Theodor Dannecker

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Theodor Dannecker (born March 27, 1913 in Tübingen ; † December 10, 1945 in Bad Tölz ) was a German SS - Hauptsturmführer and as a Jewish advisor (also "Jewish advisor") one of Adolf Eichmann's closest collaborators .

Origin and career

Dannecker's father was a businessman who ran a men's clothing store. He died in November 1918 and left two sons: Carl and the five-year-old Theodor. Theodor attended a grammar school in Tübingen from 1922, switched to the upper secondary school and in 1928 he achieved the “secondary school leaving certificate” there. Theodor then attended the commercial college in Reutlingen and began an apprenticeship in Stuttgart in 1930. He broke off this after a few months in order to run the sick mother's business for the next two years.

On June 20, 1932, Dannecker became a member of the SS and six weeks later he joined the NSDAP . In 1934 he became a member of the SS disposal force . Dannecker was on guard duty at the Oranienburg concentration camp and in the Columbia House . He was transferred as a punishment in mid-1935 because of a security offense in connection with drunkenness and forgery of documents, but a little later he was transferred to the SD . During a training course in Berlin, Dannecker received positive attention; in January 1937 he was promoted to SS-Oberscharführer and in March 1937 transferred to the "Judenreferat" of the security service.

Dannecker as adviser to Jews

While Adolf Eichmann was at the Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Vienna in 1938 , Dannecker temporarily headed the Berlin Jewish Department II-112. At the end of 1939 he was assigned to Eichmann with the newly tailored Section IV D 4. In early 1939, Dannecker was given a short leave of absence because he was involved in a brawl under the influence of alcohol. After the formation of a “Jewish reservation” in Poland had proven impracticable, in the summer of 1940 Franz Rademacher from Section D III of the Foreign Office took up the Madagascar Plan again. Reinhard Heydrich was concerned about losing competencies and commissioned Dannecker to develop the "detailed plan for the technical implementation".

Activity in France

On September 5, 1940, Dannecker became head of the Jewish department of the SD agency in Paris, which initially only had six employees. Dannecker was under the discipline of the head of the security police in France, Helmut Bone , but obtained his instructions from Eichmann. In addition to the anti-Jewish measures initiated by the German ambassador Otto Abetz and approved by the military administration under Otto von Stülpnagel for the occupied area, Dannecker strove to set up an overarching general commissioner for Jewish issues to also cover the Jews in the unoccupied part of France until November 11, 1942 capture. An elaboration by Dannecker from January 21, 1941 shows that Dannecker had exceptionally precise information about the plans in Berlin, which at that time envisaged the deportation of all European Jews to areas to be conquered in the Soviet Union as a "territorial solution to the Jewish question" . At the beginning of 1941, Dannecker achieved the merger of Jewish associations to form the Comité de Coordination , a first "instrument to control the Jewish community in France."

At Dannecker's insistence and with the support of Abetz and Carl-Theodor Zeitschel , the military administration agreed to the proposal to intern foreign Jews; however limited to criminals and politically active persons and limited to three to five thousand. In May 1941, Dannecker had 3,746 Jews arrested and taken to the Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande camps . After attacks on German occupiers, Stülpnagel approved a major raid in Paris, which was carried out on August 20, 1941 under Dannecker's supervision by the French police. 4,323 Jews were interned in the Drancy assembly camp. In December 1941, Dannecker had a thousand "atonement Jews" arrested with his own efforts and placed in the Compiègne internment camp until the planned deportation .

Dannecker was present at the Reich Security Main Office in Berlin in March 1942 when preparations were being made to “deport” 5,000 Jews from France. By then at the latest, Dannecker knew that the Jews were to be murdered and that their killing had already begun. The first mass transport to Auschwitz with 1112 Jews left the Compiègne internment camp on March 27, 1942. Six more followed by the end of July. On June 30, 1942, Dannecker issued more precise instructions for the deportation of the Jewish population from the occupied area. Further plans envisaged the deportation of one hundred thousand Jews from France; However, due to insufficient transport capacity, the number was reduced to forty thousand at short notice. Dannecker was only able to get René Bousquet to abandon stateless and foreign Jews. A major raid on 16./17. July 1942 recorded 12,884 Jews, including around 4,000 children.

