Walter Pohlenz

Walter Pohlenz (born July 31, 1902 in Kiel , † September 15, 1978 in Bobingen , Schwabmünchen district) was a German detective. He was especially known for his involvement in the murder of Albrecht Höhlers , the murderer of " NS - martyrs " Horst Wessel , in the year 1933rd

Life and activity

Career up to 1933

Pohlenz was a trained car mechanic. Since 1926, he ran a car throttle business in Berlin-Niederschönhausen. In the 1930s he hit a career as a detective. In 1933 he became a detective assistant with the Secret State Police in Berlin, where he was assigned to Department III.

In this position, according to investigations by East German authorities in the post-war period, he was said to have been a serious torturer in 1933 and to have violated arrested communists in particular. He is said to have tortured communists who were involved in the Felseneck affair - an incident in January 1932 in which two people were killed in a clash between National Socialists and Communists in the Felseneck garden colony - in some cases even to death.

Post-war testimonies paint the picture of an unscrupulous sadist: He was there when prisoners were beaten on the naked body with leather whips or when prisoners' sexual organs were beaten with steel rods. He himself ordered that prisoners had to lick their urine off the floor. He also made it a pleasure to burn off tattoos on inmates with cigarettes.

For this reason, the historian Daniel Siemens comes to the conclusion that "the National Socialist orgies of violence of 1933" would not have been possible without "characters like Pohlenz [...]". He stood for "the many nameless people" who had "worked to rule" by actively supporting the regime's policy of persecution, for which they were rewarded with modest social advancement.

The Murder of Albrecht Höhler (September 1933)

The communist Albrecht Höhler was sentenced to six years in prison for manslaughter of Horst Wessel in the Weimar Republic . Wessel was subsequently stylized as a martyr by the Nazi movement. In the autumn of 1933, a few months after the National Socialists came to power , Höhler was transferred from the Wohlau prison to the prison at the police headquarters on Alexanderplatz in Berlin , only to be interrogated again as the proceedings were reopened.

After Höhler had been imprisoned there for several weeks, Pohlenz was sent to the police prison on the morning of September 20, 1933 by the head of the Secret State Police Office, Rudolf Diels, with a certificate of release for Höhler. The discharge note ordered Höhler's handover to Pohlenz and his companion, the auxiliary criminal officer Willy Schmidt. He officially stated that the purpose of handing the prisoner over to the two detective assistants was that they should transport him back to the Wohlau prison.

In fact, Höhler's handover to Pohlenz and Schmidt served to create the conditions for the execution of a revenge murder by the Berlin SA on Wessel's murderer. After Höhler was handed over to Pohlenz and Schmidt, he was driven in a police vehicle towards Frankfurt (Oder) . He was joined by two other cars, in which u. a. Diels and Karl Ernst and his deputy August Wilhelm Prince of Prussia found.

After a thirty-minute drive, the column stopped at a wooded area: Pohlenz and Schmidt got the tied Höhler out of the car. Together with the inmates of the other cars, they went with the prisoner as a group on foot into the forest, at the edge of which Ernst Höhler accused Wessels as the murderer. Then he gave the order to open fire on him. After the shots, Pohlenz and Schmidt freed Höhler from the toggle chain. He was makeshift buried on site. The official reports untruthfully claimed that Pohlenz and Schmidt had been arrested by an SA commando on the road that had forced them to hand over their prisoners at gunpoint. Then this disappeared without a trace. The actual planned cooperation between Pohlenz and Schmidt and the SA when Höhler was handed over to the SA was kept secret in the report.

Further life

Pohlenz remained in the police force until 1945. On February 1, 1932, he became a member of the NSDAP (membership no. 1.106.036).

After the Second World War , Pohlenz lived in Berlin-Adlershof, where he worked in a vehicle business. In 1948 he married a younger woman with whom he had a child.

