The Bloodhound Judge, Part I
SS Sturmbanfuhrer Konrad Morgen's relentless pursuit of justice evoked fear and hate from his fellow SS officers.
In 1943, as the Second World War was in its fourth year, an SS officer arrived at the Buchenwald concentration camp. His mission was to uncover any crimes that had been committed by the SS staff, including murder.
No, you did not read it wrong. No, it’s not a miss print.
The SS officer in question was SS Sturmbannfuhrer Georg Konrad Morgen, and he was sent there on the orders of the SS Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler. The mission he was assigned was the highlight of one of the most bizarre chapters in the history of the most bizarre and evil organizations ever formed.
The circumstances that led to this investigation are an example of the convoluted nature of Nazi morality, especially as seen through the eyes of Himmler. His hatred of the Jews was genuine and on the same homicidal level as Hitler’s. He saw the extermination, the “Final Solution” to the Jewish question as an almost holy calling. And yet, when he made it a point to visit one of his Einsatzgruppen death squads mow down a mass of naked, crying humanity with machine guns, the sight of it made him turn green and physically ill. This experience, coupled with the countless reports from SS units operating in the wake of the German armies advancing along the eastern front slaughtering Jews and gypsies city by city, town by town, convinced him that this work that he regarded as so necessary for the future of the Aryan race, was taking a toll on the emotional and mental well-being of his men. It was due to his warped sense of empathy that the idea of mass industrial level murder through a network of labor and death camps throughout eastern Europe and the occupied territories took shape. Such a network would not just accelerate the wholesale slaughter of entire communities throughout Europe as quickly as possible, but it would also require a limited number of SS officers to be directly involved with actual killing and disposal of the bodies.
For those who would be involved, the Reichsfuhrer stressed his desire that they remain “decent,” men who simply had to do something that the rest of the world did not have the strength and will to go through with it. To those he picked to run these camps, he explained it like this:
“The SS commander must be hard but he must not become hardened. If, during your work, you come across cases in which some commander exceeds his duty or show signs that his sense of restraint is becoming blurred, intervene at once.”
An SS man could never steal from a Jew, only confiscate his property to the Reich. He cannot abuse or mistreat a Jew; just lure him into a gas chamber and incinerate his remains.
Morgen became one of Himmler’s enforcers of this Kafkaesque policy. He was born on June 8, 1908 in Frankfurt am Main, the son of a railway man. When it came time to choose a profession, he opted for a legal career. He studied at the University of Frankfurt and later at the Hague Academy for International Law. His education background allowed him to be referred as “dr.”
It was at the suggestion of his parents that Morgen joined the Nazi Party in 1933 shortly after Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor. His background was good enough that he had no trouble applying for being admitted into the Allgemeine SS.
After the war, he tried to explain that his application to the NSDAP was because he believed that Hitler was genuinely committed to peace, and that it was necessary to join so as to complete his studies. He asserted to American authorities that he had no strong feelings towards National Socialism or any of its policies, especially when it came to the issue of the Jews.
However, subsequent investigation into his membership in the German Student Union and the Union of Nazi Lawyers seem to bely this claim. Perhaps more eyebrow raising was his book published in 1936 titled War Propaganda and Prevention of War, in which he denounced as the “antimilitarist propaganda” and expressed his support for Nazism, in writing.
At the beginning of 1941, Morgen was transferred to the SS und Polizeigericht as a deputy judge in Krakow, inside the Polish General Government. Morgen attained the special status of being able to confer the death penalty in certain cases, something that many judges did not have the authorization to do. Such SS officials were referred to as Blutrichter or blood judge. Later on, his tenacity in tracking down criminals inside the SS earned him the nickname Bluthundrichter, or “Bloodhound Judge.”
From the very beginning of his posting at Krakow, Morgen earned a reputation for tenacity, dedication, and scrupulous observance of the law that his superiors and colleagues quickly found irritating.
One of his first cases involved SS captain Dr. Georg von Sauberzweig, who was in charge of an SS depot in Poland where goods and property that was confiscated from Poles and Jews was stored. Morgen’s investigation revealed that von Sauberzweig, along with his staff, were selling some of this property and dividing the profits among themselves.
It was one thing for the SS to seize property and valuables from individuals and turn it over as property of the Reich, but to take this property for themselves was, in Himmler’s eyes, tantamount to stealing from the Reich, an inexcusable crime. Von Sauberzweig and his entire staff were arrested in August 1941. He was quickly convicted and sentenced to death by firing squad. But he believed, or hoped, that his early dedication to Nazism, long before Hitler became Chancellor, would be the saving of him. It wasn’t. Von Sauberzweig was executed on April 9, 1942.