In August 1942, Dannecker was suddenly recalled. The cause was a marginal violation of the traffic regulations and drunkenness; the real reason was a disorder with Helmut Bone.

Activity in Bulgaria

As early as 1942, Martin Luther from the Foreign Office asked the Bulgarian government to consent to the deportation of its nationals residing in Germany. In October 1942 the Foreign Office took action again on the “Jewish question”. The German envoy in Sofia, Adolf Heinz Beckerle , informed Section D III of the Foreign Office that Bulgaria was in principle ready to deport Bulgarian Jews. The Foreign Office and the Reich Security Main Office were equally involved in the appointment of a Jewish adviser . Beckerle suggested SS-Hauptsturmführer Dieter Wisliceny , who was indispensable in Slovakia.

From January 1942, Dannecker was assigned to the German police attaché in Sofia as a "Jewish advisor" . Formally he was counted as an "assistant to the police attachè" in the apparatus of the German embassy to the staff of the Foreign Office; In fact, he remained a full-time member of the security service.

On February 2, 1943, Dannecker and Alexander Belev from the Bulgarian Commissariat for Jewish Affairs ( Komisarstvo za evreiskite vuprosi - KEV) worked out a plan for the "resettlement" of 20,000 Jews from the annexed "New Bulgarian" regions of Thrace and Macedonia . Both knew that there were no more than 12,000 Jews living there, and secretly set out to include several thousand Jews from neighboring "old Bulgarian" areas in the deportation. The draft also recommended interning all male Jews living in Old Bulgaria. In mid-February 1943, the Bulgarian Council of Ministers approved the plan.

The arrest of the Thracian Jews began on March 4, 1943. On March 9, Eichmann confirmed that the technical preparations for "carrying out the evacuation project" for an initial 20,000 Jews had been completed. Shortly afterwards, Dannecker was informed that the rail transport would have to be postponed to April. Dannecker then had 4,150 Jews transported by steamboat to Vienna from March 22nd and from there to the Treblinka extermination camp . The Macedonian Jews were arrested on March 10, 7,122 of them were later deported in freight cars and murdered in Treblinka.

Immediately after the first arrests of Jews from Old Bulgaria, widespread resistance arose, which ultimately led to the rescue of these Bulgarian Jews . Tsar Boris III. emphasized during his visit to Germany in early April that he had only given consent to deportation for Jews from the newly acquired areas and that he wanted to use the old Bulgarian Jews for road construction. Dannecker indirectly accused his superiors in Sofia, Beckerle and Hoffmann, of a lack of commitment and annoyed them. An attack gave Belev and Dannecker the opportunity to make two proposals to the Bulgarian Minister of the Interior: the deportation of all 51,000 Jews to the east or the resettlement of all Jews from Sofia to the province. To Dannecker's disappointment, Boris III decided to relocate. Dannecker remained formally seconded to Bulgaria until March 21, 1944, but was sent to Italy with a mobile task force in September 1943.

Activity in Italy

Between September 1943 and January 1944 he was employed in the same position by Eichmann in Italy , where Sipo and SD ( BdS ) first had to be set up. As in France, there were competing representatives of the Foreign Office, the Wehrmacht and the SS in Italy. Dannecker was entrusted with the preparation and execution of the deportation, which had already been decided on December 24, 1943. Dannecker put together a mobile “Einsatzkommando Italy” of around eight to ten SS men, which was active in various cities and was most recently stationed in Verona .

The deportations were to begin in southern Italy. At a time when the Allied landings at Salerno had already started. Naples was chosen as the first city . The popular uprising against the German occupiers that broke out in Naples at the end of September 1943 destroyed this plan; instead, an action was prepared in Rome.

