Werner Hersmann

Werner Hersmann (born September 11, 1904 in Duisburg- Ruhrort; † October 17, 1972 in Cologne ) was SS-Sturmbannführer in the National Socialist German Reich , head of the SD Tilsit section, as such involved in the Tilsit Task Force , leader of the Task Force's Special Command 11a D in the USSR and commander of the Security Police and SD in Banja Luka .

Origin and education

Werner Hersmann was born on September 11, 1904 in Duisburg- Ruhrort as the son of the metallurgical engineer Paul Hersmann and his wife Paula. His parents divorced four years after he was born. His mother remarried but was later divorced again.

Hersmann went to middle and high school in Frankfurt am Main and in 1919 acquired proof of secondary school leaving certificate. From 1919 to the beginning of 1921 he worked as an intern in two Frankfurt machine works. From 1921 to 1924 he graduated from the technical center in Bingen and Friedberg in Hesse, and then worked for various companies as an engineer, film theater manager and technical machine master at Mitteldeutsche Wegebau GmbH in Weimar until August 1928.

At the security service of the SS

Unemployed until 1930, Hersmann joined the NSDAP on September 1, 1930 ( membership number 298,562), the SA in November 1930, and the SS in April 1931 (SS number 9416).

From October 1, 1930 to April 1, 1932, he worked as a voluntary cashier for the Weimar district leadership of the NSDAP. As a full-time cashier and chief accountant, Hersmann then worked from April 1, 1932 to January 1, 1934 for the district administration of Thuringia . At the same time he began volunteering for the security service of the SS (SD). Further stations on his political path were his function as managing director of the Gaugericht of the NSDAP Thuringia in Weimar from January 1, 1934 to 1935, as a full-time staff leader of the SD section Thuringia in Erfurt and Weimar and the leadership of the SD section in Weimar.

On March 9, 1935, Hersmann married his wife Charlotte, with whom he had four children. In 1937 he resigned from the Protestant church .

Promoted to SS-Untersturmführer on September 13, 1936 , he was promoted to SS-Obersturmführer on April 20, 1938 and to SS-Hauptsturmführer on January 30, 1939.

Leader of the SD section Tilsit

As he stated as a defendant in the Ulm Einsatzgruppen trial , he was entrusted with the management of the Tilsit section of the SD in March 1941, but fell out of favor with Thuringia's Gauleiter Fritz Sauckel after the Kaiser district leader denounced his irregularities at Sauckel.

In its judgment of August 29, 1958 , the Ulm Regional Court stated the following about his work in the Tilsit area on one of several sets of offenses:

“The village of Polangen was taken without a fight on June 22nd, 1941 by the German troops. In the first days after the occupation, the Angekl. Böhme arrested the Jews of Polangen through the GPK Memel together with the Lithuanian police. The men were locked up in the synagogue there, while the women and children were taken to a children's home or to a farm between Polangen and Krottingen . While the Jews and Communists were being shot in Krottingen I on June 26, 1941, the Angekl. Hersmann the defendant Böhme planned to continue to Polangen immediately after the shooting was complete, to spend the night there and to shoot the arrested Jews the next day. The defendant However, Böhme did not go into this. The day of the shooting was then set as June 30, 1941 by both of them. The defendant Böhme originally wanted to stay away from this shooting and to get it through the Angekl. Let Kreuzmann perform. However, he refrained from doing this because the Angekl. Kreuzmann only held the rank of SS-Obersturmführer and he did not assign him to the Angekl. Hersmann wanted to put in front, who held a higher rank, namely that of an SS Sturmbannführer.

At the instigation of the prosecutor. Böhme asked the head of the GPK Memel, Dr. Frohwann, the Angekl. Fischer-Schweder, in turn, asked for a police squad to be turned off. The defendant Fischer-Schweder agreed to do this; [...] Thereupon the accused negotiated. Sakuth with the leader of an air force unit lying in Polangen and managed to have a train made available for the shooting by this unit.

The shooting took place in the same way as in the first two shootings in Garsden I and Krottingen I. The victims were approached from their meeting place, which was very close by, in groups of 10 by Stapo and SD members led the trench, in front of which they had to stand facing the firing squad opposite. Before giving the order to fire, the defendant gave. Schmidt-Hammer, as in Garsden and Krottingen, explained to the victims lined up at the ditch: 'You will be shot for offenses against the Wehrmacht on the orders of the Führer .' After the salvo had been delivered, members of the Stapo and SD members who had been assigned also fired additional shots at the victims. The following group of victims had to throw the bodies of those previously shot into the trench, provided that they did not fall into it by themselves. When the body of the above-mentioned master confectioner Gurewitz had not fallen into the ditch, a Gestapo man ordered a particularly thin Jewish youth from the group below to throw this body into the ditch. Since the young man did not succeed in doing this immediately, the Gestapo man who had not been identified by name hit him and shouted: 'Now hurry up, the faster you go, the faster you will be off work!'

Towards the end of the shooting, the accused was Hersmann pointed out that a Jewish pediatrician was still staying in a hospital in Polangen and working there with the German medical personnel. Thereupon the defendant gave. Hersmann gave the order to fetch this doctor too. Despite protests from the German medical staff, the doctor was picked up by Stapo and SD people in a car and shot in his white doctor's coat.

