Reinhold Heller (SS member)

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Reinhold Heller (born July 15, 1885 in Freienwalde , Pomerania; † May 7, 1945 in Berlin- Nikolassee [?]) Was a German detective and since 1939 SS-Obersturmbannführer .

Live and act

Youth, training and the First World War

Heller was the son of the inn owner Albert Heller. In 1895 the family moved to Stargard , where he attended the Royal and Gruning High Schools and in 1905 passed the Abitur . Heller then studied law at the universities of Berlin , Jena and Kiel . In 1910 he unsuccessfully took the first state examination in law. He then belonged to a volunteer regiment in Kiel for a year .

In 1912, Heller reported as a police officer to the then royal protection team. At the beginning of the First World War , he joined an infantry regiment as an officer candidate. He was already wounded in combat operations in August 1914, but was able to return to the front after his recovery. In July 1915 he was promoted to officer. Heller was wounded twice more during the war. In 1916 he was promoted to company commander before he was dismissed as unfit for war in July 1918.

Career in the Weimar Republic

In January 1919, Heller reported to the Ehrhardt Marine Brigade . As he had become unfit for active police service as a result of his wartime wounds, Heller was transferred to the criminal police shortly afterwards, to which he was finally accepted at the third attempt after being rejected twice: After passing the specialist examination in September 1919, he was appointed detective inspector in Berlin Police taken over. During the Weimar Republic from 1919 to 1933 , Heller worked there in Department IA of the Berlin Police Headquarters , which, as the Republic's Political Police , was responsible for monitoring and combating radical political elements. This activity was only interrupted when he was assigned to the Security Police from 1919 to 1920. The Political Police saw Heller as an excellent expert on Marxism , i.e. the left-wing forces in the political life of the republic, such as the communists, social democrats and the Black Front . On November 1, 1931, Heller was promoted to the criminal police officer and head of the KPD inspection in the field service of Department I.

In 1932, Heller investigated the murder of the Hitler Youth, Herbert Norkus .

Nazi era

When the Secret State Police (Gestapo) was founded immediately after the National Socialists came into power in the spring of 1933 , Heller was one of the first officials appointed to this department by Gestapo leader Rudolf Diels . Since Diels and Heller already knew each other from their work together in Department IA, this acquaintance may have been the reason for Heller's appointment to the Gestapo.

As an expert on Marxists of all stripes, Heller was given a decisive task in the first months of the Nazi regime in eliminating the left opponents of the new regime and smashing their organized structures: In February 1933, Heller led the occupation of the communist party headquarters in Berlin, des Karl-Liebknecht-Haus , in which the Gestapo's first headquarters were set up soon after. After the Reichstag fire in February 1933, Heller was also heavily involved in the criminal investigation of the fire. The background to this was the official policy of publicly interpreting the fire as an attack by the communists, which allegedly was based on the attempt to set the signal for a communist mass uprising - of which Heller, as a communism expert, was supposed to provide evidence. For this purpose he was assigned to a four-person special commission set up by Hermann Göring , which, in addition to himself, also included Rudolf Braschwitz as head as well as Helmut Heisig and Walter Zirpins .

Soon after these events, Heller was accepted into the NSDAP ( membership number 2,826,302) on May 1, 1933 .

In the Secret State Police Office - into which he was officially accepted on September 1, 1933 - Heller initially took over the management of Section II A ("Communism and other Marxist groups" or "Communism, anarchism, syndicalism and the Communist Party"). After Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich took over the Gestapo , Heller, who was considered “too old and too soft” by the new Gestapo, was replaced by Heinrich Müller and instead became deputy head of Department II 1 A (“Communist and Marxist Movement , National Bolshevism, Anarchism, SPD ”). On April 1, 1935, on Heydrich's recommendation, he was promoted to the government council and appointed head of the “Communism, except for Marxism and subsidiary organizations, decomposition” division. In the years that followed, he was promoted to senior government and finally to criminal councilor in the administrative service.

In the Reich Security Main Office , which was founded in 1938, Heller took over Section II A 4. He also joined the SS in 1938 (membership number 280.297): He was accepted on April 22, 1938 in the course of the merger of the SS and police that had taken place at the time. In the SS he received the rank of Hauptsturmführer in the same year and in 1939, according to his police rank, that of Obersturmbannführer.

In 1939, Heller was transferred to Potsdam as head of the state police headquarters there. During the Second World War , Heller also headed the Bautzen prison in addition to this position . In the latter capacity, he repeatedly took part in meetings in which the fate of the communist leader Ernst Thalmann was discussed.

The circumstances of Heller's death have not been conclusively clarified: In the literature there are several claims that he shot himself when the Red Army marched into Berlin. According to his death certificate , he died on May 7, 1945 at 11:30 a.m. in his apartment. In the memoirs of Beate Niemann , the daughter of an employee of Heller in the State Police administration in Potsdam , which had until the 1980s contacts with Heller's widow, however, that Heller at war under a railway bridge in is Berlin-Nikolassee shot should have. In some publications on the Reichstag fire, the possibility was also taken into account that Heller's claim had only been advanced in order to cover up the removal of Heller, which was carried out shortly before the end of the war, as an unwelcome confidante of a possible National Socialist fire authorship.

Promotions

  • April 20, 1938: SS Oberscharführer
  • November 1, 1938: SS-Hauptsturmführer
  • November 9, 1938: SS-Sturmbannführer
  • September 10, 1939: SS-Obersturmbannführer

Archival tradition

An SS Fuehrer personnel file on Heller has been preserved in the Federal Archives in Berlin. There are also documents from the presidential chancellery on Heller's promotions to the government and criminal councilor in 1935 and to the higher government and criminal councilor in 1939 (Bundesarchiv Berlin: R 601/1815). Transport documents for Heller can also be found in the Secret State Archive Berlin in the repository Rep. 90, Annex P.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The date of death May 7, 1945 is the date that was later entered on his official death certificate. Siegfried Grundmann: The KPD's secret apparatus in the sights of the Gestapo , 2008, p. 105.
  2. ↑ Beate Niemann: My good father. My life with the past , 2005. Heller, Reinhold, ObRegRat . In: Berliner Adreßbuch , 1943, part 1, p. 1060. “Nikolassee Haagstrasse 23”.
personal data
SURNAME Heller, Reinhold
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German detective
DATE OF BIRTH July 15, 1885
PLACE OF BIRTH Freienwalde
DATE OF DEATH uncertain: May 7, 1945
Place of death Berlin