Taking down von Sauberzweig was a huge victory for Morgen, but he was far from finished. As happens in many investigations, one case lead to another, to higher ranking people within the ranks of the SS. When Morgen found out that at one point von Sauberzweig had told his wife to contact a high ranking SS officer about his arrest, the judge was surprised to find that the person she was to contact was SS colonel Herman Fegelein, commander of a Waffen-SS cavalry regiment, a rising star in the Waffen-SS, and one of Himmler’s favorites. Fegelein’s ambition would ultimately lead to his marriage to Eva Braun’s sister in 1944. But Morgen believed that Fegelein was pilfering mink coats and fox furs from the SS depot and selling them, but before his investigation could really get off the ground it was quashed by the Reichsfuhrer himself.
(In the end, Fegelein’s ambition got him killed. He was Himmler’s liason in the Fuhrerbunker beneath the Reichs Chancellory in 1945. He had been expected to stay there right at Hitler’s side right to the end, but instead tried to escape Berlin before the Soviets arrived. He was found, arrested, and shot on April 29, 1945, while Russian shells were pounding the Chancellory grounds.)
During the course of his inquiries he came across evidence of further corruption as well as acts of cruelty by Dr. Oskar Dirlewanger, commander of an SS-Sondercommando that over saw Jewish slave labor in Poland.
Even by Nazi standards, Oskar Dirlewanger was an extraordinarily evil bastard.
A decorated veteran from World War I and member of an ultra-right freikorps who was sentenced to prison in 1934 for the rape of an underage girl. This fact for some reason did not dissuade Himmler from accepting him into the Waffen-SS and tasking him with the job of forming a unit comprised of ex-convicts, mostly poachers at first. Later on, his recruiting base expanded to include thieves, murderers and rapists. Quite predictably, the Dirlewanger Brigade would earn one of the most infamous reputations of any SS units in the Second World War.
Morgen’s investigation against Dirlewanger involved the actions of his unit during the time that he was assigned to the Jewish ghetto in Lublin. There had been reports to local authorities that Jews were routinely being arrested for participating in “ritual slaughter” and would demand a ransom for their return, with failure to pay resulting in their executions. Dirlewanger also ran a racket where his men would confiscate Jewish property and turn around and sell them back to the owners. Unsurprisingly, there were allegations that this convicted sex offender was raping young Jewish girls, a clear violation of the Nazi racial laws.
None of these crimes could compare to what Morgen uncovered. After the war, he would testify at the Nuremberg trials how Dirlewanger along with some of his friends in the SS, would get their kicks by having Jewish girls undress before them, would perform “experiments” on their bodies and finally inject strychnine into their veins while they would stand back and smoke while they slowly writhed in agony and died. Morgen even suspected that their bodies were chopped up and used to make soap.
Unfortunately for Morgen, even a psychotic deviant like Dirlewanger could count on very powerful friends in the SS, which he learned when the chief of the SS-Haumpt, SS general Gotlob Berger, intervened on behalf of his friend Dirlewanger, just as he had helped him get into the SS after being released from prison. He had his old comrade transferred to anti-partisan duties in Byelorussia, and had the investigation quelled.
( Unlike Fegelein, there is a great deal of uncertainty as to Dirlewanger’s ultimate fate. He was captured on June 1, 1945 by the Allies and kept at a prison camp in the French occupied zone of Germany. Beyond this point it becomes mirky. French authorities reported that he died of a heart attack on June 7. Other reports indicate that he had been killed by the other inmates, or possibly by a couple of Polish soldiers serving in the French Army at the time, payback for a long litany of atrocities he and his unit committed in Poland. Still others believe that he managed to escape Europe and spend his remaining days in Egypt working for President Gamal Abdul Nasser.)
After the Dirlewanger investigation was cancelled, Morgen requested a transfer. He wrote in his request,
“The corruption of the General Government is so great and property crimes and offenses of a revolting nature so numerous that I am deeply convinced that any judge, in time, must find himself somewhat dulled, and the danger therefore exists that his natural sense of justice will suffer damage.”
It was his hope that he would be transferred to a post in Norway or perhaps the Balkans. His superiors however had other plans. Morgen was stripped of his rank and reduced to SS-Sturmmann, an SS infantryman. He was put through basic training and in December 1942 was sent to the Germania regiment of the “Wiking" SS panzer division, which was in southern Russia at the time. After the war, Morgen claimed this was punishment for refusing to prosecute a police officer for having a consensual affair with a Polish woman, a crime that infuriated Himmler. But to this day, no record of this case has survived.