State Police Headquarters Magdeburg
The Magdeburg State Police Headquarters (StapoLSt Magdeburg) was an agency of the Gestapo in the administrative district of Magdeburg , whose activities were mainly limited to the area of the city of Magdeburg . The office existed from 1933 to the beginning of April 1945. Its seat was initially the police headquarters in Halberstädter Straße 133 and in 1934 it was moved to Government Street 1.
Establishment of the service
The Magdeburg State Police Department (Stapo Magdeburg) was set up as a result of an executive order of the 2nd Gestapo Act (of November 30, 1933) of March 8, 1934 and two subsequent circulars between the end of April and the beginning of May 1933. From April 1, 1934, the state police in Prussia were separated from the police administration. This made the political police of the State Criminal Police Office Magdeburg the independent department of the Stapo Magdeburg.
With the independence from the district governments, the state police stations were only answerable to the Secret State Police Office Berlin (Gestapa Berlin). Although the regional presidents or senior presidents were able to issue instructions to the state police, they were not allowed to contradict the rules of the Gestapa Berlin.
On January 8, 1937, Reinhard Heydrich ordered the Magdeburg Stapo to be transferred to the Magdeburg State Police Headquarters . The activities of the other Stapo offices in the Province of Saxony in Erfurt and Halle were not affected by this new provision . In July 1941, the service area of the StapoLSt Magdeburg was expanded to include the state of Anhalt and thus became the superordinate agency directly responsible for the Dessau state police station. An advertisement from 1936 shows that the StapoLSt Magdeburg had a branch in Stendal . No other subordinate departments of the StapoLSt Magdeburg are known yet.
Office addresses
The head of the department initially had his office at the seat of the district government at Domplatz 3 in Magdeburg, while the employees had their office at the police headquarters at 133 Halberstädter Strasse. This spatial separation existed until the end of 1933, in 1934 the company moved to Government Street 1. In the course of a reorganization of street names and numbers, the address was renamed Klosterkirchhof 1 in 1936, as the house was adjacent to Klosterkirchhof 8 in the east. The population called this house the Brown House . The agency existed until it was closed in April 1945.
The heads of the department
The first head of the department in Magdeburg, Erfurt-born government councilor Erich Stier came from the police service of the district government. When he was transferred to the High Presidium in Hanover on May 1, 1934, there was no successor in the Magdeburg office for several weeks, so a provisional head was appointed.
On August 1, 1934, the lawyer Otto Bovensiepen , who had come from the Düsseldorf state police station, began his service in Magdeburg. His activity in Magdeburg ended after just a few months, as he was transferred to the Recklinghausen State Police Station on February 5, 1935 .
Heinrich Vitzdamm , who was experienced in the police force, succeeded him on February 15, 1935. His last position was in the district government of Szczecin . On February 21, six days after taking up service in Magdeburg, he applied for membership in the SS , which was later dated back to January 1, 1935. He also worked in Magdeburg for less than a year, since he was transferred to the Königsberg state police station on March 9, 1936 .
On March 16, 1936, the government councilor Albert Leiterer took over the management of the Magdeburg Stapo. The lawyer had previously worked in the judiciary and in the police force. Leiterer was to lead the Gestapo office in Magdeburg until September 27, 1941. He was able to escape service at the front because he had sought a position in the internal administration in good time. On August 21, 1941, he was appointed provisional head of the department as a district administrator for the Heiligenstadt district by the Reich Ministry of the Interior , where he actually took up his post on September 28, 1941.
With effect from November 29, 1941, the SS-Obersturmbannführer and senior government councilor Helmut Bischoff succeeded Leiterer. He was previously involved in several war crimes as head of the Einsatzkommando 1 / IV in Poland. In Magdeburg he organized the deportation of the Jews and hanged at least ten Polish forced laborers . His period of service in Magdeburg ended on November 16, 1943, as he was deployed in December 1943 as SD defense officer in the Dora concentration camp .
On February 15, 1944, the lawyer and SS-Sturmbannführer Robert Mohr took over the management of the StapoLSt Magdeburg. He previously ran the Darmstadt state police station , where he had organized the deportation of the Jews. When US troops approached Magdeburg on April 10, 1945, Mohr and the members of his office fled. Mohr then went into hiding with a false name.
Staffing of the department
In November 1933 ten employees were working at the agency. Detective inspectors Erich Frohwein, Arthur Rausch, and auxiliary inspector Heinrich Tofahrn came from Gestapo offices in other places. The government assessor Norbert Hering came to the office directly from his studies in 1934. The inspector Franz Königshaus came to the office directly from the Magdeburg Police Headquarters in 1935. Their activities were initially limited to the immediate office operation, so that there were no major outside activities. Even the production of reports was restricted in 1933. On January 4, 1934, eleven members were still employed at the office.