At the same time, Pohlenz was targeted by the authorities of the Soviet Occupation Zone / GDR : as early as 1945, he was accused of persecuting and torturing people for political, religious or racial reasons as a Gestapo official between 1933 and 1936 in Berlin and the surrounding area "through several independent acts" to have. Several witnesses for Pohlenz's atrocities could be found.

From June 19, 1948, Pohlenz was in custody in Potsdam. On July 25, a report was made in the press calling on possible witnesses of Pohlenz's involvement in the torture committed against the Felseneck communists and the Höhler murder to come forward and make useful statements. On July 22, 1949, Pohlenz managed to escape from the sick cell of the Potsdam-Babelsberg Municipal Hospital, where he had been transferred a few days earlier due to syphilis. According to the report by the People's Police, the police sergeant Emil Kunzack left the cell area with another inmate to go shopping. Pohlenz, who, according to a nurse, had bribed the sergeant with cigarettes and food, stayed behind and disappeared. after Kunzack found out that his prisoner had successfully escaped, he also fled. The manhunt initiated under the code word "Tiger" was unsuccessful. The circumstances suggest, according to Siemens, that Pohlenz had planned his escape long in advance and that he may have received help from old friends in the police and judicial service.

Pohlenz went to West Germany, where he again became a criminal. He had been in custody in Lüneburg since 1950 . On September 27, 1950, he was sentenced by the local district court to two years and two months in prison for theft, fraud and forgery of documents. An agreement between the Lüneburg public prosecutor's office and the GDR judiciary on the formation of a total sentence in accordance with sections 79 and 74 of the Criminal Code or on extraditing Pohlenz to East Germany after he had served his imprisonment in Celle did not come about.

In the criminal complaint drawn up against him by the East Berlin public prosecutor's office, a prison sentence of 15 years was requested. However, the proceedings were provisionally discontinued on April 4, 1951. The decision to discontinue the job stated that after a successful large-scale manhunt across Germany, Pohlenz should be extradited to the GDR authorities when he was found. Daniel Siemens interprets this as an attempt by the political leadership of the GDR to postpone a main trial against Pohlenz against the will of the state attorney general of Brandenburg, in order to initially exert political and moral pressure on the FRG state. Siemens also suspects that Pohlenz was intended as a candidate for a show trial in the GDR.

As a result, Pohlenz profited from the tense relationship that existed between the two German states established after the Second World War in the first post-war decades: According to Siemens, those responsible in both German states prevented a legally possible conviction of Pohlenz to win a moral bargaining chip in the Cold War and to deny the other side the success of the investigation ”. The Federal Republic refused to extradite Pohlenz to the GDR with reference to an impending court case in West Berlin, which however did not take place.

The judicial authorities of the GDR regularly extended the search for Pohlenz, most recently in 1974, but he was never convicted for his actions in the 1930s.

When the public prosecutor's office in Berlin resumed the murder of Albrecht Höhler in 1968 after the central office of the state judicial administrations for the investigation of National Socialist crimes in Ludwigsburg had issued a warning in 1960 to investigate violent SA crimes from 1933 before these would expire due to the statute of limitations then applicable she also came across Pohlenz, whom she questioned extensively as one of the few survivors of the incident. In the subsequent investigation, Pohlenz described the actual circumstances of Höhler's handover to the SA, which differed considerably from the official reports from 1933, and also described the course of his murder. Since no evidence of his active involvement could be produced and the aiding and abetting in an act of killing in 1933 was statute-barred as a criminal offense (since 1960), he was not charged.

During his last years Pohlenz lived in Wehringen near Augsburg and most recently in Bobingen in the Schwabmünchen district.

literature

• Daniel Siemens : Horst Wessel. Death and Transfiguration of a National Socialist . Siedler, Munich 2009, esp. Pp. 255–260. ISBN 978-3-88680-926-4 .

Individual evidence

1. ^ Siemens: Wessel, p. 256.
2. ^ Siemens: Wessel, pp. 255f.
3. ^ Siemens: Wessel, p. 256.
4. ^ Siemens: Wessel, p. 256.
5. ^ Siemens: Wessel, pp. 257f.