Wolf-Heinrich Graf von Helldorff

Wolf-Heinrich von Helldorf
Wolf-Heinrich von Helldorf
Member of the Prussian Landtag
In office 1924–1928
Member of the Reichstag
In office 1933–1944
Chief of the Berlin Police
In office 1935–1944
Personal details
Born	(1896-10-14)October 14, 1896 Merseburg, German Empire
Died	August 15, 1944(1944-08-15) (aged 47) Berlin, Germany
Political party	National Socialist Freedom Party (NSFP) NSDAP

Wolf-Heinrich Graf von Helldorf (14 October 1896 – 15 August 1944) was a leading figure in the Nazi regime.

Early life

Helldorf was born in Merseburg, a landowner's son, Helldorf served as a lieutenant from 1915 in the First World War, and from 1918 was a member of the Prussian state assembly.

Berlin chief of police

Already by 1931, he had joined the SA, and functioned as an SA leader in Berlin. The scope of his work got bigger in 1933 when he was also given responsibility for the SS's Berlin-Brandenburg leadership. At the same time, he was also elected to the Reichstag.

In March of the same year, he was named Police President of Potsdam, and from July 1935, he took on the same function in Berlin, a post in which he remained for the last decade of his life. Helldorf, an inveterate gambler, was notorious for arresting wealthy Jews, seizing their passports and then extorting huge bribes from them to secure their release and exit from Germany.

He was closely allied with Dr Joseph Goebbels, Gauleiter of Berlin and Minister for Propaganda and Public Enlightenment. As chief of the Berlin Police, Helldorf played an instrumental role in the harassment and plundering of Berlin's Jewish population in the early and mid 1930s. Joseph Goebbels mentioned in his diary on July 2, 1938, that "...Helldorf wants to construct a Jewish ghetto in Berlin. The rich Jews will be required to fund its construction." Helldorf was the organisational brains behind the arson and looting of Berlin's synagogues and Jewish businesses in the Kristallnacht pogroms of November 1938.

Helldorf used his office for personal enrichment. In the Blomberg-Fritsch Affair, he first withheld from the top Nazi leadership evidence which contradicted the Gestapo's assertion that Blomberg's new wife had a criminal record for prostitution, then later leaked to the Wehrmacht leadership the same exculpatory evidence to create the implication that it had been in the possession of but withheld by the Gestapo. Similarly in the Fritsch affair, Helldorf possessed documentary information that would have exonerated Fritsch from the allegations that Fritsch paid for the services of homosexual prostitutes, it was a cavalry captain with a similar surname. After Fritsch's consequent dismissal as Commander in Chief of the Army, Helldorf then leaked to the army leadership the misidentification upon which Fritsch had been framed and disgraced.

July 20 Plot

From 1938, it is asserted that Helldorf was in some form of communication with the military opposition to Hitler. This is especially the case in Hans Gisevius' book "To the Bitter End", in which Helldorf plays an important role in Gisevius' circle of conspirators and anti-Nazis.

On 20 July 1944, he was in communication with the coup d'état plotters. His place was to command his Berlin police during the coup, first to not interfere with the military takeover, then to aid the new government.

His motivations are the subject of controversy, and may likely be traced more to opportunism than to any inner conviction on Helldorf's part.

The fact that Helldorf sided with the anti-Hitler movement in their attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler paradoxically earned him a place in history as a German resistance fighter against the Nazi régime.

Trial and execution

For his participation in the July 20 Plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler at the Wolf's Lair in East Prussia, he was condemned by Roland Freisler at the Volksgerichtshof and later put to death at Plötzensee Prison. On Hitler's personal order Helldorf was made to watch the hanging of each of those sentenced to death, Witzleben et al., before being the last to be hanged. Like the others, he was hanged with piano wire from a meat hook, strangling to death in a most agonizing manner. These hangings were filmed for Hitler's later viewing. His body was then burned in a furnace by the SS.

Further reading

• Gisevius, Hans Bernd, To the Bitter End, Translated from German by Richard and Clara Winston, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1947 Reprinted 2009.