26 Facts About Helmut Bischoff

Helmut Hermann Wilhelm Bischoff was a German SS-Obersturmbannfuhrer, Gestapo officer and Nazi government official.

From 1943 to 1945 Bischoff served as a senior deputy to SS-Obergruppenfuhrer Hans Kammler and was the chief of security for Germany's V-weapons program.

Helmut Bischoff later commanded the Sicherheitsdienst at the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp.

Between 1967 and 1970 Helmut Bischoff was a defendant in the Essen-Dora war crimes trial.

Helmut Bischoff was born on 1 March 1908 in the town of Glogau in the Province of Silesia, then a part of the German Empire.

Helmut Bischoff was the son of a prosperous metzgermeister and attended the Glogau Gymnasium.

Helmut Bischoff joined the Nazi Party in March 1930 and the Sturmabteilung in 1933.

Helmut Bischoff entered the Gestapo shortly afterward and served as chief of the organization's district bureau in Liegnitz until October 1936.

Helmut Bischoff went on to lead the Gestapo departments in Harburg-Wilhelmsburg and Koslin.

Helmut Bischoff's unit was involved in the bloody pacification of Bydgoszcz 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.

Helmut Bischoff was promoted to the rank of SS-Obersturmbannfuhrer in September 1941 and returned to Germany, where he had been appointed chief of the State Police Headquarters in Magdeburg.

Helmut Bischoff played a central role in orchestrating the deportation of the Jews from Magdeburg and the nearby towns of Stendal, Dessau, Bernburg and Aschersleben.

In December 1943 Helmut Bischoff was reassigned to the SS-Main Economic and Administrative Office and attached to the general staff of SS-Obergruppenfuhrer Hans Kammler, ostensibly as a representative of the Organisation Todt.

Helmut Bischoff was appointed by Kammler to serve as "Defense Officer" for Germany's V-weapons program.

Helmut Bischoff was responsible for preventing organized attempts by Mittelwerk's prisoner-laborers to sabotage the V-weapons during the assembly process.

Under this new arrangement, Helmut Bischoff took over as chief of the camp's Sicherheitsdienst bureau.

Helmut Bischoff ordered the surviving leadership of the camp's resistance organizations to be shot by firing squad prior to the liberation of Mittelbau-Dora by the US Army in April 1945.

Helmut Bischoff was interned at NKVD Special Camp No 1 near Muhlberg until September 1948 when he was transferred to NKVD Special Camp No 2 outside of Weimar.

In January 1950 Helmut Bischoff was deported to the Soviet Union.

Helmut Bischoff was sentenced to twenty five years hard labor by a military tribunal in Moscow and sent to a German POW camp located in Siberia.

Helmut Bischoff would remain imprisoned in the USSR for the next five years.

In October 1955 Helmut Bischoff would be among the last German prisoners of war and war criminals to be released from captivity by the Soviet Union.

Helmut Bischoff was charged with the use of torture on prisoners under interrogation.

On 5 May 1970 the case against Helmut Bischoff was postponed by the court due to reasons of his poor health.

Helmut Bischoff was thus able to avoid being formally convicted of war crimes.

Helmut Bischoff continued to reside in West Germany for the remainder of his life.