Walter Adolf Langleist

Walter Adolf Langleist (born August 5, 1893 in Dresden , † May 28, 1946 in Landsberg am Lech ) was a German SS-Oberführer and camp commandant of the Mühldorf concentration camp . As a war criminal Langleist was sentenced to death and executed in the Dachau trials .

Life

Langleist was a mechanic by trade and the father of one child. In World War I soldier, he joined 1930 the NSDAP ( membership number 352801) and 1931 of the SS (SS-No. 8980) at. In the SS he was promoted to Oberführer on April 20, 1939 and temporarily headed SS Section XIII in Stettin.

After the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, Langleist was in Bromberg (Polish: Bydgoszcz) leader of the Volksdeutsche Selbstschutz , a paramilitary organization formed from members of the German minority in Poland . Until October 1940 again as SS-Oberführer in Stettin, Langleist was involved in the murder of patients in the sanatoriums and nursing homes in Pomerania in late 1939 and early 1940. On the initiative of the Gauleiter for Pomerania, Franz Schwede , the patients were to be brought to neighboring Polish areas. In the autumn of 1939 about 1,400 patients from Pomerania were shot there by the SS; another 1,000 were murdered in gas vans in the spring of 1940 . From the beginning of 1939 to September 1941, the number of beds in the provincial sanatoriums and nursing homes fell from 7,600 to 2,800. Some of the facilities that had become vacant were used by the SS.

From 1941 Langleist belonged to the Waffen-SS , most recently with the rank of SS-Sturmbannführer of the reserve. From June 1941 at the latest he was in a leading position in the security team of the Buchenwald concentration camp , the SS-Totenkopf-Sturmbann. In April 1942 he became the commander of the guards at the Majdanek concentration camp in Lublin. Langleist was also part of the staff of the Warsaw concentration camp , and may have been the camp commandant there for a time. From August 1943 to May 1944 he was in command of the guards in the Dachau concentration camp .

In September 1944 Langleist was transferred to a satellite camp of the Dachau concentration camp in the Kaufering and Landsberg am Lech area . Eleven satellite camps were set up in this area; the prisoners were used as slave labor in the construction of a semi-underground concrete bunker in which fighter planes were to be produced. Langleist was in command of these satellite camps. At the end of October or beginning of November 1944 he was relieved of his position in Kaufering because he had not complied with the demands of the construction manager of the armaments project for more sanitary facilities and a delousing facility in the camps.

Langleist then moved to the Mühldorf external command as commander . According to post-war statements from Oswald Pohl , among others , Langleist seems to have tried in Mühldorf to free the camps there from their subordination to the Dachau concentration camp. For example, he had made an SS-Oberscharführer his adjutant without his rank being suitable and there was no corresponding position in Mühldorf.

After the end of the war, from November 15, 1945, Langleist and 39 other members of the camp staff were accused in the main Dachau trial, which took place as part of the Dachau trials . The US Military Tribunal was charged with "violating the laws and customs of war" against civilians and prisoners of war alike. Within the prosecution, the concept of “ common design ”, the common plan for a crime, played a central role: not only the individual acts of the concentration camp personnel were viewed as criminal, but the concentration camp system itself. In the course of the preliminary investigations it had proven difficult to assign individual crimes to the accused, as the concentration camp inmates only partially survived, their statements lacked the necessary precision due to the traumatization and they only partially knew the names of the perpetrators.

Langleist was sentenced to death on December 13, 1945, along with 35 other defendants . In Langleist's case, the court found two individual acts of excess as proven: He threw a prisoner into a pit, whereupon he died. Langleist also hit another inmate with a piece of wood in such a way that he too died. The judgment was confirmed on April 5, 1946 by the Commander-in-Chief of the American Armed Forces in Europe , who had received a recommendation from a so-called "Review Board" of the army. Langleist was hanged on May 28, 1946 in the Landsberg War Crimes Prison .

literature

• Holger Lessing: The first Dachau trial 1945/46. (= Fundamenta juridica. Volume 21). Nomos, Baden-Baden 1993, ISBN 3-7890-2933-5 .
• Gerd R. Ueberschär (Ed.): The National Socialism in front of the court. The allied trials of war criminals and soldiers 1943–1952 (= Fischer pocket books. The time of National Socialism 13589). Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1999, ISBN 3-596-13589-3

Web links

• Review of Proceedings of General Military Court in the Case United States vs. Martin Gottfried Weiss (PDF file;, 40 MB) at jewishvirtuallibrary.org

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Biographical information on Langleist in:
   • Ernst Klee: The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 3-596-16048-0 , p. 357.
   • Review of Proceedings of General Military Court in the Case United States vs. Martin Gottfried Weiss (PDF file;, 40 MB) at jewishvirtuallibrary.org, pp. 73f, 124f.
   • Review and Recommendations of the Deputy Theater Judge Advocate (PDF file;, 29.4 MB) at the International Research and Documentation Center for War Crimes Trials (ICWC), p. 49.
   • Edith Raim: The Dachau concentration camp external commandos Kaufering and Mühldorf. Armaments construction and forced labor in the last year of the war, 1944/45. Neumeyer, Landsberg am Lech 1992, ISBN 3-920216-56-3 , p. 156f.
   • Edith Raim: The end of Kaufering IV. In: Wolfgang Benz, Barbara Distel (Ed.): Dachauer Hefte. Issue 20. Verlag Dachauer Hefte, Dachau 2004, ISBN 3-9808587-4-X , pp. 139–156, here p. 147
   • SS seniority list 1934, Sturmhauptführer ( Memento from January 5, 2005 in the Internet Archive ) and SS-Oberführer ( Memento from June 16, 2002 in the Internet Archive ) at Axis Biographical Research.
2. ↑ Heike Bernhardt: "Euthanasia" and the beginning of the war. The early murders of Pomeranian patients. In: ZfG , 44, Heft 9, 1996, pp. 773-788, here pp. 773-776.
3. ↑ Short biography of Walter Adolf Langleist with photo (Polish)
4. ↑ Investigations by the Munich I public prosecutor's office, see Raim: Ende. P. 147.
5. ↑ Raim: KZ-Außenkommandos. passim. An overview of the locations of the camps at the European Holocaust Memorial Foundation eV
6. ↑ Raim: KZ-Außenkommandos. P. 157. Deviating from this, Langleist is named in the documents of the Dachau trial as the person responsible for the Kaufering IV concentration camp command , see Review (PDF file; 40 MB), pp. 73, 152f.
7. ↑ ^{a b} Raim: KZ-Außenkommandos. P. 157.
8. ↑ On "Common Design": Robert Sigel: In the interest of justice. The Dachau war crimes trials 1945-1948. Campus, Frankfurt 1992, ISBN 3-593-34641-9 , p. 42ff.
9. ^ Lessing: Process. P. 322.
10. ↑ Summary of the review on Kramer: Review (PDF file; 40 MB), p. 152f. Ibid, p. 164, recommending that the death penalty be retained in Langleist's case .