* " 3 January 1909" –
Warnau an der Havel (Sachsen-Anhalt)
† " 4 February 2006" –
Hamburg
Starting in 1944, Siegfried Engel played a leading role in the massacres committed by German forces in Upper Italy and in the deportation of Italian Jews. He was active in Genoa as head of the Außenkommando (‘external headquarters’) of the Security Police and Security Service (the SD).
In Germany, Engel would only be convicted of a crime in 2002: this was for his role in the massacre at the Turchino Pass. He was not brought to justice in either Italy or Germany for his other crimes. His ascent in the institutions of the Nazi state, as well as his sluggish prosecution after the war, are exemplary for the life-course of prominent Nazi perpetrators.
Engel had an academic background. He was already a member of the Nazi Party and SA in the early 1930s and joined the SD in 1934. From the following year onward, he was integrated into the RSHA (the Reich Security Main Office), responsible for training cadres of the Security Police and SD.
After the war Engel was arrested but escaped in 1946, then lived under a false name until 1954. Although he was interrogated in the 1980s and even accused of crimes, he was only convicted in the 1990s in Italy and in 2002 in Germany. He was never incarcerated. In the postwar years he preferred the first name Friedrich.
Lived in Hamburg and worked as an agent in an import firm.
1960s-1980s: interrogated as a witness in various investigations of Nazi crimes.
1969: Proceeding on account of war crimes in Italy; terminated.
1999: sentenced in absentia in Turin to life imprisonment.
2002: Trial in Hamburg. Sentenced to seven years in prison; overturned on appeal.
Training and war experience
Early years and academic background
Friedrich Wilhelm Konrad Siegfried Engel was born in 1909 in Warnau an der Havel, Sachsen-Anhalt, as the third son in a Prussian official’s family. His father was a teacher. Following his Abitur and commercial training, he studied sport, history, German literature, and philosophy at universities in Berlin, Innsbruck, and Kiel. In 1934 he received his doctorate for a dissertation on the theme of ‘Austro-Hungary and Russia 1870-1890’. Until 1945, Engel’s first name was Siegfried; after the war he preferred the name Friedrich.
Political socialization and entry into Nazi Party
In 1931, Engel joined the National Socialist German Students' Union; he joined the Nazi Party on 1 Oct. 1932. Until July 1934, he also was a member of the SA in Innsbruck. After the Nazi Party and all its organizations were banned in Austria on 19 June 1933, Engel followed his party into illegality. In 1934, he moved to Kiel. There he joined the Security Service and initially became the deputy leader of Kiel’s SD subsection. Starting in 1936, he served as the full-time cultural officer in the Hannover office of the SD’s Oberabschnitt Nord-West (greater northwest region). In this period he was also named acting Bereichsführer Nord (‘area-leader north’) for the Reich Students’ Leader. Parallel to this, he had an additional leading position in the Northern German SD and was training leader for the inspector of the Security Police in Hamburg. Although Engel had repeatedly interrupted his studies because of extensive political activities, in 1939 he passed his state qualifying exam to teach secondary school. At this time, he was a member of the Hamburg SD with SSObersturmführer rank.
As a National Socialist intellectual, Engel was responsible for indoctrination within the RSHA. He had great influence on the training of the Security Police and SD men who would constitute the Einsatz (mobile killing) squads in the East. His vision of Early Modern and modern German history was based on the idea of a long struggle of a threatened ‘northern race of rulers’ for liberation from Romanic rule and Catholic universalism.
A Wartime Political Instructor
In April 1940, Engel arrived in Norway with the Einsatzkommando of the Security Police and SD - the Einsatzkommandos were subunits of the Einsatz squads. Some months later he returned to Hamburg, where in March 1941 he passed a second, pedagogical exam for secondary school teaching.
In their assessment, his SD superiors described Engel as having an open character, assertiveness, and a strong will. He was a committed National Socialist, and his public appearance corresponded to his ideological standards. Also in 1941, he was transferred to Berlin to serve as leader of Section I B 1 in the RSHA, responsible for ideological education. He held this office until 1943, offering history instruction at the SD leadership school in Bernau and the leadership school of the Security Police in Berlin-Charlottenburg.
For the historian Christian Ingrao, as a Nazi intellectual Engel was responsible for indoctrination at the RSHA. He had a great influence on the training of the Security Police and SD men who would constitute the Einsatz squads in the East. He reinforced the ideological qualities they would subsequently display in their role as occupiers in the East.
