Helmut Bischoff
Helmut Hermann Wilhelm Bischoff (1 March 1908 – 5 January 1993) was a German SS-Obersturmbannführer, Gestapo officer and Nazi official. During World War II he was the leader of Einsatzkommando 1/IV in Poland and later headed the Gestapo offices in Poznań (Posen) and Magdeburg. From 1943 to 1945 Bischoff served as a senior deputy to SS-Obergruppenführer Hans Kammler and was the chief of security for Germany's V-weapons program. He later commanded the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) at the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp. Between 1967 and 1970 Bischoff was a defendant in the Essen-Dora war crimes trial. Early life Bischoff was born on 1 March 1908 in the town of Glogau in the Province of Silesia, then a part of the German Empire (now: Głogów, Poland). He was the son of a prosperous metzgermeister (master butcher) and attended the Glogau Gymnasium as a youth. From 1923 to 1925 Bischoff was a member of Bund Wiking, a paramilitary group associated with the right-wing Organisation Consul movement. After graduating from gymnasium, Bischoff went on to study law at Leipzig University (where he was a member of the Leipziger Burschenschaft Dresdendia) and the University of Geneva. It was during his time as a law student that Bischoff first became active in the Nazi movement. He joined the Nazi Party in March 1930 (Member # 203 122) and the Sturmabteilung (SA) in 1933. After receiving his doctorate of jurisprudence (Dr. jur.), Bischoff returned to his native Lower Silesia and worked as an assessor at the district court offices in Schweidnitz and Strehlen. By 1934, Bischoff had also begun serving as a confidential informant (vertrauensmann) for the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the Nazi Party's internal intelligence service. Gestapo After completing his legal clerkship, Bischoff joined the Schutzstaffel (SS) in November 1935 (SS # 272 403). He entered the Gestapo shortly afterward and served as chief of the organization's district bureau in Liegnitz until October 1936. Bischoff went on to lead the Gestapo departments in Harburg-Wilhelmsburg (1936-1937) and Köslin (1937-1939). By the outbreak of World War II he had risen to the rank of Sturmbannführer (major) in the SS. Einsatzgruppen During the invasion of Poland in September 1939, Bischoff served as the commander of Einsatzkommando 1/IV (a sub-unit of Lothar Beutel's Einsatzgruppe IV) which was deployed in the northern Polish territories of Pomerania, Warsaw, Białystok and Polesie. Bischoff's unit was involved in the bloody pacification of Bydgoszcz (Bromberg) along with the mass-killing of ethnic Poles carried out as part of Operation Tannenberg, the Nazi ethnic cleansing campaign targeting Poland's intelligentsia and other members of the nation's elite. On 27 September 1939 Bischoff and his Einsatzkommando staged a raid on the town of Pułtusk. The action ended with the mass-expulsion of the town's large Jewish population from their homes, followed by their deportation across the Narew River into the Soviet-occupied east. In October 1939 Einsatzgruppe IV was placed under the command of SS-Standartenführer Josef Albert Meisinger and stationed in Warsaw, where it took part in the initial round-up of the city's Jewish residents,