Werner Schmidt-Hammer (police officer)

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Werner Schmidt-Hammer (born August 28, 1907 in Vogelsang , Elbing district , † March 2, 1979 in Bad Friedrichshall ) was one of the ten defendants in the 1958 task force in Ulm .

Life

Werner Schmidt-Hammer was the son of the pharmacist Oskar Schmidt and Elfriede, geb. Hammer. Since he could not attend secondary school at his parents' residence - they lived in the Baltic Sea resort of Rauschen / Samland - he was given to his mother's brother in Breslau at the age of six . After secondary school, he learned the trade of opticians. From 1928 to 1930 he attended the State University of Applied Sciences for Optics in Jena, completed his professional training as a state-approved optician and then worked as a master optician at the Carl Zeiss company in Jena . From the spring of 1936 until he was called up to the police on September 1, 1939, he ran his own optician's shop in Königsberg .

After completing basic military training and various courses, he was promoted to lieutenant in November 1940 . promoted in police service. At the beginning of 1941 he was transferred to the command of the Memel Police . In the same year he married, and in 1942 he officially changed his name to Schmidt-Hammer. He was not a member of the NSDAP , the SS or the SA .

As the commander of the so-called emergency train of the Memel police force, Schmidt-Hammer carried out the shooting of a total of 526 people, mainly Jews, in the Lithuanian border area at the end of June 1941 on the instructions of the Memel police director, Bernhard Fischer-Schweder , as part of the Tilsit task force Garsden, Krottingen and Polangen). The head of the Stapostelle Tilsit Hans-Joachim Böhme had asked Fischer-Schweder for administrative assistance because he did not have enough people. Actually, the Memel police should only have provided the necessary barriers during the shootings, but Fischer-Schweder offered his police officers "out of a desire for validity" (judgment) for the execution himself, which was gratefully accepted. The Garsden massacre on June 24, 1941 - just two days after the attack on the Soviet Union - which killed 201 people, is the first known systematic shooting of Jews by the National Socialists.

In 1943 Schmidt-Hammer, now a lieutenant , came to a police volunteer battalion in Yugoslavia. There he was taken prisoner of war on May 10, 1945, from which he was only released in February 1949. Since September 1949 he was again employed as a master optician at Carl Zeiss, now in Oberkochen .

On July 5, 1957, he was arrested in connection with the investigation by the Einsatzkommando Tilsit. He was the only one of the ten defendants who did not belong to the orbit of the SD and the security police. On August 29, 1958, he was sentenced to a minimum of three years in prison in Ulm for “collaborating in community murder” . On February 23, 1960 , the Federal Court of Justice granted a request for revision . In a new trial of the Ulm jury court he was on October 3, 1960 in the Garsden case, z. T. also Krottingens, acquitted. This reduced the number of victims for which he was responsible to 313, but the sentence itself was confirmed. The judgment became final on April 26, 1961. After serving two-thirds of his custody (including remand), Schmidt-Hammer was released on March 3, 1962 and he returned to work at Zeiss in Aalen.

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personal data
SURNAME Schmidt-Hammer, Werner
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German police officer and defendant in the Ulm Einsatzgruppen trial in 1958
DATE OF BIRTH August 28, 1907
PLACE OF BIRTH Vogelsang , district of Elbing
DATE OF DEATH March 2nd 1979
Place of death Bad friedrichshall