From the DW:
“The mass murder of Polish
intellectuals — and the German Nazis who got away with it”
( Wladyslaw Bielinski shortly before
he was executed by the Germans.)
Maria chose the warmest sweater,
the one with a zipper and collar. She was afraid that Wladyslaw would get cold,
as the autumn temperatures in Poland were dropping. She approached the
Bydgoszcz barrack fence on Danziger Street, which the Germans had renamed Adolf
Hitler Street. She gave her husband the clothes, they exchanged a few words.
There was no time for more. The guards of the internment camp, that had been
set up by the Germans, quickly chased away the imprisoned grade school
teacher's family. It was October 31, 1939. Eight years later Maria looked at
the sweater covered with clay. She recognized the jacket. She knew it was
Wladyslaw's. His body was recovered from a grave together with those of other
victims. Only 40 of the 350 murdered could be identified.
A black and white photo
Wladyslaw Bielinski's relatives
were not made aware of his fate when the war ended. That was until they came
across a photo showing the moments before his death. In the black and white
photo, Bielinski is standing with his hands crossed behind his head. He is
wearing the sweater Maria brought him and a jacket. Two more men can be seen
behind him. They were all killed by shots to the head. The Germans buried them
in trenches in the Bydgoszcz district of Fordon, later called the Valley of
Death. It happened on November 1, 1939. "My grandmother knew my
grandfather was dead only when she saw him in the picture. The Germans wouldn't
tell her where he was buried. They lied that he had been taken back to Germany
to work. I have known this last photo of my grandfather since I was a child. It
is tragic, shocking. Even now, it still makes me feel very emotional because it
shows the face of a man who knows what is about to happen to him," says
Wladyslaw's granddaughter, Marek Bielinski, a professor at Bydgoszcz's University
of Technology and Biosciences. While Wladyslaw's family was mourning him, the
internment camp tribunal in Recklinghausen, West Germany, was dealing with
Jakob Lölgen, a 50-year-old officer with the German secret police, or Gestapo,
and was fined 2000 Marks for his membership. But he did not have to pay anything because
his one-year internment was considered sufficient punishment. The provisional
tribunal, supervised by the Allied occupying powers, did not know that it was
Lölgen who had sent Wladyslaw and more than 300 other innocent inhabitants of
Bydgoszcz to their deaths.
'Intelligentsia action'
In 1938 Lölgen was sent to Gdansk
as a Gestapo criminal councilor. In September the following year, he was sent
to Bydgoszcz. He became commander of the local task force, unit 16, whose role
was to persecute and kill the local ruling classes. The leaders of the Third
Reich wanted to wipe out Poland's intellectual class. They knew the elite would
stop the regime from seizing complete control of the country and prevent them from turning
Poles into slaves in service of the German "master race." This meant
that from the first days of the war, scientists, teachers, lawyers, doctors and
civil servants were killed in occupied Poland as part of the so-called
intelligentsia action. It is estimated that around 60,000 people were murdered
in the first months of the war. Unit 16, led by Lölgen in Bydgoszcz, is
responsible for the deaths of 349 people. Lölgen stated this number in his
reports. In one, he wrote about the period from 22 to 29 October: "The
action initiated against the Polish intelligentsia is as good as completed.
Over the last week, 250 people from the Polish intelligentsia, and those who
stood out as German haters and agitators against the Germans, have been
liquidated." After the war, Lölgen returned to Germany and was de-Nazified
in December 1949. He resumed work with the police. He became head of the
criminal investigation department in Trier, Rhineland-Palatinate, and remained
in office until March 1957. He retired at the age of 60. Lölgen spent the last
years of his life in a retirement home in Brühl near Bonn, where he died on
August 5, 1980.
Line of defense
In the mid-1960s, the judiciary
of the Federal Republic of Germany initiated legal proceedings in Munich
against Lölgen and an associate from the Bydgoszcz period, Horst Eichler. They
were accused of aiding and abetting the murder of 349 Poles. Lölgen claimed
that he had not wanted to take part in the operation in Bydgoszcz and that he
had repeatedly asked his superior, Rudolf Tröger, to send him to Danzig or to
the front. Tröger had refused. In one of these conversations, Tröger had
allegedly said that Lölgen would be sent to a concentration camp if he did not
follow instructions.
A 'disgraceful' verdict
Lölgen admitted that he knew that
the victims were shot without trial or conviction. He claimed, however, that he
never once participated in the executions and that the decision as to who
should be killed was made by Tröger; Lölgen said he was only passing along
orders. The court in Munich found there was not sufficient evidence presented
to refute the version. On April 1, 1966, Lölgen was acquitted. Dieter Schenk,
author of important publications on German crimes against Poland, calls this a
disgrace to the judiciary. Referring to the findings by the State Justice
Administration for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes in
Ludwigsburg, Schenk said he doubts Lölgen would have been in danger if he had
refused to follow the orders.
Grandpa Jakob
"I found him to be very
warm-hearted, he always made jokes, I always felt comfortable when I was with
him," says Lölgen's grandson. "When
I was little, we played a game with our hands where one of us would lay one
hand on top of the other person's hand, then the other one would put his other
hand top and so on until, with a lot of shouting and laughter, the tower would
get dissolved." He asks that we not include his real name in our story,
which is why he is referred to as Andreas. "You don't want to be
associated with it, not in Germany and not anywhere else either," he
explains. Andreas recently started to focus on his grandfather's biography, a
person who, in his eyes, was always just his dear grandfather. "In the
beginning, I was shocked. I tried to understand what was meant by
"superior orders." That was the legal structure that a lot of people
in court referred to. I tried to understand whether refusing an order actually
posed a danger to life and limb. What was the situation back then? What
influence did it have on a person? I think I tried to find excuses for him. But
the facts were clear." Andreas knows the verdict for his grandfather could
end differently if he was on trial today. "I am fully aware of the fact
that the judges of that time were themselves people with a Nazi past." This
report is part of the series "Guilt Without Atonement" — a project by
DW-Polish with Interia and Wirtualna Polska.
^ Sadly this is not surprising.
Thousands upon thousands of Germans that were guilty of murdering innocent men,
women and children (Jewish and non-Jewish from all of German-occupied Europe) returned
to West Germany or East Germany after the war and had little to nothing done to
punish them for their crimes. Most lived openly under their own names and could
be found in every level of society (from the Federal German Government on down)
and in every kind of job. They not only committed war crimes and were murderers,
but received praise, recognition and government pensions for their “service to
the Fatherland.” A country (like: West Germany, East Germany, reunited Germany,
etc.) that claims to be sorry for the crimes committed in their name by their
own citizens and then allows those same criminals to live openly without
punishment for decades is not really sorry at all. All the token sentences and
fines were just that: token justice to save face in the International
Community. It is only since around the 2000s that the Germans have actively
started bringing the Nazi murderers to justice (when most are either dead or in
their 80s, 90s and 100s.) At the same time the German Government continues to
give pensions to the Nazis and their spouses for their “service.” ^
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