Rudolf Lohse

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Rudolf Emil Louis Lohse (born February 18, 1904 in Zwickau , † November 23, 1944 in Strasbourg ) was a German SS leader, most recently with the rank of SS brigade leader .

Life and activity

Lohse earned his living as an employee of a bank. He had been a member of the NSDAP since 1922 , which he rejoined after the party was banned in 1925 (membership number 12.209), and has been a member of the SA ever since . For the party he worked from 1926 to 1929 as the deputy local group leader and clerk at the local group Zwickau. In 1926 he became a member of the SS (SS No. 297). In 1934 Lohse was the leader of SS-Standarte 16 in Breslau . In this position Lohse was commissioned on the night of June 30th to July 1st, 1934 by the commander of the Silesian SS, Udo von Woyrsch , to organize the execution of seven leading members of the Silesian SA . These measures took place in the course of the Nazi government's political "cleansing operation" in the summer of 1934 . The death row inmates had previously been sent to Woyrsch on a death list that had been sent to him by the Secret State Police in Berlin . Among the seven men to be executed were u. a. the police president of Gleiwitz and member of the Reichstag Hans Ramshorn , the commander of the SA-Brigade 21 (Lower Silesia) Eberhard von Wechmar , the SA-Standartenführer Karl Belding , who was suspected to have attempted an assassination attempt on the SS-chief Heinrich Himmler , and the SA- Sturmbannführer and adjutant of the Silesian SA chief Heines Reinhard Nixdorf . The men had all been arrested on June 30, 1934, and taken to the quarters of the SS section in Breslau for custody. There Lohse had them presented on the evening of June 30th and demonstratively demoted them by tearing off medals and insignia (collar tabs and shoulder pieces) from them. Later that night Lohse entrusted SS-Sturmführer Fritz Mohr with the practical execution of the execution order. Mohr transported the seven SA leaders who were to be shot at around 3 a.m. with a command of volunteers from the 16th SS Standard in several cars to a wooded area near Obernigk , north of Breslau. There he had the men lined up in a clearing, where they were then shot (illuminated by the headlights of the cars that had brought them there). The dead were buried on the spot, later exhumed and cremated.

In the further course of the 1930s, Lohse, as SS-Oberführer, was the leader of the SS section in Schwerin (1936 to 1938) and the SS section in Konstanz . On the occasion of the Reichstag election of April 10, 1938 , Lohse ran unsuccessfully for a seat in the National Socialist Reichstag on the "List of the Führer for the election of the Greater German Reichstag on April 10, 1938".

During the Second World War , Lohse was from December 1, 1940 to November 23, 1944, SS leader in SS-Section XXXXV in the German-occupied territory of the French province of Alsace-Lorraine, which included standards 122 and 123. In this position he was promoted to SS-Brigadführer on November 9, 1943. Lohse died on November 23, 1944 in combat operations in Strasbourg. His body was discovered on the morning of that day - with a bazooka that he had carried in combat - near the seminary of Strasbourg in the Bruderhof, in front of the Alsatia bookshop. An SS functionary friend, who initially rescued him, threw the dead man out of his moving car while fleeing onto the street after he discovered that he was actually dead. His remains were buried in the Strasbourg- Cronenbourg cemetery.

Promotions

  • March 10, 1931: SS-Sturmführer
  • April 20, 1933: SS-Sturmhauptführer
  • November 9, 1933: SS-Sturmbannführer
  • April 20, 1934: SS-Obersturmbannführer
  • July 4, 1934: SS Standartenführer
  • September 13, 1936: SA Oberführer
  • November 9, 1943: SS brigade leader

literature

  • Daniel Schmidt: "The SA leader Hans Ramshorn. A life between violence and community (1892-1934)", in: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte , 60th Jg. (2012), no. 2, pp. 201-235.
  • Thierry Tixier: General-SS, Police et Waffen-SS Officiers, sous-officiers et Soldats: Biographics. Volume 2, December 2016, ISBN 978-1-32654-867-4 , p. 1944.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Erich Stockhorst: Five thousand heads: Who was what in the Third Reich , 1967, p. 276.
personal data
SURNAME Lohse, Rudolf
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Lohse, Rudolf Emil Louis (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German SS brigade leader
DATE OF BIRTH February 18, 1904
PLACE OF BIRTH Zwickau
DATE OF DEATH November 23, 1944
Place of death Zwickau