Willy Gay

Willy Max Gay (born February 22, 1890 in Burg in the Jerichow district , † February 28, 1975 in Cologne ) was the first chief of the criminal police in Cologne after the Second World War .

Training, World War I, studies and joining the police

The son of the major of the protective police Albert Gay attended the secondary school in Erfurt . Following the example of his father, he too wanted to pursue the career of an officer in the police. In the autumn of 1912 he passed an exam that was supposed to prepare him for administrative service. He also attended lectures in political science and law at the University of Jena .

He took part in the First World War as a reserve officer in the field artillery. In 1919 he continued his path to become a police officer. An attitude to review took place in March 1919, whereupon he was hired as a commissioner at the police in Erfurt the following August . After the practical introduction to the police station, his position as detective inspector was confirmed.

Police award and appointment to the Berlin State Police

In 1923 he was known for the first time in police circles across the Reich. In a competition on the topic of How can the preventive activities of the police in the fight against crime be expanded and made successful? , which was advertised by the Ministry of the Interior, he received the first prize. This secured his further career.

In August 1925 he was transferred to the State Criminal Police Office (LKPA) in the Berlin Police Headquarters . This was retrospectively linked to a promotion to Chief Inspector of the Police. Two years later he was appointed to the position of a police officer in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior for criminal police matters. In this position he created numerous decrees within the framework of the Prussian State Criminal Police.

Concepts for police tactics and crime prevention

The regulations of criminal police radio communications , fingerprint procedures , criminal investigations , criminal intelligence and other publications shaped his reputation as one of the leading criminal investigators in Germany from now on. Furthermore, from 1928 he was entrusted with the editing of the magazine Kriminalistische Monatshefte . He also published the German Criminal Police Gazette and the German Fahndungsbuch along with police regulations.

In 1928 he took over the management of the Berlin headquarters of the criminal police, which comprised the areas of the identification service center, the search center and the intelligence center. In this office he was honored twice by the Minister of the Interior for special services. He was appointed forensic technician in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior in January 1930, whereupon he was promoted to government councilor in 1932 .

Transfer after Nazi takeover

After the " seizure of power " by the National Socialists in the beginning of 1933, he and Oberregierungsrat Meydam had to vacate his post, which was taken by Detective Inspector Arthur Nebe and Erich Liebermann von Sonnenberg . In the same year he became a member of the NSDAP on May 1 , which, however, did not have a beneficial effect on him. Gay was transferred to Magdeburg in June 1933 , where he took over the management of the criminal police. The later detective inspector Kurt Zillmann had fond memories of Gay:

“ After Holters was transferred to Stettin, my second 'master' teacher in Magdeburg was Willi Gay, a government detective who had to leave a top position in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior in 1933 because of the political reorganization. Gay was the father of the organizational and reporting regulations for the Prussian police from 1925–1927, of particular importance for the criminal police. "

Position at the Cologne Criminal Police

From 1934 he took over the position of deputy head of the criminal police in Cologne. Here he worked among other things in the preventive crime inspection . In 1935, the district president of Cologne called for more police activities because crime in the city of Cologne was still too high. Thereupon Gay called for some measures to intensify the fight against the criminals in the sense of a preventive fight against crime . Grabitz stated that Gay relied on having expressed the position of the current state in a letter as early as 1921 .

When the Second World War broke out, he served in the Air Force for seven months . In 1941 he resumed his service in Cologne. Noethen states that several files show how Gay was noted with the RU file number in people who were sent to concentration camps . For the SS personnel in the concentration camp, this comment meant the reference to return undesirable , which practically resulted in the death of the deportee .

1945: Head of the Cologne police force and appointment to the state ministry

On October 1, 1945, Gay took over the position of the previous detective commissioner Wilhelm Heller as head of the criminal police in Cologne, which involved rebuilding the police's activities. Apparently his efforts were successful, because in January 1952 he was appointed to the criminal investigation department in the Ministry of the Interior of North Rhine-Westphalia . Associated with this was the promotion to government and criminal director.

On October 1, 1952, he took over the post of editor of the specialist journal Kriminalistik . In 1958 the detective Herbert Kosyra published the book Murderers, Robbers and Bandits - The Polish-Upper Silesian Gang System during the Second World War 1939–1945 . Gay wrote a foreword to this book. In it he was obviously referring to his earlier experiences, because he wrote of the struggle of the elements of order , which must be directed against an unleashed subhumanity .

Gay had married Ida Elise Charlotte Sauerland in Berlin in 1928. He died in 1975 a few days after his 85th birthday.

Fonts

• An uphill battle requires sharp weapons. We fight it, that's why it is important to create it , in: Willy Gay, Max Julier, How can the preventive activity of the police in the fight against crime be expanded and made more successful? Two award-winning works from the competition of the Free Association for Police and Criminal Science, Berlin 1925
• The Prussian State Criminal Police. Its establishment, its previous and intended development, its tasks , (= Landeskriminalpolizei, Erl. = Regulations for the State Police Prussia, No. 32), Berlin 1928
• Die Prussische Landeskriminalpolizei in: Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology, Vol. 20, No. 1 (May, 1929), pp. 158-159
• Criminal Police , 1937
• The position of the criminal police in criminal proceedings , in Kriminalistik, No. 5, 1957
• The Kürten case. Description of the facts and observations with Otto Steiner, Hamburg 1957

literature

• Markus Grabitz: The Cologne Police 1941–1953. Master's thesis at the University of Cologne, 1998.
• Stefan Noethen: Old comrades and new colleagues - police in North Rhine-Westphalia 1945–1953. Klartext, Essen 2003, ISBN 3-89861-110-8 .
• Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Frankfurt am Main 2003
• Kriminalistik magazine , 6th year, issue 17/18, 1952.
• Dieter Schenk: Blind in the right eye - the brown roots of the BKA. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 2001, ISBN 3-462-03034-5 .
• Thomas Roth: Cologne Criminal Police in the Third Reich, primarily from the point of view of the preventive fight against crime. Master's thesis, Bonn 1998.
• Thomas Roth: The Cologne criminal police: organization, staff and "fight against crime" of a local criminal investigation apparatus 1933-1945. In: Harald Buhlan, Werner Jung (Ed.): Whose friend and whose helper? - The Cologne police under National Socialism. Cologne 2000.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Death certificate No. 733 from March 3, 1975, registry office Cologne West. LAV NRW R civil status register, accessed on June 27, 2018 . 
2. ^ Foreword by Zillmann to an unpublished book manuscript, quoted from Schenk, Auge , p. 29.