Werner Knab

Werner Knab (born December 18, 1908 in Frankenthal (Palatinate) ; † February 15, 1945 near Weißenfels ) was a German lawyer who worked as a government councilor and SS leader for the Gestapo and the SD during the Nazi era .

Life

Knab attended secondary school in his hometown and then moved to the upper secondary school in Ludwigshafen am Rhein , where he completed his school years with the Abitur in 1928 . He then completed a degree in law and political science in Munich , Berlin and London , which he completed in 1931 with the first state examination in law. In the course of his legal traineeship doctorate he attended the University of Munich 1931 Dr. jur. and passed his second state examination in law in 1935.

During his legal clerkship, he joined the NSDAP ( membership number 3.269.940) and the SS (SS number 191.584) at the beginning of February 1934 after the transfer of power to the National Socialists in early May 1933 . After completing his studies, he joined the Bavarian Political Police in September 1935 . From 1936 he was employed as a government assessor at the state police headquarters in Munich and was promoted to the government council in September 1938. He then became deputy head of the Wroclaw State Police Headquarters .

After the beginning of the Second World War he worked in the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) in the Secret State Police Office (Amt IV) and at the end of 1939 was transferred to the German embassy in Oslo as cultural attaché . In the course of the German occupation of Norway , Knab became head of the Gestapo with headquarters in Oslo at the end of April 1940 and later belonged to the staff of the commander of the Security Police and the SD (BdS) in Norway Walter Stahlecker . In this capacity he led arrest operations during the state of emergency in Oslo and represented the prosecution at the stand courts . On the intervention of the Reich Commissioner for the Occupied Norwegian Territories, Josef Terboven , Knab was transferred to the Eastern Front for rehabilitation on charges of having behaved in a cowardly manner. Immediately afterwards, in mid-January 1942, Knab was transferred to the Ukraine as head of Einsatzgruppe C , which carried out mass murders of Jews . Soon afterwards he headed the Gestapo department in Kiev under the BdS .

In June 1943 he was appointed to the Oberregierungsrat and was promoted to SS-Obersturmbannführer in the SS. On June 23, 1943, he became the commander of the security police and the SD (KdS) in Lyon in German-occupied France . After the Allies landed in France, Knabs ordered massacres of civilians and resistance fighters during the Wehrmacht's actions against the resistance fighters of the partisan republic of Vercors in July 1944 . In a risky airborne maneuver, with Knab's participation, gliders landed at Vassieux, and on his command, the units under his command shot civilians and captured resistance fighters. A total of two villages and several farmsteads were burned down and a total of 639 Resistance fighters were shot dead during fighting or after capture and 201 civilians were murdered.

After the liberation of France by the Allied troops, Knab returned to the RSHA. On January 13, 1945 he was awarded the Iron Cross First Class. While driving on the Berlin-Munich autobahn, Knab was fatally injured in a low-flying attack near Weißenfels on February 15 . The criminal proceedings initiated in Germany and France because of his crimes committed in France were discontinued after his death became known.

literature

• Stein Ugelvik Larsen, Beatrice Sandberg, Volker Dahm (eds.): Reports from Norway 1940–1945: The secret situation reports of the commander of the Security Police and the SD in Norway , Oldenbourg, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-486-55891-3 . (Short biographies, p. 77f.)
• Peter Lieb : Conventional War or Nazi Weltanschauungskrieg - Warfare and Fight against Partisans in France 1943/44 , R. Oldenbourg, Munich 2007 (= sources and representations on contemporary history , vol. 69). ISBN 3-486-57992-4 .