Wilhelm Helten
Wilhelm Helten (born April 13, 1900 in Ettlingen , † July 2, 1987 in Ansbach ) was a German National Socialist and between autumn 1941 and April 1945 worked as SS-Hauptscharführer in the Dachau concentration camp in the commandant's office, department IV site administration .
Childhood and youth
Helten came as the eldest son of three children from Wilhelm Moritz Helten and Frida Helten, née. Tschira in Ettlingen in Baden. His mother was the daughter of the grand-ducal Baden and royal Saxon court photographer Karl Christian Tschira. His father was a chief inspector of the Reichsbahn.
Helten attended elementary schools in Stuttgart , Braunschweig and Horrem . Helten and his father joined the German Scout Association, founded in 1911 . He had to leave the high school in Cologne in April 1917 without a degree, as he was drafted into service in the First World War .
The way to the SS
Between the spring of 1917 and December 1918 Helten served as an orderly in the staff of the Boy Scouts at the Brussels headquarters, who were assigned to a general of the Prussian foot artillery. In December 1918 he returned to Germany. On the march through Belgium Helten's disarmed company was attacked several times by Belgian rioters and several of his young comrades were shot or lynched . Helten himself suffered injuries.
Since the Rhineland and parts of the Ruhr area were occupied by the French from 1919, the Helten family lost their home. Your villa near Cologne was expropriated by a French general. The family lived in a hotel at their own expense for weeks before they found new living space. Despite the prohibition by the occupying power, Wilhelm Helten and his father tried to reactivate the scout organization. Helten was found out through denunciation in 1922 and the occupation authorities put it out to be wanted. He evaded the threat of arrest and the certain death sentence by fleeing. His father bribed a subordinate engine driver and his stoker. These brought Wilhelm Helten to safety from the occupied zone to southern Germany, at risk of death.
In 1923 Wilhelm Helten lived with his grandmother in Lörrach and traveled from there to Bavaria, the Lake Constance region, Switzerland and Austria. He was unable to continue his studies at the art academy that he had started in Cologne. On his return trip from the Bavarian Alps, he met Adolf Hitler in Munich in the late summer of 1923 , whose political ideas kept him enthusiastic. Because of the hyper-inflation , Helten was forced to end his stay in Munich. Helten planned to take part in the Hitler putsch in Munich. But his father blocked him from changing and ultimately ordered him to Loerrach. At the beginning of 1924, Helen's father ordered the move to Osterode am Harz . Wilhelm Helten married Marie Schubert here in November 1924. Although his father disinherited him because of the marriage that was not in keeping with his status, Helten worked for his uncle Wilhelm Tschira's company in Katzenstein near Osterode until 1929 . Wilhelm Tschira was director of a stock corporation.
Like his nephew Wilhelm Helten, Wilhelm Tschira was a sympathizer and financial supporter of Adolf Hitler and the NSDAP . In November 1922 the NSDAP was banned in Prussia, thus also in Osterode, which was in Hanover-Prussia . Wilhelm Tschira then founded the Central German Workers' Party together with Gustav Seifert in the spring of 1923 . Seifert had founded a local branch of the NSDAP in Hanover in July 1921 and left Hanover in 1923 for professional reasons. The Central German Workers' Party was supposed to be a temporary, regional gathering place for former members of the NSDAP. At the beginning of September 1923 the first meeting of the Central German Workers' Party took place in Förste near Osterode, chaired by Director Wilhelm Tschira, the main speaker was Gustav Seifert.
The Wilhelm Tschira corporation was heavily involved in the USA. As a result of Black Thursday on October 24, 1929 and the subsequent global economic crisis , the company became insolvent in late 1929 and ceased operations in early 1930. Wilhelm Helten was thus unemployed, like millions of others. The remainder of his family's fortune was for good.
The Osterode employment office ordered him to the Sösetalsperre , which was under construction , where he took over the management of the magazine until 1931. Unemployed again in 1932, Wilhelm Helten and his wife managed to do odd jobs. The family had five children.
Career in the SS
Shortly after the reorganization of the NSDAP , Helten joined the NSDAP and the Sturmabteilung (SA) in 1927 . Organizational irregularities in the regional party administration ensured that his membership application was not registered. Helten protested and submitted petitions. In 1931 he applied for membership in the NSDAP again. His active membership in the SA since 1927 was not in question. According to the documents in the Federal Archives, his second application was registered in 1932 under the number 878739. Because of joining the NSDAP, Helten claimed the status of old fighter long before the National Socialists came to power in 1933 . Being an old fighter was associated with prestige and preferential care. In 1936, the Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler personally presented Helten with an SS honor dagger with a dedication as "compensation" because of the irregularities in the registration in the NSDAP , which allegedly happened on instructions from Adolf Hitler.
In 1931/1932 Helten was re-registered with the NSDAP. He also transferred from the SA to the Schutzstaffel (SS) as an SS squad leader . In the spring of 1935, the SS arranged for Heltens to move to Göttingen and to be employed as a nurse in the local sanatorium . He was supposed to be prepared for a job in a concentration camp as part of the so-called "euthanasia program", a program of murders of the sick during the Nazi era . (A relative of Heltens, Bernhard Tschira, born in Katzenstein in 1926, was murdered in 1940 as part of the program in the Grafeneck killing center .)
