Hans Krüger

Hans Krüger was one of those lower-ranking functionaries without whom the Holocaust would not have been possible. As head of a small German Security Police outpost in Stanisławów (Ivano-Frankivsk), usually staffed by about 25 Germans, he organised within sixteen months – according to the findings of the historian Dieter Pohl – the shooting of some 70,000 Jews and the deportation of a further 12,000 to extermination camps. On 12 October 1941 he directed “Bloody Sunday”, the murder of 10,000 to 12,000 Jews in the Stanisławów cemetery, which is regarded as the beginning of the “Final Solution” in the General Government. He was also responsible for the massacre of the Polish intelligentsia of Stanisławów in the Black Forest and took part in preparing the murder of the Lwów professors. After the war he lived for well over a decade in the Federal Republic of Germany as a respected businessman and an activist of the expellees’ associations. In 1968 he was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Poznań and Luckenwalde

Hans Erich Kurt Krüger was born on 1 July 1909 in Poznań, then a Prussian city, the son of a teacher at a private commercial school. He attended the German grammar school there. After the First World War his father was active in the German People’s Council of the Province of Posen, a movement of German nationalists. During the Greater Poland Uprising he was interned, and the whole family then had to leave the city, which had passed to Poland. Pohl points out that Krüger witnessed the German–Polish “national struggle” at close quarters from childhood, and that his family became impoverished after leaving Poznań. They settled in Luckenwalde, where in 1923 Krüger abandoned his grammar-school education. He trained as an agricultural inspector, worked on landed estates and in his parents’ shop, and around the turn of the 1920s and 1930s was unemployed for a long period.

The SA and Oranienburg

At sixteen he joined the youth organisation of the Stahlhelm, an association of former front-line soldiers with a far-right character. On 1 April 1929 he joined the SA, in which he rose quickly, and on 1 September 1930 the NSDAP. He thus belonged to the movement’s “old fighters”. After Adolf Hitler took power in 1933, from May to November of that year he headed the political (police) department of the early concentration camp at Oranienburg, to which the SA brought communists and social democrats. After the Night of the Long Knives and the weakening of the SA, his career in the movement stalled. In 1934, as a deserving party veteran, he was given a post at the labour office in Luckenwalde.

He returned to the apparatus of repression in the late 1930s. On 1 May 1938 he was admitted to the SS with the rank of Hauptsturmführer, and in March 1939 he became a candidate for the post of criminal commissioner in the Security Police in Berlin.

The Gestapo in occupied Poland

In September 1939 he entered Poland with a Security Police task force, and then served with the Gestapo in Poznań and Kraków. From November 1939 he ran the Security Police school in Zakopane, where he trained Ukrainians and ethnic Germans as future policemen; some of them later served under his command. Some accounts link him with the school in Rabka, but Pohl and German studies speak of Zakopane. After a course for senior staff in Berlin, he returned to Kraków in June 1941.

After the German attack on the USSR he became one of the highest-ranking officers of the special detachment (Einsatzkommando zur besonderen Verwendung) of the commander of the Security Police in the General Government, Eberhard Schöngarth. On 2 July 1941 the detachment entered Lwów (Lviv) and began arresting members of the Polish intelligentsia from lists it had brought with it. Krüger took part in preparing the murder of the Lwów professors on the night of 3–4 July; his direct participation in the executions has not been proven.

“The King of Stanisławów”

At the end of July 1941 Schöngarth sent Krüger to Stanisławów, which was just then passing from Hungarian administration to German rule. There Krüger set up an outpost of the Lwów headquarters of the Security Police and SD, later renamed a border police commissariat, and led it until August 1942. It was responsible for the Stanisławów and Kałusz districts and the area around Rohatyn – a territory inhabited by more than 700,000 people. Its headquarters were in the former court building, with a prison that only a few weeks earlier had been used by the NKVD.

After Eastern Galicia was incorporated into the General Government as the District of Galicia, Krüger began by murdering the local elites. On 2 August he ordered doctors, lawyers, teachers and engineers to register; about 600 of them, most of them Jews, were shot in the forest near Pawełcze. On the night of 14–15 August, in the same Black Forest, some 250 Poles, mainly teachers, were killed after being arrested from lists by the Ukrainian militia.