At the shooting, schnapps was given to the participants, as was always the case with the shootings. From the shooting events, the prosecutor. Hersmann, an air force officer and detective inspector Krumbach made recordings. The witness Krumbach sent his film to the Angekl. Böhme had to hand over the film from Angekl to the air force officer. Hersmann was removed.

After the completion of the shooting, the Stapo and SD members ate a communal meal in Polangen, which was previously held by the witness Na. had been ordered. After this shooting in Polangen, the prosecutor gave. Böhme gives the heads of the GPK and the leaders of the GPP general power to arrest and shoot smaller groups of Jews and communists at their own risk and to report this to him. "

Until the end of the war

In May 1942 Hersmann was transferred to Einsatzgruppe D of the Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police and the SD in the USSR in order to take over the command of Sonderkommando 11a from December 1942 to May 1943. This was last used under his leadership to fight partisans in the Pripjet swamps . On March 17, 1943 he was wounded during these operations near Boroshilovsk and then transferred to Banja Luka in Bosnia and Herzegovina as commander of the security police and the SD . Here, too, his central task was to fight partisans , which he carried out until October 1943.

After a brief assignment in the combat group of General Freudenfeld and that of SS-Standartenführer Hans-Joachim Böhme in Riwno , Hersmann was assigned to the Reich Security Main Office and, with the establishment of a special commando. b. V. in Konitz , West Prussia . This command, consisting primarily of ethnic Germans, he led until October 1944 in Slovenia and Carniola and until March 1945 in Slovakia in action against local partisans.

Shortly before the end of the war, Hersmann returned to the Reich Security Main Office in order to be transferred to the Waffen-SS in Berlin and to be assigned to the 38th SS Grenadier Division "Nibelungen" under SS-Standartenführer Martin Stange. In fact, Hersmann joined a group of around 35 men from the SD Weimar section of the 1500-man combat group of SS Oberführer Hans Trummler , which was made up of various SD units. The Trummler combat group was still used in Bavaria . Hersmann also participated in a shooting of five civilians in Altötting on April 28, 1945 - known as the " Altötting Citizens' Murders ".

After the war

After the dissolution of this unit in Tyrol, he was arrested on his way back to Thuringia on June 8, 1945 in Bad Sulza by American occupation troops due to his SS and party membership and interned in Darmstadt until August 2, 1948. In his capacity as a former member of the Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police and the SD , he also testified in the Nuremberg war criminals trial. Hersmann also rejoined the Evangelical Church.

Because of his involvement in the shooting of civilians in Altötting , the Traunstein jury court sentenced him on September 21, 1950 to a prison sentence of eight years and the loss of civil rights for a period of five years for five joint manslaughter crimes . The pre-trial detention from August 2, 1949 was counted towards the prison term. On October 20, 1954, the Traunstein court decided to suspend the remaining sentence for the period from December 2, 1954 to August 1, 1957, with a probation period ending on November 1, 1958.

On October 10, 1952, the Munich verdict court classified him as the “main culprit” and sentenced him to four years in a labor camp , which included political internment after the end of the war.

From January to October 1955, Hersmann found a job at the Silent Help for Prisoners of War and Internees eV founded by Helene Elisabeth von Isenburg in Düsseldorf, but then became unemployed. From February 1, 1956, he worked as a commercial clerk at the Frankfurt company Dietrich Schützler.

On October 29, 1956, he was again provisionally arrested as a defendant in the Ulm Einsatzgruppen Trial and taken into custody. On August 29, 1958, the Ulm Regional Court convicted him of a crime of joint aiding and abetting community murder in 1656 cases, including the prison sentence of eight years and five years of loss of honor recognized against him by the judgment of the Traunstein jury court of September 21, 1950, both of which were Loss of the total sentence of 15 years in prison; his civil rights were revoked for a period of ten years. In its reasoning, the court concluded on the basis of the investigations and interrogations on "his ice-cold, sober, heartless inner attitude to the cleansing measures at the time of the crime". In December 1961, Hersmann was released on parole.

literature

• Alfred Streim : The treatment of Soviet prisoners of war in the "Barbarossa case". A documentation. Taking into account the documents of German law enforcement authorities and the materials from the Central Office of the State Judicial Administrations for Solving Nazi Crimes . Müller, Heidelberg et al. 1981, ISBN 3-8114-2281-2 ( motifs, texts, materials 13).
• LG Traunstein, September 21, 1950 . In: Justice and Nazi crimes . Collection of German criminal judgments for Nazi homicides 1945–1966, Vol. VII, edited by Adelheid L Rüter-Ehlermann, HH Fuchs and CF Rüter . Amsterdam: University Press, 1971, No. 241, pp. 455–471 [1]

Web links

• The civil murders in Altötting on April 28, 1945

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg, holdings EL 322 II, public prosecutor at the regional court of Ulm: NS proceedings Ks 2/57 ("Ulmer Einsatzgruppen Trial")
2. ↑ Patrick Tobin: Crossroads at Ulm: Postwar West Germany and the 1958 Ulm Einsatzkommando trial , 2013, (dissertation), p. 370 ( online )