Richard Glücks

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Richard Glücks (born April 22, 1889 in Odenkirchen ; † May 10, 1945 in Flensburg ) was a German SS group leader and lieutenant general of the Waffen SS . From November 1939 Glücks was head of the inspection of the concentration camps , first in the SS headquarters of the Waffen SS, from March 1942 in the SS economic and administrative headquarters .

Life

Richard Glücks was the son of the former teacher and later businessman Johannes Leberecht Ludwig Glücks and his wife Wilhelmine Ida, née Mechelen. He first attended elementary school and the municipal grammar school in Düsseldorf , but broke off his school education before graduating from high school in 1907 in order to do a commercial apprenticeship in his parents' insurance company and to work there.

From October 1, 1909, Glücks was a one-year- old volunteer in the Kleve Field Artillery Regiment No. 43 in Wesel. This was followed by stays abroad in England and Argentina for several months from 1913. After the beginning of the First World War , he returned from Buenos Aires to Germany in January 1915 to fight as an observation officer and battery leader on the Western Front . For his work he was awarded the Iron Cross II and I Class and in 1934 the Cross of Honor for Front Warriors. After the armistice of Compiègne he joined the Freikorps Lichtschlag in the Ruhr area . He then belonged to the Reichswehr and was then from March 1920 to July 1926 liaison officer of the Army Peace Commission to the Inter-Allied Military Control Commission . As a first lieutenant , Glücks was retired from active service on July 31, 1926 and was then entrusted as a civil employee of the 6th Division with tasks in border protection until the end of 1931 .

In 1927 Glücks became a member of the Stahlhelm . In March 1930 he joined the NSDAP ( membership number 214.855) and became a member of the SS in November 1932 (SS number 58.706). In the SS, Glücks initially worked as a staff leader for various SS standards and was promoted to standard leader in 1935 . Since April 1936 Glücks was on the staff of the inspector of the concentration camp Theodor Eicke . After he had increasingly focused on his role as commander of the SS skull and crossbones associations , Glücks was his successor in 1939. At the beginning of March 1942, the inspection of the concentration camps was subordinated to the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office (WVHA) as Office Group D. Glücks was then head of Office Group D in the WVHA until the end of the war in May 1945. In November 1943 he rose to the position of SS-Gruppenführer and Lieutenant General of the Waffen-SS .

In the post of inspector of the concentration camps , Glücks was the superior of all the concentration camp commanders and was thus directly responsible for all crimes committed in the concentration camps until the end of the war . His representative was Gerhard Maurer , his adjutant was August Harbaum . At Glücks' instruction, u. a. In January 1940 a delegation was sent to Auschwitz to sound out the site for a new concentration camp, which would later become the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp . In June 1944, Glücks advocated human experiments on the compatibility of seawater and suggested imprisoned Jews for them.

On January 25, 1945, two days before the liberation of Auschwitz, Glücks received the German Cross in Silver . In a statement he was praised by the National Socialists in his role as a desk clerk: “If there have been no difficulties here in all the years of the war and the war industry has been supplied with the required workforce in the shortest possible time, then that is thanks to the SS group leader Lucky With this achievement he made a significant contribution to armament and thus to warfare. "

At the end of April 1945, following Heinrich Himmler's entourage, along with Rudolf Höß and other employees of Office Group D of the WVHA, along with family members, he took the so-called Rattenlinie Nord to Flensburg. On May 3, 1945, Himmler gave Glücks and Höß the order to disguise themselves as NCOs to go to occupied Denmark, but this failed. Glücks had received a pay book from the Wehrmacht in the name of Sonnemann . Two days after the end of the war , Glücks died on May 10, 1945 in the Flensburg - Mürwik naval hospital by suicide with a cyanide capsule .

The assertion made by Frederick Forsyth in his thriller The Odessa Files that Glücks survived, managed to move to South America under the name Ricardo Suertes and built up a network of refugee National Socialists there is a fiction.

literature

  • Jan Erik Schulte : Forced Labor and Extermination. The economic empire of the SS. Oswald Pohl and the SS-Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt 1933–1945. Paderborn 2001, ISBN 3-506-78245-2 .
  • Walter Naasner (Hrsg.): SS-Wirtschaft und SS-Verwaltung: The SS-Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt and the economic enterprises under its supervision (= writings of the Federal Archives. Volume 45a). Droste, Düsseldorf 1998, ISBN 3-7700-1603-3 .
  • Johannes Tuchel : The inspection of the concentration camps 1938–1945. The system of terror. Edition Hentrich, Berlin 1994, ISBN 3894681586 .
  • Karin Orth : The system of the National Socialist concentration camps. A political organization story. Hamburger Edition , 1999, ISBN 3930908522 .
  • Dermot Bradley (ed.), Andreas Schulz, Günter Wegmann: The generals of the Waffen-SS and the police. The military careers of the generals, as well as the doctors, veterinarians, intendants, judges and ministerial officials with the rank of general. Volume 1: Abraham – Gutenberger. Biblio, Bissendorf 2003, ISBN 3-7648-2373-9 , pp. 393-398.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e Walter Naasner (ed.): SS economy and SS administration. Düsseldorf 1998, p. 332 f.
  2. ↑ a b c d e Ernst Piper : Richard Glücks. The man who administered Auschwitz. In: Der Tagesspiegel . January 26, 2010.
  3. ^ Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, second, updated edition, Frankfurt am Main 2005, p. 187.
  4. ↑ Document VEJ 11/146 in: Lisa Hauff (edit.): The persecution and murder of European Jews by National Socialist Germany 1933–1945 (collection of sources), Volume 11: German Reich and Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia April 1943–1945. Berlin / Boston 2020, ISBN 978-3-11-036499-6 , pp. 427-428.
  5. ↑ Stephan Link: "Rattenlinie Nord". War criminals in Flensburg and the surrounding area in May 1945. In: Gerhard Paul, Broder Schwensen (Hrsg.): Mai '45. End of the war in Flensburg. Flensburg 2015, p. 22.
  6. ↑ Stephan Link: "Rattenlinie Nord". War criminals in Flensburg and the surrounding area in May 1945. In: Gerhard Paul, Broder Schwensen (Hrsg.): Mai '45. End of the war in Flensburg. Flensburg 2015, p. 23.
personal data
SURNAME Good luck, Richard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Head of inspection of the concentration camps
DATE OF BIRTH April 22, 1889
PLACE OF BIRTH Odenkirchen, Mönchengladbach
DATE OF DEATH May 10, 1945
Place of death Flensburg