Wilhelm Albert (SS member)

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SS-Brif KW Albert

Karl Wilhelm Albert (born September 8, 1898 in Hessenthal , † April 21, 1960 in Erndtebrück ) was a German SS leader and police chief , most recently in the rank of SS brigade leader and major general of the police.

Live and act

Albert was born the son of a senior teacher. After attending elementary school and a humanistic grammar school, he took part in the First World War as a soldier . He then belonged to the Epp Freikorps from 1919 to 1921 . He completed a degree in electrical engineering and was awarded a Dr.-Ing. PhD. He then worked as a production engineer in Würzburg and finally in Frankfurt am Main.

Albert worked for the NSDAP's intelligence service as early as 1930, without being a party member. He joined the NSDAP on May 1, 1932 ( membership number 1.122.215) and the SS on August 1, 1932 (SS number 36.189) and worked for the Security Service (SD), the secret service of the SS. In autumn 1933 Albert took over the management of the SD Upper Section West in Düsseldorf and later the SD Upper Section Rhine in Frankfurt am Main as SS Sturmführer . In 1935 he succeeded Werner Best as head of personnel and organization at the SD main office . After the reorganization of the SD in January 1936, Albert took over the management of the newly established Office I (Administration), one of the three SD offices. Along with Reinhard Heydrich , Werner Best, Heinz Jost and Franz Six, he was temporarily one of the five institutionally highest-ranking SD leaders. In April 1939 he was promoted to SS Brigade Leader and Major General of the Police, his highest rank among the SS and the police. In 1939 Albert von Heydrich was named one of five directors of the Nordhav Foundation alongside Werner Best, Walter Schellenberg , Herbert Mehlhorn and Kurt Pomme .

In the course of the establishment of the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA) Albert was supposed to take over the planned Office II "Young Talent and Education", in which curricula and guidelines for careers at SD and Sipo schools were to be developed. Albert, who had been included in the planning by Heydrich in the summer of 1939, fell out of favor with him. Whether this was due to a lack of suitability remains doubtful. Hans-Christian Harten rather suspects that an alleged affair Albert with Heydrich's wife could have played a role in this context.

At the beginning of the Second World War , Albert was entrusted with the administration of the police chief in Opole in September 1939 . From July 1940 he was police chief in Litzmannstadt (Łódź) . He published an anti-Semitic article in the 3/1941 issue of the journal Die deutsche Polizei , in which he called Łódź “one of the most criminal cities in Europe” because of the high proportion of Jewish people in the city. In April 1943 Albert inspected the Litzmannstadt ghetto . After his replacement, he became the successor of the District President Hans Burkhardt in the Hohensalza district of the Warthegau in 1944 .

After the war, Albert was interned until 1947. Until the end of his life, he was never questioned in connection with Nazi crimes in the Federal Republic of Germany.

See also

literature

  • Shlomo Aronson : Reinhard Heydrich and the early history of the Gestapo and SD , 1967.
  • George C. Browder: The Beginnings of the SD. Documents from the organizational history of the security service of the Reichsführer SS. In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 27 (1979), pp. 299-324 ( PDF ).
  • Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich . Updated 2nd edition. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-596-16048-8 .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Ernst Klee: The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 11.
  2. ↑ a b c d Klaus-Peter Friedrich (edit.): The persecution and murder of the European Jews by National Socialist Germany 1933–1945 (source collection) Volume 4: Poland - September 1939 - July 1941. Munich 2011, ISBN 978-3- 486-58525-4 , p. 539, fn. 3.
  3. ↑ a b Julien Reitzenstein : Himmler's researcher. Defense science and medical crimes in the "Ahnenerbe" of the SS. Schöningh, Paderborn 2014, p. 224f.
  4. ↑ a b c Hans-Christian Harten: The ideological training of the police in National Socialism. Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn 2018, ISBN 978-3-657-78836-1 , p. 96f.
  5. ↑ Saul Friedländer: The Third Reich and the Jews , Vol. 1, p. 216.
  6. ↑ a b c Hans-Christian Harten: The ideological training of the police in National Socialism. Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn 2018, ISBN 978-3-657-78836-1 , p. 574.
  7. ↑ Shmuel Krakowski: The Chełmno / Kulmhof death camp: the beginning of the “final solution” . Wallstein-Verlag, Göttingen 2007, ISBN 978-3-8353-0222-8 , p. 128.
  8. ↑ Sascha Feuchert , Erwin Leibfried , Jörg Riecke (eds.): The Chronicle of the Ghetto Lodz / Litzmannstadt. Wallstein, Göttingen 2007, Volume 5, p. 408. There sources of information on activities in Litzmannstadt.
personal data
SURNAME Albert, Wilhelm
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Albert, Karl Wilhelm (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German SS leader
DATE OF BIRTH September 8, 1898
PLACE OF BIRTH Hessenthal
DATE OF DEATH April 21, 1960
Place of death Erndtebrück