Wilhelm Rosenbaum (SS member)

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Wilhelm Rosenbaum

Wilhelm Karl Johannes Rosenbaum (born April 27, 1915 in Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg , † April 4, 1984 in Hamburg ) was a German SS officer who was involved in numerous murders and other crimes during the Nazi era. He was sentenced to life imprisonment in a court case in Hamburg in 1968. In 1982 he was conditionally released.

Live and act

Childhood and Adolescence (1915 to 1934)

Wilhelm Rosenbaum was born in 1915 as the son of the Berlin municipal official Peter Rosenbaum. The mother died when Rosenbaum was one year old. The brother Franz Rosenbaum (* 1910) came from an earlier marriage of the father. The younger brother Kurt Rosenbaum (* 1919) emerged from the third marriage. Family life was marked by violence and the resignation of Rosenbaum and his older brother by the stepmother, who beat them and vilified them as "Polack children".

From 1921 to 1926 Rosenbaum attended elementary school, after which he was taught at a secondary school, which he left in 1931 with poor grades. Rosenbaum, who had been a member of the Hitler Youth since autumn 1930, moved out of his parents' house in October 1932. After Rosenbaum had already joined the SA on February 1, 1932 , he lived in the SA sports school in Prenden from November 1932 . On April 27, 1933, on his 18th birthday, Rosenbaum joined the NSDAP .

From spring 1933 to autumn 1934 Rosenbaum managed to do various odd jobs: at the beginning of 1933 he worked in the labor service, then from May to August 1933 he attended the Reichsführer-school of the voluntary labor service , and finally with the German Labor Front (DAF) as an unskilled worker (sorting mail and similar).

SS career (1936 to 1945)

From November 1934 to September 1935 Rosenbaum belonged to the 12th Infantry Regiment of the Reichswehr in Dessau-Halberstadt. He then found a job as an office worker with the SS . On the advice of his colleagues, Rosenbaum left the SA and joined the SS, which he was accepted on July 1, 1936 on probation. In the autumn of 1936 he took up a position with the State Police in Berlin. There he was primarily entrusted with the registration of gun possession and confiscation matters.

Rosenbaum married Hedwig Bober in August 1937. The marriage, which was divorced in 1940, had a daughter, Ellen (born June 22, 1938).

After the attack on Poland began in September 1939, Rosenbaum was assigned to the inspector of the security police in Opole . As an SS- Oberscharführer he was a member of the SS unit led by Otto Sens , which fought partisans and insurgents in Oppen, Częstochowa and, most recently, Cracow. In Krakow he was part of a firing squad of the security police led by SS- Hauptsturmführer Hans Krüger , which shot "enemies of the Reich" sentenced to death by courts-martial.

In November 1939, Rosenbaum was assigned to the office of Karl Eberhard Schöngarth , the commander of the Security Police and SD in Krakow. In December 1939 he was given the job of reorganizing the security police leadership school in Zakopane , which was run by Hans Krüger . In July 1940 the school was moved to Bad Rabka . Rosenbaum took on the role of police secretary at the facility's new location. After Kruger was transferred to Cracow, he took over the management of the school.

In April 1941 Rosenbaum was assigned to Schöngarth's office in Cracow, where he was given the task of organizing an officers' club. From June to autumn 1941 he was a member of the special task force subordinate to Schöngarth , which was involved in mass shootings in Galicia . He then took over the management of the Sipo SD school in Rabka until the spring of 1943. There he participated in the exploitation of numerous Jews and other people who were imprisoned as forced laborers and murdered in Rabka . In addition to regular mass shootings that he had initiated, cases of personal abuse could later be proven: He always carried a metal whip with him, with which he often mistreated people extradited to him.

In 1943 Rosenbaum was transferred to Krakow as punishment for embezzling numerous Jewish property, where he married for the second time in August. Soon after, he was sent to Salzburg . Shortly after his promotion to SS- Untersturmführer on April 20, 1945, Rosenbaum fled to Simmling, where he saw the end of the war.

post war period

After the end of the war Rosenbaum worked briefly as a transport worker for a farm in the Soviet occupation zone . He later went to Hamburg , where he worked as an insurance agent, private detective and traveling salesman. In 1949 he opened a candy store there before finally turning to wholesale sales of ready-made goods. With an annual turnover of 1.3 million DM , he achieved modest prosperity in this area.

On September 7, 1961, Rosenbaum was arrested by the Federal Republican authorities for war crimes . On August 15, 1968, the Hamburg Regional Court sentenced him to life imprisonment. The subject of the proceedings was mass and individual killings in Bad Rabka by shooting and hanging. The victims included Jewish slave laborers, Jews who had evaded deportation to a concentration camp, and a Jewish family who bore the same name as the defendant. In 1982 Rosenbaum's remaining sentence was suspended and he was released from prison. He died in 1984.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ 213-12_0027 Rosenbaum, Wilhelm Karl Johannes, and Kück, Alfred Hinrich // Hamburg Public Prosecutor 147 Js 21/74
  2. ^ Database Justice and Nazi Crimes Procedure 689
  3. ↑ "One cannot hide injustice" . In: Der Spiegel . No. 36 , 1968 ( online - 2 September 1968 ).
  4. ↑ Jochen Kuhlmann: Maywald, Arajs and others ... 60 years of NSG justice in Hamburg. In: Yearbook Democratic History. Volume 17, 2006, p. 160
personal data
SURNAME Rosenbaum, Wilhelm
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Rosenbaum, Wilhelm Karl Johannes (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German SS leader
DATE OF BIRTH April 27, 1915
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg
DATE OF DEATH April 4th 1984
Place of death Hamburg