Zimmerman, Herbert

Herbert Zimmerman was born on August 22, 1907 in the family of an official and raised in Merseburg . Since 1927 he studied theology, but after one semester of study he transferred to a law course. In 1932 he passed the first state exam, and on May 31, 1933 he became a doctor of law. In 1933 he joined the NSDAP and the SS . After completing his legal internship, he became a judge on the prosecutor's office in Magdeburg , and also worked in the provincial administration of Merseburg. At the end of 1937 he entered the service of the Ministry of the Interior, where he was engaged in the expatriation of Jewish emigrants.

World War II

Since 1939 he served in the Gestapo in Munster . In 1940 he became head of the Gestapo in Bremen ^[1] . In May 1943, he was promoted to commander of the Security Police and SD in Bialystok. In addition, he was deputy commander of Einsatzgruppe B and one of the leading figures in the extermination of Jews. In July 1944, he had to flee the advancing Red Army in Königsberg . Zimmerman was sent west and was appointed commander of the security police and SD in Westmark .

After the war

After the war, he hid under the name Tsolner and worked as a farm laborer. In the fall of 1945, he was arrested by the French, but escaped from captivity in early 1946. He retrained in Thuringia as a carpenter, and also studied at a construction school in Hagen , where he received the specialty of civil engineer. Zimmerman’s false documents protected him from being extradited by the Polish authorities, who were looking for him for the murders of 1,125 Poles and residents of two villages. In 1949, his family moved from the east of Germany to the west. In 1952, Zimmermann divorced his wife, but later married with the daughter of a Westphalian landowner. After the first amnesty laws, in July 1953 he became an assistant lawyer, and in December 1954 Zimmerman worked as a lawyer in the Kiel District and Land Court. Since February 1957 he was engaged in advocacy in Bielefeld .

In 1959, he was charged with war crimes because he was responsible for the shooting of 1,125 Poles and the burning of three villages. As the commander of the security police and SD, he was responsible for the destruction of the ghetto in Bialystok ^[2] . Sick people were killed on the spot, and the rest Zimmermann sent to death camps, of which at least 15,000 were killed in Treblinka . He was accused of deporting several hundred Bialystok children to Theresienstadt , and from there to the Auschwitz concentration camp ^[3] . At the beginning of 1944, he ordered 40,000 bodies to be burnt and dug from mass graves; 30 Jews were involved in these works, who were later shot ^[4] . In 1954, he was charged with the shooting of the security police commander in Freiburg , who was executed in 1945 for refusing to participate in the creation of the local Werewolf organization. On July 7, 1954, the Munich Land Court acquitted him. In 1959, Zimmerman was accused of destroying 100 prisoners in Bialystok Prison in July 1944, but was again acquitted by the Bielefeld Regional Court ^[5] . During the investigation, Zimmerman refused to give any evidence without commenting on the charges against him ^[6] . But as a result of further investigations, the Bielefeld Regional Court in 1964 brought him the third charge in the murder and aiding in the killing of 16,000 people ^[2] . On December 29, 1965, an arrest warrant was issued. December 31, 1965 Zimmerman committed suicide ^[7] .

• Katrin Stoll. Die Herstellung der Wahrheit: Strafverfahren gegen ehemalige Angehörige der Sicherheitspolizei für den Bezirk Białystok. - Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2012 .-- ISBN 978-3110280098 .
• Katrin Stoll. "... aus Mangel an Beweisen." Das Verfahren gegen Dr. Herbert Zimmermann vor dem Bielefelder Landgericht 1958/1959 // Białystok in Bielefeld: nationalsozialistische Verbrechen vor dem Landgericht Bielefeld 1958 bis 1967 / Freia Anders. - Bielefeld: Verlag für Regionalgeschichte, 2003 .-- ISBN 978-3895344589 .
• Bert Hoppe. Die Verfolgung und Ermordung der europäischen Juden durch das nationalsozialistische Deutschland 1933–1945 / Susanne Heim. - München: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 2009 .-- Bd. 6: Deutsches Reich und Protektorat Böhmen und Mähren Oktober 1941 - März 1943. - ISBN 978-3-486-70872-1 .