Herbert Kappler , commander of the security police in Rome, Eitel Friedrich Moellhausen from the German embassy and General Field Marshal Albert Kesselring spoke out against an arrest operation in Rome, which was inexpedient in this political situation. After consulting Joachim von Ribbentrop , it was said that Hitler had issued instructions to bring the Jews living in Rome to Mauthausen as hostages . On October 16, 1943, Dannecker carried out a raid in the Jewish ghetto in Rome, in which, despite careful preparation, only 1259 instead of the hoped-for six thousand Jews could be arrested. Two days later, 1,022 of the prisoners were transported to Auschwitz instead of Mauthausen and, after the selection, 839 of them were sent to the gas chambers . Then Dannecker moved his activities to northern Italy and carried out raids in Florence, Siena, Bologna, Venice and Milan, in which a total of more than four hundred Jews were caught. On November 9th, a second train from Florence left Italy for Auschwitz.

Those responsible in the Eichmann department were dissatisfied with this result, but did not blame Dannecker for the low success, but rather the inadequate staffing. A manifesto adopted on November 16, 1943 at the first congress of the newly founded Republican Fascist Party in Verona was to become the basis for a more successful collaboration with the Italians . In the 18-point Verona Manifesto , among other things, the Jews were declared enemies of the state, which was to result in the internment of all Jews in the Italian Social Republic , and was sanctioned in a decree submitted on November 30, 1943 by Interior Minister Guido Buffarini-Guidi . The Italian police were supposed to arrest the Jews, take them to the nearest Sipo-SD office and forward their personal details to Dannecker's Jewish department in Verona. In December, 827 Jews from northern Italy were waiting in the Fossoli transit camp to be transported to Auschwitz. The preparations for this were Dannecker's last official act. He left Italy in early January 1944 and returned to Sofia. His successor in Italy was Friedrich Boßhammer .

Activity in Hungary

In March 1944, Dannecker and other Jewish advisors arrived in Mauthausen, where the Eichmann Special Operations Command was preparing the deportation of the Hungarian Jewish population. The sources only partially depict the whereabouts of Hungary and Dannecker's activities. Dannecker was responsible for arrests, at least in Kaschau and Stuhlweissenburg . One of the three routes on which Jewish work details were brought to Germany on foot from November 1944 was called the "Dannecker Route". At the end of November, Dannecker carried out raids to track down people with forged letters of protection. It was only when Budapest was almost surrounded that Eichmann and Dannecker fled the city camouflaged in Wehrmacht uniform.

After the end of the war

Dannecker was in Berlin until mid-March. After the surrender, he probably went into hiding for a few months until he found out his wife's whereabouts. On the day of his arrival in Bad Tölz , on December 9, 1945, he was arrested by the American military police. Dannecker died of suicide the following day. His body was identified by his wife and then released for burial. Even so, Dannecker's death was repeatedly questioned. Eichmann's statements give the impression that he is trying to protect Dannecker and unilaterally incriminate Wisliceny, of whose death he was convinced. The Frankfurt district court did not want to rule out in the 1970s that Dannecker was still alive.

Claudia Steur refers in this connection to an extended suicide attempt by the wife shortly after Dannecker's death. The older of the two sons could no longer be saved. There was no reason for a serious suicide attempt if the wife had not been convinced of Dannecker's death.

