Erwin Schulz

Erwin Schulz
Erwin Wilhelm Schulz (27 November 1900 – 11 November 1981) was a German member of the Gestapo and the SS in Nazi Germany. He was the leader of Einsatzkommando 5, part of Einsatzgruppe C, which was attached to the Army Group South during the planned invasion of Soviet Union in 1941, and operated in the occupied territories of south-eastern Poland and Ukrainian SSR committing mass killings of civilian population, mostly men of Jewish ethnicity, under the command of SS-Brigadeführer Otto Rasch.
Schulz's case was notable for demonstrating how service in the Einsatzgruppen was voluntary. After being ordered to kill all Jewish women and children, he protested. However, he was unable to get the order retracted. Schulz asked if he could stop. The request was granted within days, with him being discharged on the orders of Reinhard Heydrich himself. Schulz not only faced no consequences for stopping, but was promoted shortly after. By the end of the war, he'd reached the rank of Brigadeführer, the SS equivalent of a brigadier general.
Career
In April 1918, Schulz, then 17, volunteered for service in the Imperial German Army. World War I ended before he saw combat. However, Schulz would participate in the suppression of the Spartacist uprising as a member of the 3rd Guards Regiment. He was discharged later that year.
Schulz never received a doctorate in law, albeit some called him Dr. Schulz. He studied law for two semesters in Berlin, but then left the university to join the Freikorps Oberland in the spring of 1921. During his time in the Freikorps, Schulz fought Polish insurgents during the Silesian Uprisings. Afterwards, he worked in a bank and relocated to Hamburg in 1923. He joined the uniformed police force (Schutzpolizei) in Bremen, and in 1926 was appointed a police lieutenant. In 1931 he was an informant for the SS. He officially joined the Nazi Party in May 1933 and in November was appointed head of the Gestapo of Bremen. In 1935 he joined the SS and SD. In March 1938 he was promoted to SS-Major (Sturmbannführer) and State Councillor for the state of Bremen. In April 1940 he was inspector-instructor of cadets of the SiPo and SD at Charlottenburg.
In May 1941 Schulz was appointed chief of Einsatzkommando (mission squad) 5. The unit departed Germany in June 1941, and arrived in Ukraine in early July 1941. Overall, Einsatzkommando C executed 2,500 to 3,000 people in Lviv in July 1941. Schulz himself was later proven to have presided over the executions of at least 90 to 100 men by his unit. When Schulz convened with Otto Rasch at Zhytomyr on 10 August 1941, Rasch informed him that on the orders of Adolf Hitler, more Jews needed to be shot. The Senior SS and police leader for occupied Eastern Russia Friedrich Jeckeln ordered that all Jews not engaged in forced labor, including women and children, were to be slaughtered. Schulz later summarized what happened at the meeting.
Shortly thereafter he questioned both Bruno Streckenbach and Reinhard Heydrich on this point; it was confirmed that this order had come from Hitler. Schulz asked to be relieved of his post, saying he could not handle this kind of job. On 24 August 1941, he left for Berlin, arriving there three days later. He was promoted to SS-Oberführer, and appointed deputy to Erwin Rösener, SS and Police Leader and commander of SS-Oberabschnitt Alpenland from 1 to 28 May 1944. While testifying at the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials in the 1960s, Schulz said he "tried to prevent the worst." However, he was then asked why he did not further object to the new orders. He admitted that at the time, he'd attempted to rationalize the orders to himself, despite his personal refusal to carry them out."Because the orders were given. And I have to say that here, since they were known to all authorities, I assumed at first that this was, in fact, a carefully considered order issued out of wartime necessity. I did not have the feeling that they were completely unjustified, as inhuman as the orders were."Arrested by the Allies, Schulz wrote a letter to Lucius D. Clay, deputy to General Dwight D. Eisenhower, requesting clemency.
At the Einsatzgruppen Trial, Schulz claimed that the Lviv executions carried out by his men were legal. He said he had been told that the Russians had massacred about 5000 Ukrainians and Poles before fleeing (in reality, it had been perpetrated by Ukrainian nationalists). Schulz also claimed that German soldiers had been murdered, but could not say how many. Lastly, Schulz said he'd freed 2000 detainees held in a stadium in Lviv after witnessing them being abused by Wehrmacht troops."I had subdivided my Kommando into three platoons; each platoon consisted of about 50 men. The persons to be executed were transported by trucks to the place of execution. At each time there was about 18 to 22 persons."
"The first platoon was placed face to face with the persons about to be executed, and about three men each aimed at each person to be shot. I myself was present at the first volley of the execution, with my face turned away. When the first volley had been fired, I turned around and saw that all persons were lying on the ground. I then left the place of execution and approached the place where the second and third platoons were gathered. The first platoon which had carried out the shootings was recalled, I inspected the men, and then returned to my quarters."