Engel’s vision of Early Modern and modern German history was based on the idea of a long struggle of a threatened ‘northern race of rulers’ for liberation from Romanic rule and Catholic universalism. For him, the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648) was the first in a triad of wars. At stake in this vision was not only a political and confessional conflict, but, beyond that, one that was ‘racial’ in nature. Here ‘Germanness’, Germanentum, faced a Romanic universalism associated with Austria’s Habsburg Empire. But, Engel believed, the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia had, for the time, obstructed the desired unity, since it led to Germany’s ‘dismembering’ into numerous small states. The Napoleonic Wars (1789-1815), for Engel the second Thirty Years’ War, had in his view revived German national feelings. But the Congress of Vienna (1815) once again undermined unity and an overcoming of alien rule. Bismarck’s founding of what Engel termed a ‘smaller German empire” (kleindeutsches Reich) in 1870/71 was indeed a great step forward – but one without the incorporation of Austria needed for a ‘greater German empire’ (Großdeutsches Reich). In 1914, then, in Engel’s schema the third Thirty Years’ War began. After the First World War produced no result, the struggle continued from 1919 to 1939 on a political level and in regional conflicts.
‘Today, 1942, we have entered the last stage of this third Thirty Years’ War. The new peace that will victoriously end the third Thirty Years’ War and with it three centuries of struggle for German unity at the same time also brings with it the final overcoming of the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648. And this time – we all know this – there will be no half decisions.’
In Italy: At the head of the Security Police and SD in Genoa
In Jan. 1944 Engel took over leadership of the Außenkommando of the Security Police and SD in Genoa. This office had been established there on 8 Oct. 1943 and stood under the command of Group Upper-Italy West of SSStandartenführer Walter Rauff. In the RSHA, Rauff was responsible for the technical development of the mobile gas chambers the SS used to murder Jews and others. Engel’s predecessor, SS Obersturmführer Paul Neunteufel, only led the Außenkommando for a short time. The main office in Genoa was then led by Guido Zimmer, an SS Obersturmführer and expert in espionage and counter-espionage in the SD. In the first months, the Außenkommando was classified as a simple external office; its seat was the students’ dormitory in the Corso Giulio Cesare (present-day Corso Aldo Gastaldi).
Engel took over the Außenkommando in a period of extreme tension. The Ligurian capital was one of the main centres of a wave of strikes that had begun in Dec. 1943. Suppression of both the strike and partisan activity in cooperation with Wehrmacht offices was one of the most important tasks facing Engel. His subordinates organized operational groups for deployment against resistance groups and created an information-network to be used against partisans. In April 1944, his men participated in Wehrmacht deployments in the Monte Tobbio area and in many other “cleansing operations”.
With the increasing number of partisans in the Genoa area and later in the other Ligurian provinces, the way the Security Police were deployed to ‘combat bandits’ changed. Initially, the SD simply supported the Wehrmacht troops; later on, there was a deployment of autonomous units, and of ‘counter-bands’: SS-men and Italian fascists who disguised themselves as partisans and either collected information in areas controlled by the resistance or attacked partisan groups and command posts. In the late summer of 1944, Engel led negotiations with formations of the Giustizia e Libertà resistance movement; the negotiations led to a ceasefire agreement between German troops and non-Communist partisan formations.
Engel’s men participated in numerous executions by shooting of partisans and anti-fascists at various locations in occupied Liguria. The following massacres are the most well-known: the massacre at the Turchino Pass, in the Benedicta Chapel, on Monte Tobbio, in Portofino, and in Cravasco.
Participation in massacres of civilians
Torture and reprisals under Engel’s command
Engel’s men participated in numerous executions by shooting of partisans and anti-fascists at various locations in occupied Liguria. The following massacres are the most well-known: the massacre at the Turchino-Pass, for which he was convicted in 1999 in Italy and 2002 in Germany; and in the Benedicta Chapel, on Monte Tobbio, in Portofino, and in Cravasco, for all of which he was only convicted in Italy.
Engel selected victims for reprisal from among the political opponents and partisans imprisoned in block 4 of the Marassi prison near Genoa and at the disposal of the Außenkommando. In addition, under his direction the seat of the Außenkommando, located in an old students' dormitory, was used for horrific torture.