Helten did not like working as a nurse. After he was recognized as an old fighter in 1936 , he was able to get the SS to find a new use for him. With effect from October 1, 1937, Helten moved to the SS Junckerschule in Braunschweig . Here he was an SS-Oberscharführer as a non-commissioned officer in the Waffen SS . In 1939 he was promoted to SS-Hauptscharführer . Helten acted as an adjutant to the Junkernschule headmaster and was promoted to SS-Sturmscharführer in 1940 .
In 1941 Wilhelm Helten was anonymously accused of an official offense. Thereupon Helten was demoted and transferred to Dachau, where he was then part of the staff in the Dachau concentration camp . After completing a "six months' sentence" in the security team, protective custody camp leader Alexander Piorkowski (in office February 1940 - September 1942) placed him in Department IV, the site administration . Helten quickly went through all the warehouse administration departments. The head of the protective custody camp, Martin Gottfried Weiß (in office September 1942 - October 1943) finally appointed him administrative manager. Helten remained in this role until the day of the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp , April 29, 1945. The day before, the SS had partially withdrawn from the city and the concentration camp after the Dachau uprising was put down . Unlike numerous SS members, Helten did not flee from the approaching US soldiers, but was taken prisoner. On the day of the liberation of the concentration camp, US soldiers shot 28 to 50 members of the SS guards in spontaneous acts of revenge known as the “ Dachau massacre ”.
Denazification and life after 1945
After being captured by US troops, Helten was initially imprisoned in the concentration camp that had been converted into the Dachau internment camp . This is where the trial should be brought to him. Helten was subjected to interrogation with the use of force by US interrogation specialists, but did not reveal any incriminating, legally usable information. As a result of the interrogations, Helten lost all of her teeth. Nor were any surviving concentration camp inmates found as witnesses against him. Since one could prove him no involvement in crimes in concentration camps, Helten was the beginning of the Dachau main process in the detention center in the former 75 Kornwestheimer laid Ludendorff Barracks. There he was subjected to numerous further interrogations over the next six months. Neither during the Dachau trials nor during the Nuremberg trials , usable accusations against Helten could be uncovered. That is why he was transferred to the US internment camp in Darmstadt in the former cavalry barracks on today's Straße Am Kavalleriesand in mid-1946 . The accommodations there were considered to be the worst of any detention center in the US zone. At Christmas 1948 he was released from internment as part of a Christmas amnesty.
Helten returned to his family near Göttingen. Unemployed until 1955, he found a job as a technical draftsman. In 1968 Herbert Jankuhn , director of the Prehistory and Protohistory Department at the University of Göttingen , hired him as a draftsman. Helten worked here until she turned 80.
In February 1986, Helten suffered a stroke that left him in a wheelchair. His daughter took him to the senior care home in Ansbach , where he died on July 2, 1987. He was buried three days later.
Wilhelm Helten could never be prosecuted for his involvement in the atrocities of the Nazi era as well as his allegedly thousandfold (indirect) involvement in the experiments and murders of prisoners in the administration of the Dachau concentration camp, as he was between 1945 and 1948 despite intensive investigations by the US prosecutors no crime or personal fault could be proven. However, he atoned in part by serving three years and eight months of internment.
Archives
- Federal Archives Koblenz and Berlin-Lichterfelde
- Family archive Helten
- Tschira family archive
- Archive Osteroder Kreisanzeiger
- Archive Osteroder Kreiszeitung
- Church archive Ettlingen
- Church archive Lörrach
Individual evidence
- ^ AG Wilhelm Tschira, Katzenstein near Osterode: Vol. 1 - German digital library. In: deutsche-digitale-bibliothek.de. Retrieved May 30, 2020 .
- ↑ Walter Struve: Rise and rule of National Socialism in a small industrial town - Osterode am Harz 1918–1945 . Klartext-Verlagsgesellschaft, 1992, ISBN 978-3-88474-156-6 , p. 74-76 .
- ↑ Osteroder Kreiszeitung. September 7, 1923
- ↑ Education and nursing home for the mentally weak in Mosbach, Baden-Württemberg. In: gedenkort-t4.eu. Retrieved May 30, 2020 .
- ↑ The internment camps for Nazi-polluted people in Württemberg-Baden - LEO-BW. In: leo-bw.de. Retrieved May 30, 2020 .
- ^ Barracks in Darmstadt until 1945. In: dfg-vk-darmstadt.de. Retrieved May 30, 2020 .
- ↑ Darmstadt internment camp. In: dfg-vk-darmstadt.de. Retrieved May 30, 2020 .
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Helten, Wilhelm |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German SS man |
| DATE OF BIRTH | April 13, 1900 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Ettlingen |
| DATE OF DEATH | 2nd July 1987 |
| Place of death | Ansbach |