Herbert Mehlhorn

Georg Herbert Mehlhorn (24 March 1903 – 30 October 1968)[1][2] was an SS Oberführer,[3] Nazi legal expert, and Gestapo official. Mehlhorn was involved in the camouflage of the mass graves of the Jewish victims in the forest of the Chełmno extermination camp.[4][5] He operated gas wagons at the Chełmno camp to murder the sick Jewish prisoners who were sent from the Wartheland ghettoes.[6] He was also a director of Stiftung Nordhav, a front organization of the Sicherheitsdienst founded in 1939 by Reinhard Heydrich, one of the main architects of the Holocaust.[7] He was the mentor of SS-Brigadeführer Walter Schellenberg while at the SS-Hauptamt.[8]

Early life

Mehlhorn was the son of a wealthy industrialist.[9] He was born in 1903.[2][10] As a schoolboy, he became a member of nationalist paramilitary organisations. At 16 years of age, he resisted the rules set forward by the Allied Disarmament Commission for Germany, by taking part in exercises involving the camouflage of weapons.[11]

Although too young at the time to participate in armed fights between German paramilitaries and Polish fighters over the threatened annexation of Silesia, he still resisted by participating in the underground resistance.[11] Later on, Mehlhorn became an expert on armaments and military policy and used to give lectures in meetings organised by youth sports societies such as Turnerschaft Mundenia.[11] Melhorn has been described as a "strange character".[9]

Education

Mehlhorn attended university from January 1923 to December 1926 for a total of 8 trimesters, studying in Göttingen, Munich and Leipzig, eventually obtaining his Ph.D. in 1928. His thesis was on "law history and penal practices related to poaching" (Die Bestimmung der Strafe für die Wilderei). His grade was very high and upon graduation he was the only one from his class not to become a civil servant, opting instead to join the ranks of a famous law office at Chemnitz.[11]

Career

Mehlhorn became a member of NSDAP in 1931 and a member of the SS in 1933.[10] His career in the SD started when the organisation was a small nucleus of officers at its formative stage. He was deemed important enough to be hired along with Lothar Beutel, Hermann Behrends, and Wilhelm Albert in order to help with the formation of SD as an organisation.[11][12]

Mehlhorn was given the task of organising the administrative apparatus of the new service and became head of its administration between 1932–1937.[11][12] On 1 September 1933 he became deputy leader of the Gestapo branch in Saxony.[13][14] In 1935, Mehlhorn was sent to the Berlin headquarters of the SD to assume a high-echelon position, probably due to legal advice he provided concerning the financial affairs of Heydrich's mother.[14] Post-1945, Mehlhorn worked as legal officer in the town of Oberndorf am Neckar.[2]

Gleiwitz incident

According to Schellenberg, Mehlhorn was "in a state of shock" when ordered by Heydrich, whom he considered his enemy, to lead the Gleiwitz operation. Schellenberg advised Mehlhorn to ask Heydrich to excuse him from taking part in the planned attack due to physical inability; Mehlhorn followed Schellenberg's advice and was surprised when Heydrich dismissed him from the ranks of the SD without raising any issues.[8] In 1939, he was sent to Posen where he joined the CdZ after his relation with Heydrich deteriorated.[10]

Mass-murder coordinator

Mehlhorn was the head of Department I in the Warthegau which was responsible for the General, Domestic, and Financial affairs of the Reichsstatthalter and also assisted in drafting many of the orders issued by Greiser.[10] Mehlhorn coordinated Gauleiter Arthur Greiser's mass murder operations,[6] having been appointed in 1941 as the man "responsible for all Jewish questions".[10]

While at the Gau, he coordinated his activities closely with Greiser's deputy August Jäger and maintained excellent rapport with both Heinrich Himmler and Greiser.[10] His tasks included disguising the mass graves of the Jewish victims in the forest of the Chełmno extermination camp.[4][5] To that effect, in the spring of 1942 he asked Heinrich May, a Nazi forester, to plant birch and pine trees and other shrubs and plants over the mass graves in the forest in an attempt to hide them from view.[5]