Arrest and deportation of Jews, striking workers, and forced labourers
Engel’s remit also included the arrest and deportation of Jews and forced labourers. The largest razzia aimed at Jews took place before his arrival. But in the spring and summer of 1944, working together with collaborators, Engel’s men arrested remaining Jews, who were deported first into police custody at the Fossoli detention camp and then to Auschwitz. The Security Police also participated in the Läuseharke (‘lice-comb’) operation, carried out to end a wave of strikes in June 1944. On 16 June, forces of the Außenkommando and Wehrmacht surrounded the factories where the workers were striking, then entered and arrested them; 1,448 workers were subsequently deported to Germany as forced labourers.
Headquarters of the Security Police and the SD in Genoa.
The postwar period
Arrest, flight, and amnesty
Engel and his men left Genoa on the evening of 23 April 1945. Before doing so, they burned all the files and secret documents of the Außenkommando in the dormitory’s courtyard. The group moved to Milan. There is film-documentation of the disarming of Security Police and SD forces on the day of the city’s Allied liberation. Engel can be seen here in the uniform of an SS Obersturmbannführer together with SS Standartenführer Walter Rauff, the two discussing details of the capitulation with American officers.
Together with other high-ranking Nazi officers, Engel was interned in the interrogation centre of the US Army in Oberursel (Hesse), directed by the Office of Strategic Services (the OSS). He was able to flee in June 1946. Under the false name Friedrich Schottenberg, he then worked first as a woodcutter in the Soviet occupation zone, then as a lifesaver in the Braunlage spa in the Harz, British Zone. Following a move to Hamburg in the winter of 1948/49, he was employed by R. Ulrich & Co., an import firm for precious wood. He would be active in this firm as an agent and director of purchasing in Canada and the Netherlands. After passage of the Adenauer government’s amnesty law, in Jan. 1954 he again adopted his birth-name. He lived from then on in the Lokstedt area of Hamburg with his wife, whom he had married in 1940; he retired in 1974.
Investigations and trials in Germany
Engel was involved in various court proceedings as both an incriminated person and a witness. But until the mid-1990s, none of these led to charges being levelled against him.
In 1961, Engel was investigated in the context of proceedings regarding persecution of Jewish lawyer Selmar Reitzenstein in Genoa between Dec. 1943 and Jan. 1944. The investigation was terminated because at the time of the events in question, Engel had not yet reported for duty in situ. In 1963, Engel testified as a witness in a West Berlin criminal trial of former RSHA members; in 1964 in the course of inquiries into the deportation of Italian Jews (the so-called Bosshammer proceedings); and in later proceedings focused on the murder of civilians between Liguria and Piedmont in the summer of 1944. In 1969, for the first time, proceedings were opened against Engel himself, the basis being a complaint of his employer’s brother. The accusations were in any case extremely vague and Engel’s participation could not be demonstrated. The proceedings were terminated.
In 1989, the Stuttgart prosecutor’s office found Engel’s name on a list of 89 persons suspected of having committed crimes in Italy during the war. The ensuing investigation was terminated in 1993 because in the prosecutor’s view there was no possibility of identifying the suspects and crimes attributed to them.
Engel’s mid-1990s Turin trial in absentia
In Italy, Engels name surfaced in the files of the Rome prosecutor general’s office in the mid-199s. Proceedings of the Turin state military prosecutor Pier Paolo Rivello led to charges being levelled at Engel and a trial in absentia. On 15 Nov. 1999, he was sentenced to life imprisonment. In March 2000, the Hamburg prosecutor’s office requested court documents from the military court in Turin; these only arrived after a long delay.
The German public only became aware of Engel and his conviction in an Italian court on 12 April 2001 through the nationally broadcast political TV-journal Kontraste. For this edition, journalists René Althammer and Udo Gümpel had reconstructed the massacre at the Turchino Pass.
The German public only became aware of Engel and his conviction in an Italian court on the evening of 11 April 2001, through the nationally broadcast political TV-journal Kontraste. For this edition, journalists René Althammer and Udo Gümpel had reconstructed the massacre at the Turchino Pass. The broadcast also showed photos of Friedrich Engel, who was living a normal life in Hamburg despite having been sentenced to life imprisonment in Italy.