"I noticed there that the detainees who were in the stadium next to the quarters, some of whom were still to be executed, were driven across the stadium by members of the armed forces and tortured. I did not succeed in apprehending those responsible for the tortures. In order to terminate this spectacle, I had the rear door of the stadium opened and the detainees could march out through it."
"The members of the armed forces who had participated in this affair disappeared as well. As the remainder of the persons to be executed had also escaped, I informed my Kommando by means of a driver that the executions were terminated."
"About 6 and 7 days after the executions we started to march towards Dubno."According to the diary of Felix Landau, he'd witnessed the aftermath of the release of the Jews:"The Ukrainians had taken some Jews up to the former GPU citadel. These Jews had apparently helped the GPU persecute the Ukrainians and the Germans. They had rounded up 800 Jews there, who were supposed to be shot by us tomorrow. They had released them. We continued along the road. There were hundreds of Jews walking along the street with blood pouring from their faces, holes in their heads, their hands broken and their eyes hanging out of their sockets. They were covered in blood. Some of them were carrying others who had collapsed. We went to the citadel; there we saw things that few people had ever seen. […] The Jews were pouring out of the entrance. There were rows of Jews lying one on top of the other like pigs whimpering horribly. We stopped and tried to see who was in charge of the Kommando. 'Nobody.' Someone had let the Jews go. They were just being hit out of rage and hatred."While the court accepted Schulz's release of the detainees, it cast doubt on Schulz's defense for the executions which he carried out, saying the documents listed the shootings as reprisals. This meant that thorough investigations or trials had not been conducted prior to the executions, making them illegal. The court also pointed out that while Schulz was on duty in Russia on 9 August 1941, his men had shot 400 Jews, described as mostly "saboteurs and political functionaries". Schulz's men shot another 74 Jews up until this date. From 24 and 30 August, Schulz's men executed 157 people, the victims being "Jews, officials, and saboteurs." Schulz used his trip to Berlin as an alibi for these executions. However, the court said this did not necessarily exonerate him since they might've been planned in advance.
Another document stated that between 31 August and 6 September 1941, Schulz's men reported the "liquidation of 90 political officials, 72 saboteurs and looters, and 161 Jews." Schulz's lawyer claimed the Jews were not listed as criminals since high command had ordered that the Jews not to be listed as "saboteurs, plunderers, etc" in reports. The court rejected this, saying other evidence showed the Jews had been shot simply for being Jews. They acknowledged that Schulz had been in Berlin at the time of these shootings, but said he was still in command of the unit.
Schulz was found guilty on all counts. However, he was spared execution since he had made an effort to oppose the "intolerable situation", then resigned when he could not stop what was happening. Schulz was sentenced to 20 years in prison instead. This sentence was reviewed by the "Peck Panel" and commuted to 15 years in prison in January 1951. Schulz was paroled on 9 January 1954. He died in 1981.
In testimony at the trial of Bruno Streckenbach in the 1970s, Schulz said serving in the Einsatzgruppen was entirely voluntary:"I never knew of any cases where members or heads of the Einsatzkommandos acted in the same way as I did. I believe that things in Russia would never have turned out as they did had a few heads of the Einsatzkommandos and Einsatzgruppen declared that they could not carry out these liquidations. The way I see it, the same applies... to the Wehrmacht commanders in whose areas of command the liquidations were carried out of the avalanche could have still been checked if a field marshal or the commanding officer of any army group had intervened. I do not know of or recall any order that stated that SS chiefs or members of the SD or the police would be sent to concentration camps if they refused to carry out an order. I also never heard of such an order during the course of the conversations I had on the subject or indeed from rumors."
Lobbying on Schulz's behalf
While in prison, numerous German Social Democrats, including press spokesman for the Senate of Bremen Alfred Faust, lobbied on Schulz's behalf. Historian Hans Wrobel has compiled evidence that the Senate of Bremen campaigned on Schulz's behalf due to his knowledge of Gestapo informants in circles of leading Bremen Social Democrats during the Nazi era. In 1933, Faust had been arrested and sent to Mißler concentration camp. During his time in custody, he was badly beaten. However, in 1934, Schulz intervened to have Faust released. Faust was expelled to Berlin with his Jewish wife, and housed under "Gestapo supervision" with the coffee entrepreneur Ludwig Roselius. During his time, Faust repeatedly traveled across Germany in a company car to contact other well-known Social Democrats.
References
1900 births
1981 deaths
20th-century Freikorps personnel
Military personnel from Berlin
Holocaust perpetrators in Russia
Holocaust perpetrators in Ukraine
Einsatzgruppen personnel
German police chiefs
German police officers convicted of crimes against humanity
German Army personnel of World War I
Gestapo personnel
Nazis convicted of war crimes
People convicted by the United States Nuremberg Military Tribunals
Reich Security Main Office personnel
SS-Brigadeführer