the rear front area on June 21. Like battalions 304 and 315, it was under the command of the 11th Police Regiment . Until January 1944, the unit was used in the so-called partisan and gang fight in the Brest-Litovsk , Gomel , Zhitomir , Schepetowka and Kovel area. In 1944 the battalion was again deployed to the front in the Rowno, Dubno , Lutsk and Vistula area. In the same year the unit was dissolved.

Involvement in crime

Members of Police Battalion 320 were involved in several murders against Jews during the German-Soviet War . In the Kamenez-Podolsk massacre , in which around 23,000 Jews were murdered between August 28 and 31, 1941, the 1st and 2nd companies took over on August 27, under the command of Captains Alfred Weber (* 1904) and Hans Wiemer (* 1914) the task of cordoning off the shooting site and driving the victims there. The 3rd Company under the command of Heinrich Scharwey (* 1907) arrived on August 28th and had been involved in the action since the afternoon of that day. A member of the battalion reported in an interrogation in 1960 that Scharwey had given an anti-Semitic address to his men and tried to convince them of the necessity of mass execution. At the same time he also mentioned that he could not give the order to individuals to join in the shooting. Only one member of the company, Werner Hofmann (born 1911), then turned to company commander Scharwey and let him free himself from the action. The others would have accepted the measure as a "necessary evil". At least twelve members of the battalion took part in the firing squads.

Jeckeln also reported to Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler by radio on August 31, 1941 that the 320 police battalion was taking an action in Minkowzy , 45 kilometers northeast of Kamenez-Podolsk , in which 2,200 Jews had been shot. There the police battalion dissolved the ghetto , with the participation of the local police, gathered the Jewish residents on the main street and led them to three already excavated mass graves, where they were shot in groups of 10 to 15 people, also with the participation of the Ukrainian police . This action may have been counted as part of the Kamenets-Podolsk massacre in later investigations.

In another major murder drive in Rovno from November 6 to 8, 1941, around 15,000 Jews were murdered. Again, the 320 police battalion was responsible for the capture and transportation of the victims and the cordoning off of the shooting site. This was a forest near the village of Sosneka, where Soviet prisoners of war had previously had to dig ten mass graves. Probably 25 men from the 1st and 3rd companies belonged to the firing squad. A division of Einsatzkommando 5 of Einsatzgruppe C under the orders of SS-Sturmbannführer Hermann Ling, Ukrainians and five members of the "Ostland Company" were also involved. On November 8th, 50 old Jews were discovered in a smaller pit that had apparently been forgotten there. They were murdered by a command of the 3rd Company under Heinrich Scharwey.

The battalion was involved in other murders, each of which killed several hundred Jews. A few days after the murder at Rovno, eight members of the 1st Company shot 300 to 400 Jews south of Kostopol . The 2nd and 3rd companies were involved in the shooting of at least 1,500 Jews by an SD command near Bereza Kartuska at the end of July 1942. In the summer the 3rd Company executed 150 Jews in the Pripjet swamps . In September / October 1942, the 1st Company cordoned off the ghetto in Bereza Kartuska and transported around 1,000 Jews to the place of execution by truck. Members of the 3rd Company drove the victims into a pit, where they were shot by an SD commando. In an execution of 5,000 Jews from Rovno in Kostopol on July 14, 1942, the battalion was not involved, contrary to the representation by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen . During the annihilation of the Pinsk ghetto , which killed at least 18,000 Jews from October 29 to November 1, 1942, one platoon of the 3rd Company took part in the comeback of the ghetto, the other two platoons and the 2nd and 3rd. Company guarded the Jews at the assembly point, escorted them to the shooting site and cordoned off the pits.

In retaliation during partisan operations, members of the 3rd Company burned down the village of Malischewka and shot at the burning houses. Around 100 villagers are said to have been killed. Shortly before Christmas 1943, battalion commander Schwarz-Linek ordered a retaliatory action against a village in which 200 men were rounded up and shot.

Criminal investigation

From 1961, the central office in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia investigated for the processing of National Socialist mass crimes at the Dortmund public prosecutor against police advisor Hans Wiemer, the leader of the 2nd company, as the main accused of murder and aiding and abetting murder in over 50,000 cases. In the course of the proceedings, 400 police officers were recorded and 131 former members of the battalion questioned. Some of the accused had meanwhile joined the police force in the Federal Republic; Friedrich Haferkamp, ​​leader of the 1st Company in the autumn of 1942, was a lieutenant colonel in the Bundeswehr . However, the central office came to the conclusion that the battalion had mainly performed barrier services and hardly deployed any shooters for the executions. Three police officers had confessed to participating in executions, the rest had denied this. The leader of the 1st Company, Alfred Weber, claimed that the use of the riflemen from his unit had been arranged by the senior SD leader. The shooters fell later.

In January and February 1962 the case against 363 former battalion members was dropped. The proceedings were initially continued against 30 suspects and finally dropped in December 1962. The central office of the state justice administrations for the investigation of National Socialist crimes in Ludwigsburg criticized in particular the discontinuation of the investigations against Wiemer, which had been justified with the assumption of an imperative to order . The attorney general in Hamm , however, confirmed the Dortmund view on April 23, 1963. The former member of the 3rd Company, Werner Hofmann, who was released from participation in the shooting actions in 1941 by Scharwey, appeared as a witness in the 1965 secondary prosecution in the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial .

literature

  • Wolfgang Curilla : The German Ordnungspolizei and the Holocaust in the Baltic States and Belarus, 1941–1944. F. Schöningh, Paderborn 2006, ISBN 3-506-71787-1 .
  • Stefan Klemp : Not determined. Police battalions and the post-war justice system. A manual. 2nd edition, Klartext, Essen 2011, pp. 296–301.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Klaus-Michael Mallmann : The qualitative leap in the destruction process. The Kamenez-Podolsk massacre at the end of August 1941. In: Jahrbuch für Antisemitismusforschung 10 (2001), p. 253; Curilla, Ordnungspolizei , p. 925. Here also the spelling “Scharway”.
  2. ↑ Alexander Kruglov and Martin Dean: Min'Kovtsy. In: Geoffrey P. Megargee and Martin Dean (eds.). The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum encyclopedia of camps and ghettos, 1933–1945. Vol. 2, Ghettos in German-Occupied Eastern Europe. Indiana University Press; In association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Bloomington, [Washington, DC] 2012, ISBN 978-0-253-35599-7 , p. 1426.
  3. ^ Daniel Goldhagen: Hitler's willing executors. Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. Siedler, Berlin 1996, ISBN 978-3-88680-593-8 , p. 323. Curilla, Ordnungspolizei , p. 619.
  4. ↑ Curilla, Ordnungspolizei , p. 621.
  5. ↑ Interrogation protocol of March 26, 1965; Fritz Bauer Institute, online.