Helmut Bischoff

Helmut Bischoff
Born	1 March 1908 Glogau, Lower Silesia German Empire
Died	Hamburg, Germany
Allegiance	Nazi Germany
Service/branch	Schutzstaffel
Rank	SS-Obersturmbannführer
Unit	SS-RHSA 1935-1943 SS-WVHA 1943-1945
Battles/wars	World War II

Dr. Helmut Bischoff (March 1, 1908 – January 5, 1993) was a German SS-Obersturmbannführer, Gestapo officer and Nazi official. During World War II Bischoff served as the leader of Einsatzkommando 1/IV in Poland. He was later chief of the Gestapo in Poznań (Posen) and Magdeburg. In December, 1943 Bischoff was appointed director of security for Germany's V-weapons program by SS-Brigadeführer Hans Kammler and later served as head of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) at the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp in 1945. Between 1967 and 1970 Bischoff was a central figure in the Essen-Dora war crimes trial.

Early life

Bischoff was born on March 1, 1908 in the town of Glogau in Prussian Silesia, then a part of the German Empire (now: Głogów, Poland). He was the son of a prosperous Metzgermeister (master butcher) and attended the local gymnasium in Glogau. While a student Bischoff was a member of the Wikingbund from 1923-1925, a paramilitary group formerly associated with the nationalist Organisation Consul movement. Following the completion of his abitur in 1926 Bischoff went on to study jurisprudence at the University of Leipzig and the University of Geneva.

It was during his time as a law student that Bischoff first became active in the Nazi movement, joining the Nazi Party in January, 1930 (Member # 203 122) and the Sturmabteilung (SA) in 1933. After receiving his doctorate of law (Dr. jur.) in 1934, Bischoff returned to his native Lower Silesia and worked as an assessor at the District Court offices in Schweidnitz and Strehlen. During this time Bischoff also functioned as an operative and informant (vertrauensmann) for the Nazi Party's domestic intelligence service, the Sicherheitsdienst (SD).

Gestapo

Bischoff joined the Schutzstaffel (SS) in November, 1935 (SS # 272 403). He was assigned to the SS-Reich Main Security Office Amt IV: the Gestapo. Bischoff initially worked as director of the Gestapo's district office in Liegnitz until 1936. He would later go on to serve as district commander of the Gestapo departments in Harburg-Wilhelmsburg (1936-1937) and Köslin (1937-1939). By the outbreak of World War II Bischoff had risen to the rank of Sturmbannführer (major) in the SS.

Einsatzgruppen

During the September, 1939 invasion of Poland Bischoff served as leader of Einsatzkommando 1/IV (a sub-unit of Lothar Beutel's Einsatzgruppe IV) and was active in Pomerania, Warsaw and Polesie. Bischoff's unit was involved in the bloody pacification of Bydgoszcz (Bromberg) along with the systematic killing of ethnic Poles carried out as part of Sonderaktion Tannenberg, the Nazi extermination campaign targeting Poland's intelligentsia and other members of the nation's political and cultural elite.

During September and October of 1939, Bischoff and Einsatzkommando 1/IV also took a leading role in the brutal raid on the town of Pułtusk, which ended with the mass-expulsion of the town's large Jewish population and their deportation across the Narew River into the now Soviet-occupied east.

Einsatzgruppe IV was formally disbanded in November, 1939. Its officers and men were transferred to the Polish General Government and incorporated into stationary units of the Sicherheitspolizei (security police) in Warsaw, under the command of SS-Standartenführer Josef Albert Meisinger.

Poznań and Magdeburg

In August, 1940 Bischoff was reassigned to the newly-annexed territory of Reichsgau Wartheland where he worked under SS and Police Leader Wilhelm Koppe as director of the Gestapo for the city of Poznań (Posen). In this capacity he was also commandant of Fort VII, which was initially called "KZ Posen" and in 1939 became Transit Camp-Fort VII.

While primarily a detention center, Fort VII also served as a regular execution site for many local Poles, Jews and the physically or mentally disabled. Over 400 patients from local sanitariums were gassed there by SS officer Herbert Lange in 1939.

Bischoff was promoted to the rank of SS-Obersturmbannführer (lieutenant colonel) in September, 1941 and later returned to Germany, where he had been appointed State Police Kommissar (commissioner) for the city of Magdeburg. Bischoff played a central role in orchestrating the deportation of Magdeburg’s remaining Jewish population; along with those from the nearby towns of Stendal, Dessau, Bernburg and Aschersleben.

Hundreds of German Jews were deported from Magdeburg by the SS between November, 1942 and March, 1943. The initial wave of deportations were routed mainly to Theresienstadt; while later rail transports carried deportees from Magdeburg directly to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

V-weapons security chief

In December, 1943 Bischoff was transferred to the SS-Main Economic and Administrative Office (SS-WVHA) in Berlin. He was assigned to the general staff of SS-Brigadeführer Hans Kammler; ostensibly as a representative of the Ministry of Armaments. Kammler was the director of Amtsgruppe C (Buildings and Works) of the SS-WVHA. This department was concerned primarily with the extensive engineering and construction projects of the SS.

