Rudolf Seck

Rudolf Joachim Seck (born July 15, 1908 in Bunsoh , † 1974 in Flensburg ) was a German SS leader during the Second World War .

Life

Seck grew up on his parents' farm. In 1931 he joined the NSDAP and the SS . In 1933 he was accepted into the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler , where he achieved the rank of Unterscharführer. In 1934 he resigned from the SS service and worked again on his parents' farm and took over it in 1937. He married in 1935. In 1939 he was drafted into the Waffen SS and took part in the French campaign in mid-1940 , after which he was released again. At the beginning of 1941, Seck was called up for an agricultural seminar by the SS in Schmiedeberg . In August 1941 he was transferred to Einsatzkommando 2 with the commander of the security police in the conquered Riga .

Seck was the commandant of the Jungfernhof camp from August 1941 to July 1944 . In the SS he received the rank of SS-Oberscharführer . He also took part in the fight against partisans in the Baltic States and Belarus .

By Rudolf Lange Seck received to manage the estate Jungfernhof as bearing the order. By the spring of 1942, the number of prisoners in the camp rose to 4,000. The death penalty was imposed in the Jungfernhof von Seck camp for even minor offenses such as theft, barter and illegal absence from the camp. According to a witness, Seck personally shot a sick prisoner on January 16, 1942. According to a witness, Ernest Haas, who was deported with his family to Jungfernhof in December 1941, Seck informed them as a greeting that he had already killed thousands of Jews and that he did not care if a few were added.

In order to practice agriculture in the camp, Seck suggested that the number of prisoners should be significantly reduced. In February 1942, an instruction from Rudolf Lange set the future number at 440. Seck then commissioned the camp elder Lore Kleemann to draw up a list, with Seck personally selecting the prisoners who were to remain in the camp. The prisoners selected were primarily suitable for agricultural or manual work. The unselected prisoners were removed from the camp on March 26, 1942. Among them were old and sick prisoners, children under 13 to 14 years with their mothers and prisoners over 46 to 50 years. The inmates were told that they would be transported to Dünamünde to work in a canning factory. All the selected prisoners were shot in the Biķernieki forest near Riga .

According to the Jewish prisoner Joseph Bermann from Ventspils, who was in charge of cleaning Seck's company car, Seck was in close contact with Lange. Seck made it a habit to meet with Lange when transports from Germany, Austria or Czechoslovakia arrived at the Šķirotava train station. The deportees were sent directly from the Šķirotava train station to the Riga ghetto , the Jungfernhof camp or the Salaspils police prison and labor education camp . It remains unclear how many of the 15,073 German Jews recorded on the transport lists were actually admitted; It is likely that many deportees were shot immediately after their arrival in the Biķernieki forest or in the Rumbula forest .

In May 1945 Seck was taken into British internment custody and was due to be brought before a British military tribunal because of his involvement in the persecution of Jews in Latvia, which, however, never came to pass. He was released from internment custody in January 1949, but was taken back into custody in May 1949 and sentenced to ten years in prison on July 8, 1949 by the Bergedorf Court of Justice .

In 1951, Seck appealed to the Hamburg Regional Court that he neither knew nor suspected that the selected prisoners were to be killed. None of the witnesses heard at the trial was able to provide information on the whereabouts of the selected prisoners on March 26, 1942. They could only report what Latvians told the remaining Jewish prisoners in Jungfernhof. Seck was sentenced to life imprisonment by the district court of Hamburg on December 29, 1951 for the selection of 1,600 to 1,700 Jews and their execution in the forest of Biķernieki , the so-called Aktion Dünamünde . He served his imprisonment in Hamburg-Fuhlsbüttel prison until July 7, 1964, and was then released.

literature

• Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich . Who was what before and after 1945 . 2nd Edition. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-596-16048-8 .
• LG Hamburg, December 29, 1951 . In: Justice and Nazi crimes . Collection of German criminal convictions for Nazi homicides 1945–1966, Vol. VIII, edited by Adelheid L. Rüter-Ehlermann, HH Fuchs, CF Rüter . Amsterdam: University Press, 1972, No. 307 pp. 177–208 Selection and evacuation of Jews from the Riga ghetto, who were then shot in an external forest. 40 Latvian-Jewish police officers shot in the Riga ghetto after the discovery of an arsenal hidden there. Abuse and shooting of members of Jewish work details from the Riga ghetto and of Jewish prisoners from the AEL Salaspils. Shooting of prisoners from the Olai work detail, KL Gut Jungfernhof and KL Schlock. Selection of around 3500 Jewish prisoners from KL Gut Jungfernhof (disabled people, sick people and mothers with children) as part of the 'Dünamünde' extermination campaign

Individual evidence

1. ^ Wilhelm Mosel: Hamburg Deportation Transport to Riga. ( Memento from September 22, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) In: German-Jewish Society Hamburg.
2. ^ Gertrude Schneider : The Unfinished road: Jewish survivors of Latvia look back. Greenwood Publishing Group, 1991, ISBN 978-0-275-94093-5 , p. 61, limited preview .
3. ^ Ernest Haas: Neumarkt - Fuerth - Riga - USA , accessed on February 9, 2020
4. ↑ Ulrich Herbert , Karin Orth , Christoph Dieckmann : The National Socialist Concentration Camps: Development and Structure, Volume 1. Wallstein Verlag, 1998, ISBN 978-3-89244-289-9 , p. 487, limited preview .
5. ^ Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich . 2nd edition Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-596-16048-8 , p. 575.