Helmut Looß

* "31 May 1910" – Eisenach
† "25 November 1988" – Lilienthal bei Bremen

Beginning in 1944, Helmut Looß was an Ic-officer in the 16th SS Panzergrenadier Division ‘Reichsführer-SS’ in Italy. In that role, on the basis of his previous experiences on the Eastern Front he was responsible for combatting partisans and had wide-reaching freedom of action. He would participate in many massacres, among them in Sant’Anna di Stazzema, Valla, and Vinca, as well as at Monte Sole,.

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 (Reichssicherheitshauptamt; RSHA). In late 1942, Looß was head of a task force responsible for violent action against both partisans and Jewish and non-Jewish civilians.

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

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

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

Youthful rejection of Weimar Republic; volkish culture and the Aufbauschule

Helmut Looß was born on 31 May 1910 in Eisenach as the second of four children of a Thuringian glass master. He would develop into a typical representative of a post Great War generation in Germany strongly marked by memory of the 1918 defeat and characterized by a profoundly hostile attitude toward both the Weimar Republic and democracy in general.

Following primary school, he attended the Deutsche Aufbauschule. This ‘training school’ was an innovation of the Weimar Republic period; it was meant to give outstanding pupils from rural areas access to eventual university education and was conceived as a counterpart to the urban, upper middle-class secondary school, the Gymnasium. Strong elements of volkish and neo-romantic ideology made their way into the curriculum of the Aufbauschule, which had the status of a teacher-training institution: something that would prove very useful to Looß in his postwar construction of a solid middle-class existence. He would graduate from the school in 1930.
University studies and entry into the Nazi Party

In 1930, Looß enrolled in the law faculty of Berlin’s Friedrich Wilhelm University, where he would remain for six semesters. Then he continued studying law in Königsberg, combined with two semesters of philosophy. He again only remained there for a short time, moving on to Göttingen, where he took courses in political philosophy.

Starting very early in this period of university studies, Looß drew close to various right-wing organizations. In both Berlin und Königsberg, he was active in radically antisemitic and volkish student groups; this included membership in the National Socialist German Students’ League.

Looß joined the SS on 30 June 1933, soon beginning to give speeches on political themes for officers in Thuringia’s SS formations. Because of his extensive political activities, he never finished his studies.

Following voluntary service in the Reichswehr, he was granted leave as a reserve officer in 1934; in 1939 he would be appointed an SS Untersturmführer in the reserves.
Political instructor and member of the Reich administration

In 1935, Looß returned to Eisenach, where at age 25 he headed the Nazi Party’s Office for Volksgesundheit [‘volk-health’], a department meant to realize ‘racial’ policy on a local level. Beyond this, he delivered additional speeches, especially in the party’s Office of Racial Policy. Looß became one of the young Nazis with an academic background working within the Third Reich’s upper administrative level.
The turn from Christianity

Also in 1935, Looß affiliated himself with the German Faith Movement – the Deutsche Glaubensbewegung. Blending neo-pagan religious theories and racist ideology, this volkish and anti-Christian organization had a decisive impact on Germany’s de-confessionalizing in the Nazi period. In 1935 Looß withdrew from the Protestant Church and placed himself at the organization’s disposal as a speaker. But he left it the following year when it fell out of favour with the Nazi Party.
Activities in the SD and RSHA

In 1936, Looß became a permanent employee at the Security Service of the SS (the SD), where new professional opportunities had opened for him. On 9 Nov. 1937, he was named an SS Untersturmführer and moved to the SD’s central office in Berlin. As a result of his profile, he received a leading position in the SD’s church-department. One of the most important actions in which he participated as an advisor on Catholicism was the closure of the main episcopal office of the Catholic Action group in Düsseldorf in Jan. 1938.

In Sept. 1939, a few weeks after the war’s beginning, the RSHA was established, wherein the Gestapo and SD would now work together. In 1942, Looß was promoted to SS Sturmbannführer and sent to Rome as the new head of the SD. To hide his secret-service activities, he was officially reassigned to the office of police attaché Herbert Kappler. Looß was thus now working out of the German embassy. But his efforts to make contacts and collect political information—above all concerning the Vatican—were largely unsuccessful. This is unsurprising since as a man responsible for actions of the RSHA against the Catholic Church in Germany, Looß must have been known to the Roman Curia. In late 1942, he was ordered back to Berlin.

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

On 28 Dec. 1942 Looß was assigned to a detachment under the command of the Security Police and SD (Einsatzgruppe C) in Kiev and began an 18-month deployment on the Eastern Front. This marked his 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. On 12 June 1943 he took over leadership of Sonderkommando 7a of Einsatzgruppe B, operating in the rear area of the Wehrmacht‘s 9^th Army. After defeat in the Battle of Kursk, the 7th Sonderkommando withdrew and managed to reach the town of Roslavl near Smolensk. A prison for civilians holding circa 700 Russians – mainly men unfit for work, women, and children – was located here; the Sonderkommando participated in its liquidation in September 1943. The same mass crime was also perpetrated against imprisoned persons in Gomel.

In late autumn 1943, the Sonderkommando arrived in Belarusian Bobruisk. There it set up a Banden-Jagdkommando – ‘bandit-hunting detachment’ – that repeatedly engaged in ‘cleansing operations’ in the army’s rear. Among other such operations was the destruction of the village of Bobrovichi and murder of those living there – 50 to 100 men, women, and children. The detachment also engaged in the shooting to death of Jews and partisans. Investigations of the Bremen prosecutor initiated in 1965 concluded that several hundred Jews were murdered, together with partisans and non-Jewish civilians: men, women, and children. The investigators indicated that Looß participated in ‘special action’ 1005, meant to remove the traces of the mass murders perpetrated by the Einsatz squads.

