Helmut Looß
* "31 May 1910" –
Eisenach
† "25 November 1988" –
Lilienthal bei Bremen
Beginning in 1944, Helmut Looß was an Ic-officer in the 16th
Born in 1910, Looß grew up in a milieu stamped by volkish and antisemitic ideas and hostile to the Weimar Republic. He joined both the Nazi Party and the SS while still a student. In the mid-1930s, he gave speeches concerned with ‘racial questions’ and became involved in neo-pagan and anti-Christian religious movements. In 1936, he was recruited by the SD – the SS’s Security Service, which in 1939 would be integrated into the Reich Security Main Office (
Looß went into hiding at the war’s end, constructing a middle-class life for himself as a teacher under a false name. In the 1960s he was investigated in connection with activities of the RSHA on the Eastern Front; but his crimes were judged to be lapsed by statute.
- Nationality
- German
- Religion
- Protestant, then gottgläubig, then again Protestant
- Formation
-
Reichswehr (1931-34)
SS and SD (1933-45) - Joined the NSDAP
- 1934 (membership number 4.863.389)
- Armed force
-
SD
- Unit
-
BdS (Befehlshaber der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD, commander of security police and SD) Kiev, BdS Minsk, Einsatzgruppe B
16th SS Panzergrenadier Division ‘Reichsführer-SS’ - Years of service
- 1943 – 1945
- Rank
- SS Sturmbannführer (9 Nov. 1944: SS Obersturmbannführer)
- Offensive
-
Eastern Front
Occupation of Italy (1944-45) - Confirmed Massacres
-
Sant’Anna di Stazzema
Valla
Vinca
Certosa di Farneta
Monte Sole - Post war period
-
Interrogated as a witness in a number of legal proceedings.
1965-1969: Court proceedings in Bremen.
1968-1971: civil suit; suspension as teacher and revocation of tenured civil-service appointment.
Training and war experience
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Youthful rejection of Weimar Republic; volkish culture and the Aufbauschule
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University studies and entry into the Nazi Party
-
Political instructor and member of the Reich administration
-
The turn from Christianity
-
Activities in the SD and RSHA
Looß’s deployment to the Eastern Front starting 28 Dec. 1942 marked entry into a violent career. Until then, he had not come into direct contact with the Nazi ‘struggle for race and volk’. But as a committed National Socialist, he could smoothly integrate himself into the murder machinery.
-
Leadership of a Sonderkommando on the Eastern Front
Participation in massacres of civilians
Looß’s arrival at headquarters of the ‘Reichsführer-SS’ division accelerated its radicalization in the summer of 1944. Looß applied his war experiences on the Eastern Front in the anti-partisan campaign in Italy, playing a central role in the division’s massacres.
-
Ic-leader of the ‘Reichsführer-SS’ division
About the photographs
Helmut Looß can be considered an example of a National Socialist intellectual. He was particularly concerned with religious and mystical aspects of the ideological education of the ‘German people’. Two of Looß's lectures on this subject were published in 1938 by the völkisch Drei-Adler-Verlag in his hometown of Eisenach. In ‘Der Glaube des deutschen Arbeiters’ (The Faith of the German Worker), Looß argues for a rejection of Christian notions of an afterlife after death in favour of ‘Germanic’ traditions, mythologies, and heroic stories. He explains that the German faith is rooted in nature and the ‘Volk’ [people], emphasizing the difference from Christianity, which sees earthly life and toil as punitive. Looß underscores the German people's growing estrangement from the church.
The following pictures show Looß's personnel evaluation in November 1944, signed by SS Gruppenführer Max Simon, commander of the 16th SS Panzergrenadier Division ‘Reichsführer-SS’, who commented: ‘[Looß] showed to be an apt commander against partisans in Italy and achieved excellent successes’ — finally, we see a photo showing Helmut Looß in civilian clothes in the first months of the war. The photo was attached to his marriage application of April 1940. The marriage took place in Potsdam in August 1940.
The postwar period
-
Evading trial
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Living underground
Looß very skilfully hid his Nazi past, thus circumventing the denazification process.
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A new identity
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Primary school teacher in Bremen
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The investigations of RSHA members in the 1960s
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The Bremen proceedings of 1965
Sources
The main source for reconstructing Helmut Looß’s military career and biography until 1945 is the personnel documentation in the Bundesarchiv in Berlin (German Federal Archives in Berlin) (R 9361-III-541071 and R9361-III-121436). Looß’s youthful political-religious writings Fest- und Feiergestaltung im deutschen Raum and Der Glaube des deutschen Arbeiters (both Eisenach, Drei-Adler-Verlag, 1938) are to be found in Germany in the Leipzig National Library, Bavarian State Library, Munich, and the Berlin State Library.
Information on Looß’s activities on the Eastern Front and in the postwar period is found in the personnel files opened against him and records of the various proceedings against him kept in the Bremen State Archives (Bestand 4,111 Pers. - Senator für das Bildungswesen, Personalakten). Records of the criminal proceedings tied to actions of Sonderkommando 7a are likewise found in Bremen and in Ludwigsburg (BArch B 162/25501).
Literature
Wolfgang Dierker, Himmlers Glaubenskrieger. Der
Carlo Gentile, Wehrmacht und
Joachim Staron, Fosse Ardeatine und Marzabotto. Deutsche Kriegsverbrechen und Resistenza. Geschichte und nationale Mythenbildung in Deutschland und Italien (1944-1999), Paderborn etc., Schöningh Verlag, 2002, pp. 82, 94, 108, 208, 279f.
Michael Wildt, Generation des Unbedingten. Das Führungskorps des Reichssicherheitshauptamtes, Hamburg, Hamburger Edition, 2002.
Authorship and translation
Author: Carlo Gentile
Translated from German by: Joel Golb
© Project ‘The Massacres in Occupied Italy (1943-1945): Integrating the Perpetrators’ Memories’
2023