The plan did not work however because the stench was overpowering. This forced the reopening of the graves in June 1942 and the burning of the decaying bodies.[4] May, during a conversation with Mehlhorn, had remarked that they could always claim the bodies were those of murdered Germans in the event that the mass graves were ever discovered.[5] Mehlhorn also operated gas wagons at the Chełmno camp to murder the sick Jewish prisoners who were sent from the Wartheland ghettoes.[6]

References
  1. Standesamt Nr. 1135/1968.
  2. Polen September 1939 – Juli 1941. De Gruyter. 15 December 2011. p. 149. ISBN 978-3-486-70535-5. 4 Dr. Herbert Mehlhorn (1903–1968), Jurist; 1931 NSDAP- und SA-, 1933 SS-Eintritt; ...
  3. Victoria Khiterer; Ryan Barrick; David Misal (11 April 2014). The Holocaust: Memories and History. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. p. 40. ISBN 978-1-4438-5935-6.
  4. Claus-Christian W. Szejnmann (18 January 2016). Heimat, Region, and Empire: Spatial Identities Under National Socialism. Springer. p. 154. ISBN 978-0-230-39111-6. In spring 1942, an official in Greiser's agency, Herbert Mehlhorn, summoned a forestry official, Heinrich May, and told him to plant over the mass graves of Jews murdered at Chełmno. May soon planted gorse shrubbery and pine and birch trees ...
  5. Patrick Montague (2012). Chełmno and the Holocaust: The History of Hitler's First Death Camp. Univ of North Carolina Press. pp. 35–36. ISBN 978-0-8078-3527-2. The duties entrusted to Dr. Mehlhorn included such details as covering up the mass graves of the victims in the forest ... May was told to provide the SSSonderkommando with the materials necessary to meticulously camouflage the graves and ...
  6. Wolf Gruner; Jorg Osterloh (15 January 2015). The Greater German Reich and the Jews: Nazi Persecution Policies in the Annexed Territories 1935–1945. Berghahn Books. p. 205. ISBN 978-1-78238-444-1. Wartheland's Security Police and SS-Oberführer Herbert Mehlhorn, who was ordered by Greiser to coordinate the mass murder operations, resorted to gas wagons, which had already ...
  7. Philip Kerr (7 April 2015). The Lady from Zagreb. Penguin Publishing Group. p. 37. ISBN 978-0-698-14289-3.
  8. Reinhard R. Doerries; Gerhard L. Weinberg (18 October 2013). Hitler's Intelligence Chief: Walter Schellenberg: Walter Schellenberg. Enigma Books. pp. 19–20. ISBN 978-1-936274-13-0.
  9. André Brissaud (1 January 1974). The Nazi Secret Service. Norton. p. 77. ISBN 978-0-393-05523-8. Herbert Mehlhorn was a strange character whom Schellenberg quickly learned to know well and to esteem.8 Born into a rich industrial family, he had studied law and practised as a lawyer in a large industrial city in Saxony. Schellenberg thus
  10. Catherine Epstein (27 May 2010). Model Nazi: Arthur Greiser and the Occupation of Western Poland. OUP Oxford. p. 141. ISBN 978-0-19-161384-5.
  11. Christian Ingrao (11 July 2013). Believe and Destroy: Intellectuals in the SS War Machine. John Wiley & Sons. pp. 92–. ISBN 978-0-7456-7004-1.
  12. Jay Robert Nash (28 October 1997). Spies: A Narrative Encyclopedia of Dirty Tricks and Double Dealing from Biblical Times to Today. M. Evans. p. 440. ISBN 978-1-4617-4770-3.
  13. Peter Longerich (2012). Heinrich Himmler: A Life. OUP Oxford. p. 786. ISBN 978-0-19-959232-6.
  14. Robert Gerwarth (2011). Hitler's Hangman: The Life of Heydrich. Yale University Press. p. 81. ISBN 978-0-300-17746-6.
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