Werner Lorenz

Werner Lorenz (1934)

Werner Lorenz in Allied internment

Werner Lorenz (born October 2, 1891 in Grünhof ; † March 13, 1974 in Hamburg ) was head of the Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle (VoMi), SS-Obergruppenführer , general of the Waffen-SS and police and a convicted war criminal .

Life

Werner Lorenz was born as the son of a landowner in the Pomeranian Grünhof. The family did not have a " von " in their name, but Lorenz was one of the few SS leaders who could at least offer an introduced family coat of arms when Himmler asked every senior SS leader to have a coat of arms to decorate the Wewelsburg .

Lorenz joined the elite cadet corps to become a Prussian army officer. In April 1913 he joined a dragoon regiment as a flag junior . Immediately after the outbreak of World War I , Lorenz went to the front in August 1914, where he was awarded the Iron Cross, 2nd class within a month . In 1915 he switched from the cavalry to the air corps . He later served as a staff officer and received the Iron Cross 1st class shortly before the end of the First World War. After the end of the war, the last unit he led stood in the Polish border region and took part in fighting in the Eastern Border Guard until it was disbanded in March 1920.

Lorenz then worked as a farmer and soon acquired land and industrial property in Gdansk . In 1929 Lorenz joined the NSDAP ( membership number 317.994) and on January 31, 1931, he joined the SS (SS number 6.636). In 1933 he served as a member of the state parliament in Prussia and from November 1933 as a member of the Reichstag . At the same time he worked in the Hamburg State Council .

On November 9, 1933, Lorenz was promoted to SS group leader and acted as a liaison to the Völkischer Kampfring of South Tyrol . From 1934 to 1937 he was the leader of the SS Upper Section North , with its official seat in Hamburg. In November 1936 he was promoted to SS-Obergruppenführer . From January 1937 he headed the Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle (VOMI) and from October 1939 was directly subordinate to the Reich Commissioner for the Consolidation of German Volkstum , Heinrich Himmler , who gave him his own SS main office in June 1941 . At the same time, Lorenz was the authorized representative for international relations for the Führer’s deputy, Rudolf Hess . In this capacity he acted (since August 11, 1938) in Berlin as President of the "Association of Intergovernmental Associations and Institutions eV".

After the Second World War , Lorenz was briefly interned in England until he was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment on March 10, 1948 in the Nuremberg Race and Settlement Main Office Trial . As head of the VOMI, Lorenz was responsible for the resettlement and "home management" of foreigners of German origin and German minorities abroad as well as for the "Germanization" of foreign children, especially Poles and Slovenes . In 1951 his imprisonment was reduced to 15 years, and in the spring of 1955 he was already released from the Landsberg war crimes prison .

Werner Lorenz had three children, Rosemarie (1920–2019), Jutta (* 1922) and Joachim-Werner (* 1928). His eldest daughter Rosemarie Springer was the third wife of the publisher Axel Springer .

literature

Erich Stockhorst: 5000 people. Who was what in the 3rd Reich . Arndt, Kiel 2000, ISBN 3-88741-116-1 (unchanged reprint of the first edition from 1967).
Valdis O. Lumans: Werner Lorenz - head of the "Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle" . In: Ronald Smelser , Enrico Syring (ed.): "The SS: Elite under the skull". Schöningh, Paderborn 2000, ISBN 3-506-78562-1 , pp. 332-345.
Valdis O. Lumans: Himmler's auxiliaries - the Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle and the German national minorities of Europe, 1933-1945 . University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill 1993, ISBN 0-8078-2066-0 .
Military Tribunal No. I, CASE 8, The United States of America vs. Ulrich Greifelt et al. - "The RuSHA Case" (PDF; 56.9 MB) . United States Government Printing Office , Washington 1948. (Vol. IV, Green Series ).

Web links

Commons : Werner Lorenz - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Literature by and about Werner Lorenz in the catalog of the German National Library
Newspaper article about Werner Lorenz in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .
Werner Lorenz in the database of members of the Reichstag

Individual evidence

↑ ^a ^b Valdis O. Lumans: Werner Lorenz - head of the "People's Mittelstelle" . In: Ronald Smelser, Enrico Syring (ed.): "The SS: Elite under the skull". Schöningh, Paderborn 2000, p. 334.
↑ International Dilemmas and European Visions. Festschrift for the 80th birthday of Helmut Wagner . In: Martin Sieg, Heiner Timmermann (Ed.): Series: Politics and Modern History . tape 9 . Lit-Verlag, Münster 2009, ISBN 978-3-643-10481-6 , p. 207 .

personal data
SURNAME	Lorenz, Werner
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	German politician (NSDAP), MdR, MdL, head of the Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle and SS-Obergruppenführer
DATE OF BIRTH	October 2, 1891
PLACE OF BIRTH	Grünhof
DATE OF DEATH	March 13, 1974
Place of death	Hamburg

[Lumans-334-1] Valdis O. Lumans: Werner Lorenz - head of the "People's Mittelstelle" . In: Ronald Smelser, Enrico Syring (ed.): "The SS: Elite under the skull". Schöningh, Paderborn 2000, p. 334.

[2] International Dilemmas and European Visions. Festschrift for the 80th birthday of Helmut Wagner . In: Martin Sieg, Heiner Timmermann (Ed.): Series: Politics and Modern History . tape 9 . Lit-Verlag, Münster 2009, ISBN 978-3-643-10481-6 , p. 207 .