After independence from the district government, the number of employees rose to 29 on June 25, 1935. Many employees were taken over by the Magdeburg Police Headquarters. After the change of name to StapoLSt Magdeburg, the number of relatives rose to 75 on March 31, 1937. The head of the office was now able to deploy 52 employees to supervise the Gestapo. On March 31, 1937, the StapoLSt Magdeburg had six vehicles in use to monitor the administrative district of Magdeburg (1933: about 1.3 million inhabitants) and later also the area of Anhalt (about 440,000 inhabitants). The vehicles covered up to 650 km a day. There were five members of the agency with two drivers in this operation.
A total of 360 members of the agency can be identified from the files between 1933 and 1945. Of these, 147 were civil servants and 129 were salaried employees. The number of female relatives was 84.
After the Stapo Dessau was placed under the Magdeburg office in July 1941, relatives from Dessau were transferred to Magdeburg to the StapoLSt. However, there were also delegations to the Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police and the SD when deployed in the Soviet Union .
Measures of persecution
The main activity of the members of the StapoLSt Magdeburg was initially directed against members of the KPD , the SPD and the Socialist Workers' Party of Germany (SAPD). But also other organizations such as the Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold , the Combat Community of Revolutionary National Socialists (also called Black Front ), the Stahlhelm, Bund der Frontsoldaten , the Pan-German Association , the Community of Seventh-day Adventists , the German Volkskirche under Artur Dinter , the German Faith Movement , the Nordic Faith Movement , the International Bible Students Association and the Catholic and Evangelical Churches were under observation.
In the later years, the Gestapo Magdeburg was directed mainly against Jews, enemies of the home front and groups that the National Socialists described as work-shy and anti-social . So-called professional criminals were also taken to concentration camps.
Persecution of the KPD resistance
After the first big wave of arrests of members of the KPD in the administrative district of Magdeburg in the first months of 1933, the remaining members organized themselves in small groups that used colonies of allotment gardens as conspiratorial meeting places, whereby the contact among the couriers and distributors of publications by naming Passwords.
The members of the StapoLSt Magdeburg tried with partial success to smuggle so-called V-men into the organization of the KPD . Due to repeated arrests, the KPD was forced to rebuild its leadership of the district five times by April 1935. The decisive blow of the Gestapo was made possible by the betrayal of the KPD leader in the Magdeburg district, Willi Jahn, in September 1935. In connection with smuggled V-men, about 150 people were arrested between September 1935 and May 1936, and according to other statements by those arrested such as Gerhard Holzer and Paul Weller were further KPD members until 1938. It was not until 1943 that the KDP succeeded in rebuilding new structures.
Deportations of Jews from Magdeburg and Berlin
The StapoLSt deported at least 235 Jews in four trains from Magdeburg directly to the Theresienstadt ghetto . At least 82 were transported from Magdeburg to Auschwitz .
The transports to Theresienstadt were:
- November 18, 1942 with 77 deportees
- November 25, 1942 with 76 deportees
- December 2, 1942 with 70 deportees
- January 10, 1944 with 16 deportees
The trains from Magdeburg also included residents from Stendal, Dessau, Bernburg and Aschersleben.
The transports to Auschwitz were:
- February 26, 1943 with 77 Magdeburgers from Berlin
- March 2, 1943 with 5 Magdeburgers from Berlin
Individual evidence
- ↑ From 1933 to 1937 the department was called "State Police Station Magdeburg", from 1937 to 1945 the name was "State Police Headquarters Magdeburg"
- ↑ Alexander Sperk, Die Staatspolizei (leit) stelle Magdeburg, their leaders and the smashing of the KPD, in: Polizei & Geschichte, Edition 1, 2009, ISSN 1865-7354 , pp. 4–23
- ↑ Alexander Sperk, State Police (head) office Magdeburg, p. 5
- ↑ Alexander Sperk, State Police (head) office Magdeburg, p. 5 and FN 27
- ^ Hermann-Josef Rupieper, Alexander Sperk, The Situation Reports of the Secret State Police on the Province of Saxony 1933-1936, Volume 1, Administrative Region Magdeburg, Halle (Saale) 2003, p. 17
- ↑ Hermann-Josef Rupieper, Alexander Sperk, situation reports, p. 19.
- ↑ Biography of Hering in the Rhineland-Palatinate personal database
- ↑ Wolfgang Benz, Homosexuals and “Community Strangers”. On the discrimination of groups of victims after the National Socialist persecution, in: Wolfgang Benz, Barbara Distel (Ed.), Persecution as Group Fate (Dachauer Hefte, No. 14), Dachau 1998, pp. 3-16
- ↑ Alexander Sperk, State Police (head) office Magdeburg, pp. 15-16
- ↑ Alfred Gottwaldt, Diana Schulle: The "Deportations of Jews" from the German Reich 1941-1945 - An annotated chronology, Wiesbaden 2005, ISBN 3-86539-059-5