Waldemar Krause (SS member)

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Waldemar Krause (born July 15, 1908 in Strasbourg , † April 11, 1992 in Niedernstöcken ) was a German criminal police officer, SS-Sturmbannführer and leader of Sonderkommando 4b of Einsatzgruppe C in the Soviet Union .

Life

While the information on Krause's activity as head of SS-Sonderkommando 4b is consistent in the literature, it is in some cases imprecise or contradicting his earlier activity. According to the Brown Book published in the GDR , he was - without an exact time - active as a detective in the Reich Criminal Police Office in Section IA 3 and a member of the NSDAP ( membership number 2,953,348) and SS (SS number 346,964).

According to the historian Stephan Linck , Krause took part in a course for detective inspectors at the driving school of the Security Police in Berlin-Charlottenburg and was employed in Office V of the Reich Security Main Office ("Criminal Police").

According to the historian Gerhard Paul , Krause had headed the Saarbrücken criminal police until 1943 before he was seconded to the command of the security police and the SD (KdS) in occupied Stalino ( Soviet Union ). After the KdS there was recalled, Krause advanced to head of special command 4b of Einsatzgruppe C, which was responsible for the shootings of Jews in Ukraine, and headed it until January 1944.

On December 13 or 14, 1943, Krause's Sonderkommando shot dead around 1,000 Jewish craftsmen in the Ukrainian town of Wolodymyr-Wolynskyj , who were initially left alive during the occupation in 1942 and the murder of 13,500 people in the Jewish ghetto there in September. The railroad tracks, which were used as grates for the later cremation of the corpses, had already been laid. "With that," said the historian Dieter Pohl, "the 'final solution' in the Reich Commissioner was completed".

Towards the end of the war, Krause managed to escape to Flensburg, following the northern rat line . In 1961, in a commemorative publication Ten Years of Comradeship, the Flensburg Criminal Police Office said:

"In the turbulent days before and after the surrender on May 8, 1945 [...] Flensburg became a refuge for numerous members of the Reich Criminal Police Office."

According to Gerhard Paul, Krause applied for his reinstatement as a detective after the introduction of Article 131 in the Basic Law of 1951, which made it easier to return burdensome civil servants to civil service . By 1960 he was promoted to head of the Flensburg District Criminal Police Office. According to a report by the news magazine Der Spiegel , Krause was arrested at the end of August 1963 and was in custody until August 1964, as after investigations by the Central Office for the Investigation of Nazi war crimes in Dortmund he was suspected of being head of Sonderkommando 4b for the murders committed by him to be responsible. The responsible judge at the Ratingen District Court near Düsseldorf saw a risk of escape if Krause was released from pretrial detention due to the ongoing investigations, so that he only consented to the release after hearing from more than a dozen higher Schleswig-Holstein police officers sums between 500 and 6,000 DM Had obtained bail .

In 1970 the responsible Düsseldorf public prosecutor brought charges. The allegation was that Krause had "knowingly provided assistance to the cruelly committed killing of at least 500 people" by ordering and monitoring the shooting of at least 500 Jews living in the so-called craftsman ghetto in a nearby forest in the Lutsk district in Ukraine " have. However, the proceedings were discontinued in 1974 after the presentation of medical certificates attesting that he was in poor health.

During the investigations directed against him, Krause was supported by the "comrades help" of the former police officer Willy Papenkort , who himself had been involved in the murder of the Jewish population in Slutsk , Belarus in October 1941 . In 1982 the public prosecutor's office in Kiel started new investigations, which were immediately stopped when the then state justice minister of Schleswig-Holstein, Henning Schwarz , said, contrary to the facts, to a parliamentary request from the SPD member of the state parliament, Uwe Jensen , that he was "Krause not possible as a perpetrator" has probably been confused with a "civil servant of the same name who otherwise remained unknown at the crime scene in Russia". Krause died on April 11, 1992 in Niedernstöcken, Lower Saxony .

Fonts

  • Our office through the ages . In: Ten years of camaraderie. Criminal Police Flensburg 1951–1961 . Publisher German Police, Hamburg 1961.

literature

  • Gerhard Paul: Landunter. Schleswig-Holstein and the swastika . Westphalian steam boat, Münster 2001, ISBN 3-89691-507-X .

Web links

  • Suspected escape. Kiel Guard. Police . In: Der Spiegel . No. 34 , 1964, pp. 30-31 ( Online - Aug. 19, 1964 ).

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Norbert Podewin (Ed.): Braunbuch. War and Nazi criminals in the Federal Republic and in Berlin (West) . Edition Ost, Berlin 2002 (reprint of the edition of the Staatsverlag der DDR, Berlin 1968), p. 373.
  2. ↑ Stephan Linck: The Stammtisch history of the "old Charlottenburg". A network in West Germany . In: Klaus-Michael Mallmann , Andrej Angrick (ed.): The Gestapo after 1945. Careers, conflicts, constructions . WBG, Darmstadt 2009, ISBN 978-3-534-20673-5 (publications by Forschungsstelle Ludwigsburg , vol. 14), pp. 105–121, here p. 117.
  3. ↑ Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. The persecution and murder of the European Jews . Vol. 3. Ed. Eberhard Jäckel , Peter Longerich , Julius H. Schoeps . Argon, Berlin 1993, ISBN 3-87024-303-1 , p. 1737.
  4. ↑ a b c d Gerhard Paul: Landunter. Schleswig-Holstein and the swastika . Münster 2001, p. 361.
  5. ^ Dieter Pohl: Scene Ukraine. The mass murder of Jews in the military administration area and in the Reich Commissariat 1941–1943 . In: Christian Hartmann , Johannes Hürter , Peter Lieb , Dieter Pohl (eds.): The German War in the East 1941–1944. Facets of crossing borders . Oldenbourg, Munich 2009, pp. 155–198, here pp. 183ff.
  6. ^ Dieter Pohl: Scene Ukraine. The mass murder of Jews in the military administration area and in the Reich Commissariat 1941–1943 . In: Christian Hartmann, Johannes Hürter, Peter Lieb, Dieter Pohl (eds.): The German War in the East 1941–1944. Facets of crossing borders . Oldenbourg, Munich 2009, p. 185.
  7. ↑ Waldemar Krause: Our office through the ages . In: Ten years of camaraderie. Criminal Police Flensburg 1951–1961 . Verlag Deutsche Polizei, Hamburg 1961, p. 10, quoted from Gerhard Paul: Landunter. Schleswig-Holstein and the swastika . Münster 2001, p. 359.
  8. ^ Gerhard Paul in: Die Zeit : Zeitleile: Flensburger Kameraden , from: February 1, 2001; accessed on: June 14, 2017
  9. ↑ Suspected of having escaped. Kiel Guard. Police . In: Der Spiegel No. 34 from August 19, 1964.
  10. ↑ a b c Ocke H. Peters: Schleswig-Holstein has proven itself as a hiding place for Nazi criminals. Erich Waldemar Krause even lied . In: Information on contemporary history in Schleswig-Holstein (ISHZ). Issue 23, November 1992, p. 61f.
  11. ↑ Stefan Klemp : Not determined. Police Battalions and the Post War Justice. A manual. Klartext, Essen 2005, ISBN 3-89861-381-X , p. 397.
personal data
SURNAME Krause, Waldemar
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German criminal police officer, SS leader and head of Sonderkommando 4b of Einsatzgruppe C
DATE OF BIRTH July 15, 1908
PLACE OF BIRTH Strasbourg
DATE OF DEATH April 11, 1992
Place of death Niedernstöcken