Sonderkommando K

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Sonderkommando K was the code name for a planned enterprise of the SS and the research community Deutsches Ahnenerbe for the " racial " and military- scientific total exploration of the Caucasus . The withdrawal of the German Wehrmacht and its allies as a result of the defeat at Stalingrad thwarted the plan.

Goals and preparations

At the height of the German summer offensive in southern Russia , Heinrich Himmler issued the order for a military science expedition to the Caucasus on August 10, 1942. The leadership was to be taken over by the German zoologist Ernst Schäfer , who had been a member of the SS since 1933 and had led the German Tibet expedition in 1938/39 . As head of the Department for Inner Asia Research and Expeditions of the Research Association for German Ahnenerbe, Schäfer presented an expedition plan. The plan was a mix of reconnaissance and mass capture. It included the fields of activity earth , humans , plants and animals . Schäfer wanted to demonstrate a holistic concept of an interdisciplinary recording of entire natural and cultural areas. The main focus was on the categorizations of the Caucasian mountain peoples within the framework of the National Socialist racial ideology . This central component of the company was to be carried out by a team of nine anthropologists under the responsibility of Bruno Beger . Schäfer asked for a military escort of 45 soldiers, barracks for 100 people, 30 Volkswagen, 100 trucks, motorcycles, teleprinters and a Fieseler Storch aircraft . For Beger - later convicted in connection with the Strasbourg skull collection - scalpels and "meat machines" were requested.

End of the project

In the late summer of 1942, Schäfer began to select the staff when the news came from Himmler's headquarters in the Ukraine that Schäfer's demands were currently “unfulfillable”. Army Group A , deployed to conquer the Caucasus, came to a standstill in November 1942 due to lack of strength and because of the Soviet resistance and withdrew from January 1943. On February 4, 1943 - two days after the surrender of the Northern Group of the 6th Army near Stalingrad - Himmler wrote to Schäfer in a personal letter that Sonderkommando K was excluded given the prevailing military situation. The deployed teams would be used elsewhere. On paper, however, the company was maintained as the Waffen SS Sonderkommando K until the end of 1944 in order to conceal the setbacks and to exempt the selected people from service at the front.

Intended participants (selection)

literature

  • Fritz Bauer : Justice and Nazi crimes - The criminal judgments issued from 01.01.1971 to 01.08.1971, serial no. No. 747-758. Volume 35 of Justice and Nazi Crimes - Collection of German criminal judgments for Nazi homicidal crimes 1945–1966, University Press, Amsterdam 1968 ISBN 978-9-0604-2005-8 , p. 61.
  • Michael H. Kater: The "Ahnenerbe" of the SS 1935–1945 - A contribution to the cultural policy of the Third Reich. 4th edition, Oldenbourg, Munich 2006, ISBN 978-3-4865-9468-3 , pp. 214 f., 251 ff.
  • Peter Meier-Hüsing: Nazis in Tibet - The riddle of the SS expedition Ernst Schäfer. Theiss / WBG, Darmstadt 2017, ISBN 978-3-8062-3438-1 , p. 204 ff.
  • Mechthild Rössler, Sabine Schleiermacher: Himmler's Empire on the “Roof of the Earth” - Asian Expeditions under National Socialism, in: Michael Hubenstorf et al. (Ed.): Treatises on the history of medicine and the natural sciences. No. 81, Matthiesen, Husum 1997, ISBN 978-3-7868-4081-7 , p. 448 f.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Meier-Hüsing 2017, p. 206.
  2. ↑ Without author: War crimes SS- "Ahnenerbe" - German spirituality. Der Spiegel, December 14, 1970, accessed on September 4, 2018 .
  3. ↑ Meier-Hüsing 2017, p. 207.