Wilhelm Zoepf

Wilhelm Zoepf

Wilhelm Zoepf , also written in Zöpf , (born March 11, 1908 in Munich ; † July 7, 1980 in Straubing ) was a German lawyer and during the Second World War he was a Jewish officer in the Jewish Department IV B 4 at the Commander of the Security Police and the SD (BdS) in The hague .

Life

Zoepf attended the Maximiliansgymnasium in Munich and passed the Abitur there in 1927. This was followed by a degree in law. The son of the Justice Secretary Michael Zoepf and his wife passed the first state examination in 1931 and the second in 1935. He married in 1938 and divorced in 1957.

time of the nationalsocialism

On May 1, 1933, Zoepf joined the NSDAP . From 1933 to 1936 he was a member of the Hitler Youth . During this period he had close contacts with convinced Nazis , like the after the war in the prison Landsberg executed as a criminal doctor Dr. Gebhardt , on whose mediation he came to the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) at the end of 1940 . In 1937 Zoepf joined the SS . From 1935 to 1940 he worked with Gebhardt in the Hohenlychen sanatorium . There he had patient sport for the high-ranking guests, including many Nazi greats.

After Zoepf broke off an Africa education in Rome due to the war, he was transferred to The Hague in 1941 . In June, his childhood friend Wilhelm Harster brought him into his office of the Commander of the Security Police and the SD (BdS) in the occupied Netherlands. Before entering service, the versatile Zoepf went to the Eastern Front at the beginning of the war against the Soviet Union, where he worked as a photo reporter in Smolensk and Riga . From October he worked in Division IV (Gestapo) of his friend Harster.

After Harster had founded a Jewish department (abbreviation IV B) following the Wannsee Conference in February 1942 , he entrusted the police newcomer Zoepf with the management . That was Zoepf's first official position. In this function, as Eichmann's representative in the Netherlands, he was responsible for the deportation of around 107,000 Dutch Jews and Jews who had fled to the Netherlands from other countries, all of whom were murdered with the exception of a few thousand survivors.

The Judenreferat had 36 employees. Among Zoepf's leading employees, who also represented him externally, were SS-Obersturmführer Konrad Grossberger, who, like Obersturmführer Erich Rajakowitsch, came from the ZJA Vienna, and SS-Untersturmführer Karl Schmidt and Alfons Werner. The middle level of the clerks were six Gestapo employees , SS-Untersturmführer or criminal secretaries who had only joined the NSDAP in 1937. An exception was Franz Fischer , called "Judenfischer". He had been a National Socialist since 1933 and was particularly concerned with the persecution of the Jews in The Hague. A dozen seriously wounded NCOs and assault men of the Waffen SS or SS who were no longer fit for war were employed on the lower level. The unit also included seven Dutch employees.

In the spring of 1943 Zoepf submitted a report in which he presented his plan for the deportation of the Dutch Jews. Zoepf was also responsible for the last transport of Dutch Jews to Auschwitz on September 3, 1944 . Anne Frank and Edith Stein were among the 1,019 deportees . There was a direct line of command between Eichmann and himself, and he took part in several meetings with Eichmann and other Jewish advisors in Berlin , including on March 4, 1942 and June 11, 1942, both of which were mandatory for Jews in the occupied western territories and The planning for the deportation of the Western European Jews was also established. On November 9, 1942, Zoepf was appointed SS-Sturmbannführer . Zoepf was also involved in the evacuation of the Jewish psychiatric clinic Het Apeldoornsche Bosch in January 1943, from where over 1200 people were deported to Auschwitz.

Life after the war and trial for an accessory to a thousandfold murder

At the end of the war, Zoepf was on the way to Bad Reichenhall . It was considered lost in the Netherlands for a long time. He managed to keep his SS membership a secret and got by with agricultural work. In 1953 Zoepf got a job at the Murnau Accident Hospital . Most recently Zoepf worked in the registry of an engineering office in Munich. It was not until 1959 that his whereabouts became known, and the Netherlands submitted a request to the Federal Republic to initiate criminal proceedings. The trial itself took place in Munich between January 23 and February 24, 1967 . In addition to Zoepf, Wilhelm Harster and Gertrud Slottke were also indicted. Zoepf partially admitted his complicity in the deportation and murder of the Dutch Jews and was sentenced to nine years in prison for aiding and abetting community murder in 55,382 cases . It was the first major case against so-called desk criminals and was followed intensively in particular by the Dutch press.

literature

• Edith Stein and Anne Frank. Two in a hundred thousand. The revelations about the Nazi crimes in Holland before the jury in Munich . Published by Robert MW Kempner , Freiburg i.Br. 1968.
• Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich . Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-596-16048-8 .
• Harald Fühner: Follow-up. Dutch politics and the persecution of collaborators and Nazi criminals, 1945–1989 . Waxmann, Münster 2005, ISBN 3-8309-1464-4 . GoogleBooks
• Kerstin Freudiger: The legal processing of Nazi crimes . Mohr Siebeck, GoogleBooks
• Israel Gutman (ed.): Encyclopedia of the Holocaust - The persecution and murder of European Jews . Piper, Munich / Zurich 1998, 3 volumes, ISBN 3-492-22700-7 . First published in English in 1990 by Macmillan New York.
• Christian Ritz, desk offender in court. The proceedings before the Munich Regional Court for the deportation of Dutch Jews (1959–1967) . Paderborn: Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh , 2012; 257 pp.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Robert Kempner: Edith Stein and Anne Frank - two of one hundred thousand Freiburg 1968, p. 40
2. ^ Robert Kempner: Edith Stein and Anne Frank - two out of one hundred thousand Freiburg 1968, p. 39
3. ^ Johannes Houwink Ten Cate: The commander of the Sipo and the SD in the occupied Dutch territories and the deportation of the Jews 1942-1943. In Wolfgang Benz ; Joannes Houwink Ten Cate; Gerhard Otto: The bureaucracy of the occupation. Structures of rule and administration in occupied Europe. Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-932482-04-2 . Pp. 202-205.
4. ^ Israel Gutman: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust . Tel Aviv 1993, p. 1638.
5. ^ Johannes Houwink Ten Cate: The commander of the Sipo and the SD in the occupied Dutch territories and the deportation of the Jews 1942-1943. In Wolfgang Benz ; Joannes Houwink Ten Cate; Gerhard Otto: The bureaucracy of the occupation. Structures of rule and administration in occupied Europe. Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-932482-04-2 . P. 204f.
6. ↑ Gerald Reitlinger : The Final Solution - Hitler's attempt to exterminate the Jews of Europe 1939-1945 . 1992, pp. 381f.
7. ↑ Harald Fühner: Follow-up . Münster 2005, p. 220ff.
8. ↑ Ahlrich Meyer : perpetrators in interrogation . Darmstadt 2005, p. 44ff.
9. ↑ Saul Friedländer: The Third Reich and the Jews. CH Beck, 2007, ISBN 978-3-406-56681-3 , p. 559 ( limited preview in Google book search).
10. ↑ ^{a b} Dietrich Strothmann : The Harster case and others… In: Die Zeit , No. 4/1967
11. ↑ Fühner, Harald: Nachspiel, p. 220ff. Munster 2005.
12. ↑ Abendblatt ( Memento of the original from January 10, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 1.6 MB) February 24, 1967