literature

  • Claudia Steur: Theodor Dannecker. A functionary of the "Final Solution" . Klartext Verlag , Essen 1996, ISBN 3-88474-545-X (Writings of the Library for Contemporary History - New Series, Volume 6, edited by Gerhard Hirschfeld )
  • Ahlrich Meyer : perpetrator under interrogation. The »Final Solution of the Jewish Question« in France 1940–1944 . Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft , Darmstadt 2005, ISBN 3-534-17564-6 (mainly pp. 36 to 50)
  • Michael Mayer : States as perpetrators. Ministerial bureaucracy and “Jewish policy” in Nazi Germany and Vichy France. A comparison. Series: Studies on Contemporary History, 80. Oldenbourg, Munich 2010, ISBN 978-3-486-58945-0 (also Diss. Munich 2007). Readable online in google.books (further information on work in France)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Claudia Steur: Theodor Dannecker. A functionary of the "Final Solution" . Essen 1996, ISBN 3-88474-545-X , pp. 24 and 28.
  2. ^ Claudia Steur: Theodor Dannecker. A functionary of the "Final Solution" . Essen 1996, ISBN 3-88474-545-X , pp. 34-35.
  3. Eckart Conze , Norbert Frei , Peter Hayes and Moshe Zimmermann : The office and the past. German diplomats in the Third Reich and in the Federal Republic . Karl Blessing Verlag, Munich 2010, ISBN 3-89667-430-7 , ISBN 978-3-89667-430-2 , p. 184.
  4. "disciplinary and factual" - Ahlrich Meyer: perpetrators in interrogation. The »Final Solution of the Jewish Question« in France 1940–1944 . Darmstadt 2005, ISBN 3-534-17564-6 , p. 38.
  5. ^ Claudia Steur: Theodor Dannecker. A functionary of the "Final Solution" . Essen 1996, ISBN 3-88474-545-X , p. 45.
  6. Ahlrich Meyer: perpetrators in interrogation. The »Final Solution of the Jewish Question« in France 1940–1944 . Darmstadt 2005, ISBN 3-534-17564-6 , p. 38.
  7. Katja Happe, Michael Mayer, Maja Peers (edit.): The persecution and murder of European Jews by National Socialist Germany 1933–1945 (source collection) Volume 5: Western and Northern Europe 1940-June 1942. Munich 2012, ISBN 978-3 -486-58682-4 , p. 51 as well as document VEJ 5/272, here p. 684-685.
  8. ^ Claudia Steur: Theodor Dannecker. A functionary of the "Final Solution" . Essen 1996, ISBN 3-88474-545-X , p. 56.
  9. Document VEJ 5/316 in: Katja Happe, Michael Mayer, Maja Peers (edit.): The persecution and murder of European Jews by National Socialist Germany 1933–1945 . Munich 2012, ISBN 978-3-486-58682-4 , Vol. 5, p. 795.
  10. ^ Claudia Steur: Theodor Dannecker. A functionary of the "Final Solution" . Essen 1996, ISBN 3-88474-545-X , p. 41 and p. 72f.
  11. The first mass transports to Auschwitz did not end with selection and murder in gas chambers. From the second transport with 1000 people came z. B. 738 within ten weeks. From the 7th train (arrival July 21, 1942), selection was made at the ramp and victims were gassed immediately upon arrival. = Danuta Czech: Calendar of the events in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp 1939–1945 . Reinbek near Hamburg 1989, ISBN 3-498-00884-6 , pp. 193 and 223 or 253 / see document VEJ 5/327: Dannecker announces further trains . In: Katja Happe, Michael Mayer, Maja Peers (arr.): The persecution and murder of European Jews by National Socialist Germany 1933–1945 . Munich 2012, ISBN 978-3-486-58682-4 , vol. 5, p. 820.
  12. Document VEJ 12/238 in: Katja Happe u. a. (Ed.): The persecution and murder of European Jews by National Socialist Germany 1933–1945 (collection of sources) Volume 12: Western and Northern Europe, June 1942–1945. Munich 2015, ISBN 978-3-486-71843-0 , pp. 634–635.
