Rudolf Beer (SS member)

Rudolf Beer (born February 17, 1911 in Friedland in Bohemia , Austria-Hungary ; died 1981 ) was a Czechoslovak teacher and German SS Obersturmführer in the Ravensbrück concentration camp .

Life

Rudolf Beer was the son of a railway official. After the First World War , the family belonged to the Sudeten German minority in Czechoslovakia . He attended elementary school and community school. He was trained for four years at the German-speaking teacher training institute in Reichenberg . From 1930 to 1938 Beer worked at various German-speaking elementary and community schools in the Sudetenland. In 1934 he did a year of military service in the Czechoslovak Army and was promoted to lieutenant in the reserve. Beer married in 1938. During the Sudeten crisis , he joined the Sudeten German Party in April 1938 . After the Sudetenland was annexed to the German Reich, its party membership was transferred to the NSDAP . In October 1938 he became a member of the SS . At the beginning of 1940 he was called up as a Untersturmführer to the Waffen-SS and was deployed as a platoon leader in a skull regiment in occupied Poland and during the conquest of the Netherlands .

In October 1940 he was appointed adjutant in the guard battalion in Auschwitz concentration camp and a year later with the rank of SS-Obersturmführer as protective custody camp leader of the men's camp in Ravensbrück concentration camp . During his time in Ravensbrück, initially 300 and in 1944 1,500 men from various nations were imprisoned who were penned in five barracks and had to do forced labor . He was subordinate to five SS block leaders and an SS labor service leader as well as a network of prison functionaries . He himself was directly subordinate to the concentration camp commandant Ravensbrück and the latter to the concentration camp inspection in Oranienburg . Because of a dispute with the commander Fritz Suhren , he reported in July 1944 to be deployed at the front in the SS Panzer Division "Wiking" and ended up as a prisoner of war at the end of the war.

After his release he was sent to political custody in the Ludwigsburg camp in June 1946 . The Central Arbitration Chamber of North Württemberg in Ludwigsburg classified him as the "main culprit" and sentenced him on November 5, 1948 to a ten-year labor camp atonement, which he was supposed to perform in the Ludwigsburg labor camp, on the basis of established activities. The verdict was confirmed on June 14, 1949 by the "Zentralberufungskammer Nordwürttemberg". In January 1950, Beer was taken into custody again and charged before the Stuttgart Regional Court . On July 12, 1950, the court added a sentence of 84 years for the charges of multiple bodily harm in office , extortion of testimony by hanging on stakes or whipping and other criminal offenses, so that Beer was sentenced to a total sentence of 15 years in prison and the maximum sentence of ten years of loss of honor . The Stuttgart Higher Regional Court rejected Beer's appeal on January 19, 1951, again referring to Beer's particular inhumanity as a camp leader, as evidenced by witness statements. In a second trial for the murder of a prisoner in the sub- camp at Gut Dahmshöhe in July 1943, Beer had to be acquitted by the Stuttgart Regional Court for lack of sufficient evidence.

Beer was released in 1955, he died in 1981.

literature

• LG Stuttgart, July 12, 1950 . In: Justice and Nazi crimes . Collection of German criminal judgments for Nazi homicidal crimes 1945–1966, Vol. VI, edited by Adelheid L. Rüter-Ehlermann, HH Fuchs, CF Rüter . Amsterdam: University Press, 1971, No. 222, pp. 661–694. Abuse and extortion of testimony of inmates, in some cases resulting in death
• LG Stuttgart, July 17, 1950 . In: Justice and Nazi crimes . Collection of German criminal judgments for Nazi homicidal crimes 1945–1966, Vol. VI, edited by Adelheid L. Rüter-Ehlermann, HH Fuchs, CF Rüter . Amsterdam: University Press, 1971, No. 224, pp. 723–729 Shooting of a Russian prisoner who was picked up again after trying to escape

Individual evidence

1. ^ Ernst Klee : Das Personenlexikon zum Third Reich , Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 36
2. ↑ Erika Schwarz: Dahmshöhe. In: Wolfgang Benz , Barbara Distel (eds.): The place of terror . History of the National Socialist Concentration Camps. Volume 4: Flossenbürg, Mauthausen, Ravensbrück. CH Beck, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-406-52964-X , p. 539
3. ↑ Christl Wickert : Concentration Camp Forced Laborers in Karlshagen - Subcamp of the Ravensbrück men's camp . In: Günther Jikeli , Frederic Werner (Hrsg.): The responsibility of memory. Remembrance work on Peenemünde and forced labor in one of the largest military experimental sites of the National Socialists . Schwerin: Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, 2014, pp. 208–226 ( PDF ), here p. 217