Nazi mass murderer Oswald Schäfer. Part One. Einsatzkommando 9 commander. скачать в хорошем качестве

Nazi mass murderer Oswald Schäfer. Part One. Einsatzkommando 9 commander.

Oswald Theodor August Wilhelm Schäfer was born on 14 June 1908 in Braunschweig. The family must have been well off as Schäfer was able to go to university to study law in Berlin. On 1 April 1933, he joined the NSDAP (membership number 1,772,081) and SA . He remained a member of the SA until he joined the SS on 1 January 1936 (SS number 272,488). After completing his studies, he worked for the Gestapo in Berlin from 1935 to August 1937 as Werner Best 's advisor in the SS Security Police Main Office which was to become the RSHA – the Reich Security Main Office – thus kickstarting his career in Nazi crime. Werner Best had played an important role in the establishment of the Gestapo and the founding of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA). He was the deputy to Reinhard Heydrich in the SD from 1934 – 1940. It was probably Best who came up with the idea of the Einsatzgruppen, long before Hitler decided to invade Poland. Best must have been quite happy with Oswald Schäfer as on 1 September 1937, aged only 29, he was appointed head of the Wesermünde - Bremerhaven Gestapo. In Nazi Germany there were many competing agencies and no-one really knew where the competence of one started and another ended. This was no more so than with the police. As far as the Gestapo was concerned all offenses and crimes within the meaning of Nazi criminal law were part of its remit. However that could also be the remit of the police as well. Of particular interest to the Gestapo was political crime. This would include all persons who were accused of making statements of high treason, incitement or defeatism once the war started against the Nazi regime. It also included violations of Nazi work regulations such as unauthorized changes of job, work stoppages or so-called unwillingness to work. As there was not enough of them to go around, Gestapo officers primarily relied on denunciations. To put this into context, East Germany had a fraction of the population but its Stasi was many times larger than the Gestapo which had preceded it. I have a theory that a crime, or alleged crime, was the responsibility of the department the denunciation was made to. Therefore if the police got a tip off, they dealt with it, if the tip off went to the Gestapo, they did it. As tip offs of a political nature were more likely to be made to the Gestapo, then this became their concern. After the start of the Second World War, violations of the regulations of the war economy, such as illegal trade in food outside of the rationing system or illegal slaughter , were its concern. It also wanted to know who was new in the area and what they were up to, this was especially important given the huge numbers of foreign workers . As the Gestapo gained more and more rights to decide on police tasks alone and independently, there was increasing friction in the previous administrative practice. The heads of the Wesermünde Stapo complained to the department heads that the authorities continued to decide certain cases on their own and did not inform the Gestapo. The Gestapo was therefore not only dependent on informers in its activities, but also on the help of the administrative authorities. Schäfer was there until the spring of 1938. One of his successors heading this Gestapo office was Werner Braune who later headed Sonderkommando 11b, part of Einsatzgruppe D. He was executed in 1951. In May 1940, Schäfer he took over the Gestapo office in Reichenberg in the Sudetenland, today Liberec in Czechia . According to the Munich Agreement, this part of Czechoslovakia had been annexed to Germany in October 1938. In June 1941, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, and thus began a particularly new and violent stage of the war. Mobile killing groups called Einsatzkommandos which were grouped into four Einsatzgruppe had been training on the Dueben Heath near Leipzig since the late Spring of 1941. They were released onto the population of the Soviet Union, which in most cases had only just been occupied by that country following the Molotov – Rippentrop pact. The heads of the Einsatzkommandos were, to a large extent, young, highly educated men like Oskar Schaefer. These men were chosen by Reinhard Heydrich. I am unable to say how Schäfer ended up in the Einsatzgruppe, heading an Einsatzkommando. Presumably he must have impressed Heydrich so much with his time at the Gestapo in occupied Czechoslovakia. I am also unable to say if Schäfer went to train with the other future mass killers at Pretzsch in the spring of 1941. In October 1941, the 31 year old Schäfer, now with the rank of SS-Sturmbannführer , replaced SS-Obersturmbannführer Albert Filbert as the leader of Einsatzkommando 9 (EK 9) of Einsatzgruppe B. Einsatzgruppe B was headed by Arthur Nebe, a former police criminal inspector and Gestapo official. Filbert may have been recalled due to accusations of embezzlement which led to a two year suspension from the RSHA.