Kruger, Hans

Hans Kruger was born July 1, 1909 in Posen in the family of a teacher in a private trading school. Since 1914 he attended high school in a German gymnasium. After the end of World War I in 1918 he was forced to emigrate with his family to Germany. His father did not find work and the impoverished family moved to Luckenwald , where in 1923 Kruger graduated from the local gymnasium. In 1925 he passed the exam in agriculture in accounting, and then worked in two noble estates. Since 1928, he helped parents manage a grocery store and a chicken farm in Stageggagen . From 1930 to 1933 he was unemployed.

In 1925, he joined the steel extremist union Steel Helmet . Since April 1, 1929, he was in the Assault squads . September 1, 1930 joined the NSDAP . From May to November 1933 he was the head of the police station in the Oranienburg concentration camp. In 1934 he received the title of " Old Fighter " of the Nazi party and headed the labor exchange in Luckenwald. May 1, 1938 joined the SS and received the title of Hauptsturmfuhrer. In March 1939, he joined the Security Police in Berlin and became the Commissioner of the Criminal Police.

In 1939, Kruger became a member of the Gestapo and was appointed director of the SD school in Zakopane , where he trained Ukrainian nationalists from Galicia ^[1] . After the outbreak of war with the Soviet Union in June 1941, he was enlisted in the Einsatzkom special purpose team led by Karl Schöngart and, together with him, was involved in the murder of Lviv professors ^[2] . July 26, 1941 he arrived in Stansilav (now Ivano-Frankivsk ) and in the wing of the courthouse he created a branch of the security police (later the border police commissariat), which he led until August 1942. His area of ​​responsibility included Stanislau County and the city of Kalusch , as well as the area around the city of Rogatin with a population of 700,000 inhabitants. The department staff consisted of only 30 German employees, most of whom were security police in the Krakau district, but Kruger also had volunteers from the local Volksdeutsche and Ukrainian police subordinate.

On August 2, 1941, he ordered the registration of all teachers, lawyers, doctors, engineers, rabbis, and other people from among Polish intillegions. Of the 800 people, only 200 were released as irreplaceable specialists, while the rest were shot and buried in the forest ^{[3] [2]} .

October 6, 1941 led the action in the small town of Nadvirna . 2,000 Jews were driven into the marketplace and then taken to a nearby copulation, where, with the help of the security police, the 133rd reserve police battalion and the Ukrainian auxiliary police were shot. October 12, 1941 organized the so-called "Bloody Sunday of Stanislav", during which there were 20,000 Jews were gathered together and sent to the cemetery, where from 10,000 to 12,000 people were killed ^[4] . The executions continued until nightfall. Beginning December 1, 1941, many executions were carried out in the district of Galcia, including in Rogatin, Stanislau, as well as in Delyatin and Kalush, during which thousands of Jews were killed. On March 1, 1942, by order of Kruger, Jews from the Stanislavsky ghetto were arrested, and on April 1, 1942, they were deported to the Belzec death camp and were killed there in a gas chamber. The events of October 6 and 12 are considered the beginning of the " final solution of the Jewish question " in the Polish Governor-General , since women, children and men of all ages were first killed in this area ^{[2] [5]} . Kruger himself stated that the ghetto themselves had limited capacity. The German historian Dieter Paul points to the border situation with the Carpathian Ukraine , in which the Hungarians ousted thousands of Jews who lived there or fled there from the territories occupied by Germans ^[6] .

Kruger was then recalled to Berlin, where he was detained in connection with a charge of enrichment at the expense of the values ​​of those killed, until Himmler terminated the investigation after the intervention of Karl Schöngart ^[7] . In 1943 he was demoted to the Untersturmführer SS and transferred to France , where he became commander of the security police and SD in Chalon-sur-Saone . In this post was also involved in war crimes. Kruger shot six civilians and set fire to several houses in order to stop the resistance movement attacks. In early September 1944, he left his post due to the advancement of the allied forces .

After the war

At the end of the war he was captured in the Netherlands . During his imprisonment on February 3, 1947, a court in Dijon sentenced Kruger to death in absentia ^[8] . In November 1948 he was released from captivity. Then he lived in Ludinghausen ^[9] , where he worked as a sales representative for a wholesale hardware company. In the early 1950s, he tried in vain to enlist in the police service or the organs of the constitution. In 1954, he independently worked in the construction industry. Since March 1960, he was the district manager of the Otto GmbH network in Munster , engaged in the shipping business. From 1949 to 1956 he was chairman of the German Land Association from Brandenburg and Berlin. In 1954 he ran for the BHE party in the North Rhine-Westphalia Landtag, but to no avail.

After a book on Nazi crimes appeared in Israel , the Dortmund prosecutor conducted an investigation into Kruger and was arrested on January 9, 1962. ^[9] As the head of the security police in Stanislav, he was accused of killing 24,875 people. ^[10] On May 6, 1968, the Münster Land Court sentenced him to life imprisonment ^[11] . In 1986 he was prematurely released ^[12] . He died in 1988 in Wasserburg.

• Elisabeth Freundlich. Die Ermordung einer Stadt namens Stanislau. NS-Vernichtungspolitik in Polen, 1939-1945. - Wien: Österreichischer Bundesverlag, 1986. - ISBN 3-215-06077-9 .
• Dieter Pohl. Hans Krüger - der "König von Stanislau" // Karrieren der Gewalt. Nationalsozialistische Täterbiographien / Klaus-Michael Mallmann / Gerhard Paul. - Darmstadt: WBG, 2004 .-- ISBN 3-534-16654-X .
• Christiaan F. Rüter et al .: Krüger, Hans // Justiz und NS-Verbrechen. Sammlung deutscher Strafurteile wegen NS-Tötungsverbrechen 1945–1999. Band XXVIII. Die vom 04/29/1968 bis zum 05/11/1968 ergangenen Strafurteile Lfd. Nr. 672-677. Amsterdam 2003, ISBN 3-598-23819-3 - Fall 675, S. 220–682.
• Dieter Schenk. Der Lemberger Professorenmord und der Holocaust in Ostgalizien. - Bonn: Dietz Verlag, 2007 .-- ISBN 978-3-8012-5033-1 .
• Roland Tatreaux. Hans Krüger, chef de la SIPO-SD à Chalon-sur-Saône, 1943–1944: le roi de Stanislau, le Barbie chalonnais (German) . - 2012. - ISBN 978-2-7466-4074-0 .
• Thomas Sandkühler. Endlösung in Galizien. Der Judenmord in Ostpolen und die Rettungsinitiativen von Berthold Beitz 1941–1944. - Bonn: Dietz Nachfolger, 1996 .-- S. 440f. - ISBN 3-8012-5022-9 .
• Dieter Pohl. Nationalsozialistische Judenverfolgung in Ostgalizien, 1941–1944 . - München: Oldenbourg Verlag, 1997 .-- ISBN 3-486-56233-9 .

• Dieter Pohl. Hans Krueger and the Murder of the Jews in the Stanislawow Region (Galicia ) // Yad Vashem Studies. - Jerusalem. - ISSN 0084-3296 .