Werner Göttsch

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Werner Theodor Göttsch (born October 23, 1912 in Kiel , † May 2, 1983 ibid) was a German SS leader. During the Nazi era he committed several murders on behalf of his superiors.

Life

education

Göttsch was the son of the builder Theodor Göttsch and his wife Bothilde, née Larsson. After attending secondary school in Kiel, Göttsch was trained for two years at the higher commercial school in his home country. He passed the examination for the upper secondary school at the state secondary school in Kiel-Wellingdorf .

From March 1930 to December 1931 Göttsch completed a practical apprenticeship at the commercial college at the clothing company "Hettlage und Lampe" in Kiel. From December 1931 to October 1932 Göttsch was unemployed. He could not afford to study because of his father's financial difficulties during the global economic crisis .

Career in National Socialism

Göttsch joined the NSDAP on January 1, 1931 ( membership number 459.389) and joined the SS on March 15, 1931 (SS number 10.238), where he belonged to SS-Sturm 2 / III. On 1 October 1932 he took over in Kiel the Sicherheitsdienst . On April 1, 1933, Göttsch was involved in the lynching of the respected Kiel lawyer Friedrich Schumm . This act seemed to qualify Göttsch for higher tasks. In the summer of 1933 he was transferred to the so-called SD Upper Section East in Berlin. Later he worked in the SD main office , and there in particular in Central Department III 3.

During the so-called Röhm Putsch , Göttsch claims to have been commissioned with others to travel to Prague and murder Otto Strasser . The order was not carried out because the campaign was poorly prepared and they only saw Strasser once from a distance. Instead, Göttsch and Alfred Naujocks murdered an employee of Otto Strasser, the engineer Rudolf Formis , on the night of January 23, 1935 in a hotel near Prague.

After the German "annexation" of Austria to the German Reich in March 1938, Göttsch temporarily guarded the Austrian imperial regalia . In addition, he claims to have received the order from Franz Six to shoot the philosopher Othmar Spann , which he did not carry out because he appeared to be unqualified. For this he delivered Spann to the concentration camp, where he was badly mistreated. The murder of Wilhelm Freiherr von Ketteler these days by presumably Standartenführer Horst Böhme was not an unknown event for Göttsch in 1938.

He later became head of department in the Reich Security Main Office . In addition, he was still one of Heydrich's preferred specialists for combating opponents of the regime abroad. In 1939, Göttsch said he was supposed to participate in the attack on the Gleiwitz transmitter staged by the SD , but was excluded from the command group at the last moment due to differences with Herbert Mehlhorn . In 1940 Göttsch was involved in the kidnapping of British agents from the Netherlands to Germany, known as the Venlo incident . During the war he worked, among other things, as SS-Obersturmbannführer in the Balkan department of the SD.

Promotions

  • February 1, 1933: SS troop leader
  • February 15, 1934: SS-Sturmführer
  • June 20, 1934: Obersturmführer
  • January 24, 1935: Sturmhauptführer
  • January 30, 1939: Sturmbannführer
  • November 9, 1943: Obersturmbannführer

literature

  • Florian Altenhöner: The man who started World War II. Alfred Naujocks : Forger, murderer, terrorist , Prospero Verlag, Münster / Berlin 2010. ISBN 978-3-941688-10-0 . Contains, among other things, the biographies of Kiel SS members who made careers in the SD Berlin.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Lutz Hachmeister: The enemy researcher. The career of SS leader Franz Alfred Six , 1998, p. 344.
  2. ↑ Entry Werner Göttsch on www.dws-xip.pl
  3. ↑ Gerhard Paul : "Until then he had no idea about Jewish affairs". Herbert Hagen, the SD officer from Neumünster . In: Information on Schleswig-Holstein Contemporary History Issue 33/34.
  4. ↑ Ronald M. Smelser : The Sudeten Problem and the Third Reich, 1933-1938 , 1980, p. 154.
  5. ^ Karl Dietrich Bracher: Resistance in the Third Reich , 1984, p. 182.
personal data
SURNAME Gottsch, Werner
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Göttsch, Werner Theodor (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German SS leader
DATE OF BIRTH October 23, 1912
PLACE OF BIRTH Kiel
DATE OF DEATH May 2nd 1983
Place of death Kiel