This included the building of factories and other manufacturing facilities for Germany's various secret weapons programs. The sensitive nature of these projects made their security a major concern for Kammler's SS office. Bischoff was tasked by Kammler with creating a security organization within Amtsgruppe C responsible for overseeing counter-intelligence and counter-sabotage for Germany’s highly-secretive V-weapons program.

Much of Germany’s V-1 flying bombs and V-2 ballistic missiles were produced at Mittelwerk, a massive armaments factory housed in an elaborate subterranean tunnel system in the Harz Mountains that had been built, and was partially administered, by Kammler's SS department. The complex and dangerous work performed to assemble the V-weapons themselves was done under brutal conditions in the tunnels by thousands of slave-laborers (mainly Russians, Poles and French, among other nationalities) drawn from the inmate population of the adjunct Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp.

As the chief of security Bischoff managed counter-intelligence operations designed to conceal the missile production facility's existence from Allied intelligence. He was also responsible for preventing organized attempts by the prisoner-laborers to sabotage the V-weapons during the assembly process.

Mittelbau-Dora

In February, 1944 numerous police and security services operating in the Nordhausen district (which surrounded Mittelwerk and the subsidiary camp of Mittelbau-Dora) would be consolidated under the control of Bischoff's SS security organization, now headquartered inside a former seminary in Ilfeld. Counter-sabotage operations were swiftly begun, mainly targeting the numerous resistance organizations operating among the various prisoner groups working in the tunnels at Mittelwerk and in the camp.

Under Bischoff's direction Mittelbau-Dora's Politische Abteilung (political department) had much of the resistance leadership among the camp's Russian, French and Communist inmates rounded up in November, 1944 and interned in solitary confinement. Many of those taken into custody were interrogated under torture with some later being executed.

In February, 1945 the SS administration of Mittelbau-Dora was reorganized under former Auschwitz commandant Richard Baer. Under this new arrangement, Bischoff took over as director of the camp's internal Sicherheitsdienst (SD) office, which he employed to conduct surveillance on the camp's inmates (and the remaining resistance groups) during the closing months of the war.

In response to rumors of a planned escape attempt, Bischoff instigated a wave of mass-executions in March, 1945 which saw hundreds of the camp's prisoners, mostly Soviet POWs, killed in a series of mass-hangings. Bischoff also ordered much of the surviving leadership of the camp's resistance organizations to be shot by firing squad prior to the liberation of Mittelbau-Dora by the US Army in April, 1945. In all, roughly 20,000 people died at either Mittelwerk or Mittelbau-Dora between 1943 and 1945.

Post-war

Following the German defeat Bischoff returned to Magdeburg, now located inside the Soviet occupation zone of Germany. Bischoff went into hiding and was able to evade capture by Russian authorities for several months before he was eventually identified and arrested by the Soviet security services in January, 1946. He was interned at NKVD Special Camp No. 1 near Mühlberg until September, 1948 when he was transferred to NKVD Special Camp No. 2 (formerly the Buchenwald concentration camp) outside of Weimar.

In 1950 Bischoff was deported by the Soviets to a German POW camp located in Siberia. He would remain imprisoned in the USSR for the next five years. In 1955 Bischoff would be among the last German prisoners of war and war criminals to be released from captivity by the Soviet Union. After resettling in West Germany, Bischoff was employed by the German Red Cross-Tracing Service from 1957 to 1965.

Essen-Dora trial

On November 17, 1967 Bischoff and two other former SS officers who had served with him at Mittelbau-Dora, were indicted for war crimes by the State Court in Essen. The charges against Bischoff stemmed from his involvement in the series of mass executions that occurred at Mittelbau-Dora between February and April, 1945. He was also charged with the use of torture against prisoners under interrogation. Bischoff entered a plea of not guilty.

The trial (known as the Essen-Dora Process) began in November, 1967 and would continue for two and a half years. The proceedings included the testimony of over 300 witnesses, among them former Nazi Armaments Minister Albert Speer and the famed inventor of the V-2 rocket, Wernher von Braun, now a premier rocket scientist in the United States.

On May 5, 1970 the case against Bischoff was dismissed by the court due to reasons of his poor health. He was thus able to avoid being formally convicted of war crimes. On May 26 the charges against Bischoff were dismissed on the grounds that:

"The trial has now gone so far that can be expected with the announcement of the judgment. Should that judgment, which, at least not unlikely after the recent investigations of the trial, read as meaning that the defendant Bischoff is condemned as a murderer, then, according to the outcome of the verification by the expert de Boor to expect that the defendant Bischoff due to the announcement of the judgment comes to an excessive increase in blood pressure, the possibility his death still in the courtroom - a consequence."

Other efforts to prosecute Bischoff for his wartime activities also met with little success. An investigation by the State Court of West Berlin into his involvement with the Einsatzgruppen killings in Bydgoszcz was discontinued in 1971, citing a lack of evidence. A further effort to prosecute Bischoff, this time for atrocities committed during his tenure as Gestapo director in Poznań, was likewise abandoned in 1976, once again owing to Bischoff's precarious health. Bischoff continued to reside in West Germany for the remainder of his life. He died in Hamburg on January 5, 1993.