In September 1941, at conferences in Lwów, the decision was taken to begin murdering the entire Jewish population in the southern part of the district. On 6 October Krüger’s men and policemen of Reserve Police Battalion 133 shot between 1,200 and 2,000 Jews in Nadwórna. According to the court’s findings, Krüger told his subordinates on that occasion that “the Führer has ordered the extermination of the Jews”. Six days later, on 12 October, he organised Bloody Sunday in Stanisławów. He shot victims himself and finished off the wounded. In the following weeks his outpost murdered Jews in one small town of the region after another, including Bolechów. In the spring of 1942 he had some 2,300 Jews shot in Rohatyn, and on 31 March he organised the first deportation of thousands of Jews from the Stanisławów ghetto to the Bełżec extermination camp. He also had Poles and Ukrainians suspected of communism or underground activity killed.

Pohl stresses that Krüger, unlike the senior SS commanders who issued orders from behind their desks, organised the killings himself and did the shooting himself. In the town he was known as “the King of Stanisławów”.

Downfall

Krüger lost his “kingdom” through his own boastfulness. In the spring of 1942 Karolina Lanckorońska, an art historian and delegate of the Central Welfare Council, was arrested in Stanisławów. Convinced that the prisoner would not leave alive, Krüger bragged to her that he had liquidated the Lwów professors. Lanckorońska survived – she was moved to Lwów and then to the Ravensbrück camp – and the matter came to light. The Gestapo chief in Drohobycz, Walter Kutschmann, denounced his rival for betraying official secrets. At the same time an audit by the German Court of Audit uncovered at the Stanisławów outpost huge, unrecorded quantities of money, gold and valuables plundered from the victims.

In August 1942 Krüger was recalled to Berlin. He spent almost a year in SS custody, but the proceedings were dropped after Schöngarth interceded with Heinrich Himmler. He was demoted to Untersturmführer. No one charged him with the murders – he was punished for his loose tongue and for the muddle in accounting for the loot.

France and the end of the war

In 1943 Krüger was posted to occupied France as head of the SD outpost in Chalon-sur-Saône. In fighting the Resistance he had hostages shot and houses burned. In September 1944, before the Allies arrived, he fled his post. On 3 February 1947 a French military tribunal in Dijon sentenced him to death in absentia.

The end of the war found Krüger in the Netherlands, where he was taken prisoner by the Canadians and then held by the Dutch. No one there knew of his crimes in Poland, and in the autumn of 1948 he was released.

In the Federal Republic

Krüger settled in Lüdinghausen in Westphalia. He worked as a sales representative, founded his own construction firm and later worked for a mail-order company. He tried to return to the civil service and even to obtain a post in the Office for the Protection of the Constitution of North Rhine-Westphalia, but was turned down. So he went into politics. From 1949 to 1956 he chaired the regional association of Germans from Berlin and Brandenburg, was active in small right-wing parties and in 1954 stood unsuccessfully for the state parliament (Landtag) on the list of the expellees’ party, the BHE.

His past came to light at the end of the 1950s, when publications about the crimes in Stanisławów appeared in Israel. From 1959 the public prosecutor’s office in Dortmund investigated him, and on 9 January 1962 Krüger was taken into custody. The indictment was filed in October 1965. He was charged with complicity in the killing of nearly 25,000 people in eight operations between 2 August 1941 and the summer of 1942. During the trial before the jury court in Münster, which lasted more than two years, he behaved arrogantly and made antisemitic remarks. Among those who testified against him was Lanckorońska. On 6 May 1968 the court sentenced him to life imprisonment for the murders of Jews. The crimes against Poles – neither his part in the murder of the Lwów professors nor the executions in the Black Forest – were not included in the indictment, and the Polish side demanded in vain either a separate trial or Krüger’s extradition.

Krüger was released from prison in 1986. He died on 8 February 1988 in Bavaria; some sources give the place of death as Wartenberg, while Pohl gives Wasserburg am Inn.

Significance

Krüger’s story shows what the Holocaust looked like from a local perspective. He was neither an ideologue nor a senior commander, but the head of a small post in a provincial town who, on his own initiative and with great zeal, put into practice decisions taken in Lwów, Kraków and Berlin. It was he who, several months before the extermination camps began operating, started the murder of entire Jewish communities in the General Government. Of the roughly 50,000 Jews of Stanisławów and its surroundings, no more than one and a half thousand survived the war.

His post-war career, in turn, shows how easily perpetrators returned to normal life in West Germany. For well over a decade Krüger was publicly active under his own name, and when he finally stood trial he answered for only part of his crimes and spent less than a quarter of a century in prison from the time of his arrest.