Internationally the broadcast sparked a strong political reaction. The Italian authorities began to exert pressure on the Schröder government in Germany. In this climate, in the summer of 2001 the Hamburg prosecutor’s office opened an investigation. It was led by Chief Prosecutor Jochen Kuhlmann and Superintendent Fred Bauer of the Hamburg State Office of Criminal Investigations. The inquiry was supported by research of historian Carlo Gentile.
The 2002 Hamburg trial
The Hamburg proceedings focused solely on the massacre at the Turchino Pass. The other murders that had been part of the charges levelled in Turin were not included: under German law they were considered homicide, hence lapsed and no longer prosecutable.
The trial began in May 2002 before the Hamburg District Court; it ended in July 2002 with Engels’ sentencing to 7 years in prison for the murder of 59 persons. The reprisal actions perpetrated under his command were in themselves not prosecutable, since their framework for legal assessment was customary law of war. But the perpetrators had taken extreme mental suffering of their victims for granted and thus displayed subjective cruelty. In the court’s view, this sufficed as a murder criterion. If such a criterion had not been demonstrable, the shootings at the Turchino-Pass would have been considered manslaughter and not murder. Then, Engel’s conviction would have no longer been possible since the crime would have lapsed. The court considered the long delay in prosecuting the crime in both Italy and Germany as a mitigating factor.
Other crimes within Engel’s area of responsibility, including the deportation of hundreds of Jews to extermination camps, were not prosecuted in either Italy or Germany. This represented the last possibility to legally account for the deportation of Italian Jews.
In June 2004, the German Federal Court of Justice (Bundesgerichthof; BGH) overturned the verdict in the Engel case on formal grounds. While the executions had indeed been cruel, a subjective cruelty on Engel’s part, the BGH opined, had not been adequately demonstrated by the Hamburg court. That court had not examined whether he had intentionally subjected the victims to suffering or if the cruel circumstances of the shootings arose from a lack of means for a more humane treatment. In the BGH’s view, the trial consequently would need to start afresh. But the 5th Criminal Division in Leipzig now terminated the proceedings permanently, citing Engel’s advanced age and the long period of time between the crime and its prosecution in Germany and Italy.
It nevertheless would have still been possible to implement the Italian court’s verdict and sentencing in the framework of a European arrest warrant. This would have involved Italy requesting his extradition from Germany, since he had been found guilty in Italy in a legally binding way. While Germany could not have subjected that legally binding decision to a review, it could have insisted on itself implementing the decision. In any case, things could not have reached that point, since on 18 July 2005 the BGH declared the law concerning European arrest warrants unconstitutional since it impinged too strongly on basic rights.
Immediately after the appeal-judgment, the meanwhile very ill Engel told journalists at the German weekly Der Spiegel that it ‘would have been good if I had had more civil courage’. Memory of the ‘completely uncomplaining deaths’ of the Italians at the Turchino Pass had, he informed the journalists, tormented him in his sleep for decades. He conceded ‘co-responsibility’ for the massacre, but did not feel he was a ‘murderer’ (Der Spiegel, no. 27, 28. June 2004).
It would have been good, if I had had more civil courage.
Sources
The SS personnel files are kept in the German Federal Archives, Berlin, R 9361-II/210036, R 9361-III/39025, and R 9361-III/523093. On Engel’s life after the war, see the verdict reached at the Hamburg trial and the BGH appeal. Some biographical information is available on the Internet.
Literature
Christian Ingrao, Hitlers Elite. Die Wegbereiter des nationalsozialistischen Massenmords, Berlin, Ullstein, 2012 (licensed edition for the Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, Bonn 2012). pp. 48, 63, 65, 71, 85f., 112, 152, 206, 239f., 330.
Ingo von Münch: Geschichte vor Gericht. Der Fall Engel, Hamburg, Ellert und Richter, 2004.
Pier Paolo Rivello, Il processo Engel, Recco, Le Mani, 2005.
Pier Paolo Rivello: Quale giustizia per le vittime dei crimini nazisti? L’eccidio della Benedicta e la strage del Turchino tra Storia e Diritto, Turin, Giappichelli editore, 2002.
Michael Wildt, Generation des Unbedingten. Das Führungskorps desReichssicherheitshauptamtes, Hamburg, Hamburger Edition, 2002, pp. 87, 509, 742-744, 838.
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