Walter Stein (SS member)

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Walter Stein (born November 6, 1896 in Schwelm , † August 11, 1985 in Garmisch-Partenkirchen ) was a German SS-Oberführer and police chief .

Life

Walter Stein was the son of the locksmith Karl Stein and his wife Auguste, nee Frech. After the elementary school he started an apprenticeship as a fitter and continued his school career, but due to the war put the final examination is no longer on. As a war volunteer, after completing basic military training, he took part in the First World War and was then deployed on the Western Front, where he suffered serious war injuries several times. He left the army at the end of 1918 with multiple awards. He then took three semesters of courses at the Elberfeld / Wuppertal mechanical engineering school. Whether he belonged to a volunteer corps has not been established. During the Weimar Republic he worked as a driver and in the commercial area in Berlin and became unemployed in the wake of the global economic crisis .

Walter Stein joined the NSDAP at the beginning of May 1929 ( membership number 255.956) and at the same time joined the SA . At the beginning of November 1930 he became a member of the SS in Berlin (SS no. 12.780) and made a part-time career in this Nazi organization. In 1931 he became the Untersturmführer. In 1932 he was appointed Hauptsturm- and the following year SS-Sturmbannführer and Obersturmbannführer. In 1934 he was promoted to SS-Standartenführer . From 1934 he worked full-time at DAF and became an honorary Reich Labor Judge at the Honorary Disciplinary Court in Leipzig. On January 1, 1936, he was promoted to SS-Oberführer and as such worked in SS-Section XXIX, first in Mannheim , then in Constance . There he was employed as an SS section leader until 1939 and was largely responsible for the destruction of the synagogue there during the Reichspogromnacht .

After the beginning of the Second World War he was appointed acting police director in Thorn in 1940 . From October 1941 he was initially acting and from February 1943 police chief in Danzig , a transfer to Warsaw in early 1944 failed due to illness. At the beginning of November 1944 he moved from Danzig as police chief to Litzmannstadt , which was renamed Łódź by the German occupiers. In January 1945 Stein was able to leave the city ​​enclosed by the Red Army with members of a police unit for Gdansk, where he was tasked with disembarking the civilian population. With a ship of the Kriegsmarine he finally crossed to the west of the German Empire to Fürstenfeldbruck and fled to Garmisch-Partenkirchen and from there to Tyrol.

After the war ended, Stein was arrested by members of the US Army on June 3, 1945 and interned in Dachau and Augsburg. Eventually he was extradited to Poland. There he was indicted in Gdansk in 1947 and sentenced to seven years in prison in 1949 for membership in a criminal organization and for crimes against the Polish people, which he served until the beginning of 1954. After returning to Germany, he lived with his family in Garmisch-Partenkirchen and made a living as a warehouse manager. In Germany in 1962 charges were brought against him for the destruction of the synagogue in Constance. However, the proceedings were discontinued in 1963 due to the statute of limitations.

Awards

literature

  • Alfred Georg Frei, Jens Runge: Remembering - thinking - learning , 1990, p. 101.
  • Markus Wolter: Radolfzell in National Socialism - The Heinrich Koeppen barracks as the location of the Waffen SS , in: Writings of the Association for the History of Lake Constance and its Surroundings, Volume 129. Ostfildern, Thorbecke 2011, pp. 247–286, on Walter Stein and its role in the Reichspogromnacht 1938: here the chapter: Reichspogrom 1938 , p. 257 ff. ( digitized version )

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://www.dws-xip.pl/reich/biografie/1936/1936.html
  2. ↑ On Walter Stein and his role in the Reichspogromnacht 1938: Markus Wolter: Radolfzell in National Socialism - The Heinrich Koeppen barracks as the location of the Waffen SS , in: Writings of the Association for the History of Lake Constance and its Surroundings, Volume 129. Ostfildern, Thorbecke 2011, pp. 247–286, here the chapter: Reichspogrom 1938 , pp. 257 ff. ( Digitized version ( memento of the original dated April 7, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and not yet checked. Please check Original and archive link according to instructions and then remove this note. ) @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.bodenseebibliotheken.de
personal data
SURNAME Stein, Walter
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German SS leader and police president
DATE OF BIRTH November 6, 1896
PLACE OF BIRTH Schwelm
DATE OF DEATH August 11, 1985
Place of death Garmisch-Partenkirchen