Yagush, Walter

The son of the hotel owner. In 1932 he joined the Hitler Youth from the ranks of the scout movement. Since the beginning of 1933 - a member of the Nazi Party . In Berlin, studied law. Successfully passed the exams in 1935 for the position of trainee, and in 1936 he received the rank of legal assessor (assessor iuris), as a result of which his professional duties included participation in the process of real estate appraisal and solving issues related to its quality and value. Until 1939, Yagush served in the prosecutor's office of a district court in Moabit , a neighborhood in the center of Berlin, famous for its prison. Since February 1939, Yagush entered the service of the Gestapo office. There he was assigned to Division II B3, "Emigrants," whose duties included the exercise of control over people who emigrated from Nazi Germany.

After the founding of the RSHA, Yagushu was transferred to the management of Division IV A5, which also dealt with issues related to immigrants. Since 1940, the so-called "Jewish affairs" were additionally transferred to the jurisdiction of Yagush and his institutions, so he became chairman of the Association of Jews in the Third Reich (also called the " Association of German Jews "). At the end of 1940, Walter Yagush assumed the post of Gestapo chief in occupied Strasbourg ; He was appointed to this position by the Commander of the SD and the Security Police in this area.

In August 1942, Yagush became the Gestapo chief in Riga; in this position, he was subordinate to the new commander of the security police and SD in Riga, Humbert Akhameru-Pyfrader . In the archives for the first time the name Yagusha appears in connection with a dispute over the redistribution of the stolen property of the Riga Jewish population, which were led by the head of the Ministry for Eastern Territories Alfred Rosenberg and Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler . Reichskommissar Heinrich Lohse , who was directly subordinate to Rosenberg, intended to legally prevent the confiscation of Jewish property to the detriment of the Rosenberg Ministry, which the security police in Ostland (in particular in Riga) were trying to implement in their favor. According to his intention, the security police and other new security forces of the occupied Baltic should have fought for the personal belongings of the Jews who did not wear special material value.

On September 8, 1941, a meeting between him and Yagush was held in the office of Gebitskommissar Šiauliai in Lithuania, Hans Heveke, in which the latter, on behalf of the head of Ainsatz-team-3 Standartenführer SS Karl Eger, demanded that all Burgomasters in the local Nazi administration be handed over to them in order for them to deliver all the gold , silver and jewelry (jewelry), which were seized from the Jewish population in the course of numerous punitive actions. In turn, Loze had a conversation with the head of the police and the SS (the highest policing officer) of Latvia, Hans Adolf Pryuttsman , in which he explained that Rosenberg and Rosenberg personally would be responsible for all the confiscation and seizure of property of the Jewish population. In the four-hour conversation that took place between Himmler and Rosenberg, which took place around this period, this topic was also touched upon; The statement about the “pettiness of the Reichsführer Lohse” was documented, and the requirements of the Commissioner-General of Belarus, Wilhelm Kuba, about “maintaining the same conditions for the SS and the police” during the process of confiscating Jewish property were described as “ridiculous”. Yagush, positioning himself as the legal representative of Himmler on October 13, 1941 at a meeting with the civil authorities of Ostland, insisted on the legality and the need to establish control over Jewish property by the leadership of the SS and the police departments of the colony, which legitimizes such a provision (however, Cuba was not acquainted with it). Thus, Yagush defended the priority of the SS and the security authorities in relation to the possession of seized Jewish property.

Walter Yagush headed the Gestapo office in Riga on October 28, 1942, when an attempt was made to escape the Jewish underground activists from the Riga ghetto (the organizers of the breakthrough included Martus Herbert , Ovsey Okun and others), which ended in failure due to an anonymous denouncement, as a result of which was found a warehouse with weapons. With the direct participation of the Riga Gestapo men, most of the members of the Resistance group were shot. At the same time, the security police conducted a series of punitive measures against the ghetto prisoners. On the same day, October 28, many people were taken hostage from the ghetto, 108 of them were killed with the participation of police officers from the department of Walter Yagush.

In the first half of 1943, the Yagush department began an active struggle against the partisan formations in Latvia , and as part of this struggle, the Gestapo men effectively used people from the so-called auxiliary police battalions and Einsatzgroups. In May 1943, Yagush was recalled to Lorraine , where he was in charge of the investigative department; in this status he remained until May 8, 1945.

It is known that in the post-war period he was engaged in legal expertise in Thuringia , working as an assessor in Detmold (there is evidence that he started this activity since 1946). In 1952, he received a license to practice law and settled in Bielefeld , where he actively worked as a lawyer. Several attempts to investigate his criminal activities as head of the local departments of the Gestapo during the Nazi occupation, in particular in Latvia, have not been crowned with success.

• Ernst Klee: Das Personenlexikon zum Dritten Reich. Wer war was vor und nach 1945. 2. Auflage. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-596-16048-8 .
• Michael Wildt: Generation des Unbedingten. Das Führungskorps des Reichssicherheitshauptamtes. Hamburger Edition, Hamburg 2003, ISBN 3-930908-87-5 .