  13. Katja Happe u. a. (Ed.): The persecution and murder of European Jews by National Socialist Germany 1933–1945 (collection of sources) Volume 12: Western and Northern Europe, June 1942–1945. Munich 2015, ISBN 978-3-486-71843-0 , p. 63 / see document VEJ 12/235. - In fact, 73,853 Jews were deported from France between 1942 and 1944.
  14. ^ Claudia Steur: Theodor Dannecker. A functionary of the "Final Solution" . Essen 1996, ISBN 3-88474-545-X , p. 83.
  15. ^ Claudia Steur: Theodor Dannecker. A functionary of the "Final Solution" . Essen 1996, ISBN 3-88474-545-X , p. 89.
  16. ^ Hans-Joachim Hoppe: Bulgaria. In: Wolfgang Benz (Hrsg.): Dimensions of genocide. The number of Jewish victims of National Socialism. dtv Munich 1996, ISBN 3-423-04690-2 , p. 282.
  17. Eckart Conze; Norbert Frei; Peter Hayes; Mosche Zimmermann: The Office and the Past - German Diplomats in the Third Reich and in the Federal Republic, Munich 2010, ISBN 978-3-89667-430-2 , pp. 282–284.
  18. Katja Happe u. a. (Ed.): The persecution and murder of European Jews by National Socialist Germany 1933–1945 (collection of sources) Volume 12: Western and Northern Europe, June 1942–1945. Munich 2015, ISBN 978-3-486-71843-0 , p. 625 with note 3 / at Steur, p. 99, January 19 is named as the start of employment.
  19. ^ Claudia Steur: Theodor Dannecker. A functionary of the "Final Solution" . Essen 1996, ISBN 3-88474-545-X , pp. 97/98.
  20. ^ Claudia Steur: Theodor Dannecker. A functionary of the "Final Solution" . Essen 1996, ISBN 3-88474-545-X , pp. 101-103.
  21. ^ Hans-Joachim Hoppe : Bulgaria. In: Wolfgang Benz (Hrsg.): Dimensions of genocide. The number of Jewish victims of National Socialism. dtv Munich 1996, ISBN 3-423-04690-2 , pp. 286-288.
  22. ^ Claudia Steur: Theodor Dannecker. A functionary of the "Final Solution" . Essen 1996, ISBN 3-88474-545-X , pp. 104-108.
  23. ^ Hans-Joachim Hoppe: Bulgaria. In: Wolfgang Benz (Hrsg.): Dimensions of genocide. The number of Jewish victims of National Socialism. dtv Munich 1996, ISBN 3-423-04690-2 , pp. 289-291.
  24. ^ Claudia Steur: Theodor Dannecker. A functionary of the "Final Solution" . Essen 1996, ISBN 3-88474-545-X , pp. 109-112.
  25. ^ Claudia Steur: Theodor Dannecker. A functionary of the "Final Solution" . Essen 1996, ISBN 3-88474-545-X , pp. 115-116.
  26. Liliana Picciotto : La macchina antiebraica della RSI e l'Ispettore generale per la razza Giovanni Preziosi. In: Michele Sarfatti (ed.): La Repubblica sociale italiana a Desenzano: Giovanni Preziosi e l'Ispettorato generale per la razza. Giuntina, Florence 2008 ISBN 978-88-8057-301-2 , pp. 21-22.
  27. ^ Claudia Steur: Theodor Dannecker. A functionary of the "Final Solution" . Essen 1996, ISBN 3-88474-545-X , pp. 117-118.
  28. ^ Claudia Steur: Theodor Dannecker. A functionary of the "Final Solution" . Essen 1996, ISBN 3-88474-545-X , pp. 120-123.
  29. Liliana Picciotto: La macchina antiebraica della RSI e l'Ispettore generale per la razza Giovanni Preziosi. P. 23.
  30. ^ Claudia Steur: Theodor Dannecker. A functionary of the "Final Solution" . Essen 1996, ISBN 3-88474-545-X , p. 127.
  31. Liliana Picciotto: La macchina antiebraica della RSI e l'Ispettore generale per la razza Giovanni Preziosi. P. 25.
  32. ^ Claudia Steur: Theodor Dannecker. A functionary of the "Final Solution" . Essen 1996, ISBN 3-88474-545-X , pp. 124-127.
  33. Wisliceny's statement in IMT: The Nuremberg Trial of the Major War Criminals ... , fotomech. Reprint Munich 1989, Volume 4, ISBN 3-7735-2502-8 , pp. 407f.
  34. ^ Claudia Steur: Theodor Dannecker. A functionary of the "Final Solution" . Essen 1996, ISBN 3-88474-545-X , pp. 135f.
  35. ^ Claudia Steur: Theodor Dannecker. A functionary of the "Final Solution" . Essen 1996, ISBN 3-88474-545-X , p. 144.
  36. ^ Claudia Steur: Theodor Dannecker. A functionary of the "Final Solution" . Essen 1996, ISBN 3-88474-545-X , pp. 147-150.