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

In the summer of 1944, the Red Army took Belarus from the Germans. Helmut Looß moved from leadership of the Sonderkommando to a new role, starting on 13 July, as Ic-leader of the 16th SS Panzergrenadier Division ‘Reichsführer-SS’. Following his arrival in Italy in late July, he was appointed the division’s Sicherungskommandant (‘security commander’) by SS-Obergruppenführer Max Simon. Looß was now responsible for what was termed Bandenbekämpfung – ‘combating bandits’ – in the interior and had great decision-making authority in that respect.

Looß’s arrival in headquarters of the ‘Reichsführer-SS’ division accelerated its radicalization in the summer of 1944. He applied his war experiences on the Eastern Front in the anti-partisan campaign in Italy, playing a central role in the division’s massacres. On 1 Nov. 1944, Max Simon assessed him as follows: ‘Old, staunch National Socialist with a corresponding approach to life. [...] Has proven himself combating bandits in the East (E.K. I and II [Iron Cross 1st and 2nd class; editor’s note]), also revealed himself a circumspect leader in Italian anti-bandit combat and had outstanding success. [...] As a Ic colleague in division headquarters has proven himself fully and completely.’

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.

Cover of the book ”The Faith of the German Worker”. © private archive Carlo Gentile
Personnel evaluation of Helmut Looß, signed by Max Simon, who describes him a an ”Old, staunch National Socialist with a corresponding approach to life.” © BArch, R 9361-III/541071
Helmut Looß in civilian clothes in the first months of the war. © BArch, R 9361-III-121436

The postwar period

Evading trial

In the immediate postwar years Looß’s name came up in the trials of Simon and Reder. In 1951, the military court in Bologna became aware of his central role in the 1944 massacres; Looß was implicated in grave crimes. But the statements of witnesses and accused persons led to a presumption that at the war’s end Looß went missing in action in Austria. During the Reder trial in Bologna, Ekkehard Albert asserted that Looß had been killed near Vienna (statement 28 Oct. 1950), and Reder confirmed this (interrogation 7 March 1951). For this reason, no effort was made to find Looß and bring him to justice for his crimes in Italy.
Living underground

In fact, Looß had survived the war and, like many other highly incriminated SS-members, had gone into hiding to evade arrest and internment by the Allied authorities. In the summer of 1945, he was living in Wesermünde (present-day Bremerhaven) as Helmut Gessert, using his mother’s maiden name, and seeking a position as a teacher.

Looß very skilfully hid his Nazi past, thus circumventing the denazification process.

A new identity

Looß very skilfully hid his past as an SS-officer, thus circumventing the denazification process. He stated that he had never been a Nazi Party or SS member and had not actively participated in the war because of an injury suffered in 1939. Instead of being on the front, he indicated, he had worked with the architect and art-theorist Paul Schultze-Naumburg, newly classifying his work. In Germany, Schultze-Naumburg was a well-known figure in the first half of the twentieth century, with close ties to National Socialism. Where in 1933 agreement with Nazi ideology stood at the centre of Looß’s self-presentation, in autumn 1945 he described his political orientation as ‘national-conservative’.

To sustain his lies, as references Looß exclusively listed persons and places in the Soviet Zone of Occupation, consequently difficult to verify. Already in the earlier version of his vita, he preferred using grandiloquent formulations, a tendency maintained after 1945. He claimed to have attended the same school as Luther and Bach and to have been a regular guest of the school-head: at the time one of the leading personalities in Thuringia’s cultural life, so that, Looß explained, he was able to meet renowned artists and writers while still a pupil. He also claimed to have been a candidate for the 1928 Olympics – a detail absent from his application to become a Nazi Party speaker. He already knew early on, Looß indicated, that teaching was his vocation. But as an opponent of National Socialism, the ‘changes taking effect in 1933’ forced him to back away from formal training in that area.
Primary school teacher in Bremen

Under the name Helmut Gessert, Looß received a short period of training as a primary-school teacher in 1946, receiving his teaching certificate the following year. Subsequently he was appointed an adjunct teacher and as such, in 1952, became a tenured civil-service employee. Meanwhile, on 31 Dec. 1949, the West German state amnestied those who had taken on a false name immediately after the war: a development allowing thousands of former Nazis to regain legal status. Looß was not among the first to make use of the new regulation. On 28 July 1954, he wrote a letter to the authorities revealing his true identity and past membership in the RSHA. After inquiries found no incriminating material about him, the Bremen administration refrained from initiating civil-service measures against him, simply amending Looß’s certificate of appointment so that it contained his real name.

In the following years he lived untroubled in Bremen, working as a teacher in the Horn district. He evidently felt quite safe, as he ran – unsuccessfully – as a Free Democratic Party candidate in the 1961 Bundestag elections. In addition, he was active for a long time in Bremen’s Schwachhausen citizens’ association.
The investigations of RSHA members in the 1960s

In the early 1960s, the German judicial authorities, which were investigating the RSHA’s activities and those of the Einsatz squads in the East, became aware of the case of Helmut Loos. In May 1960, the Central Office of the Land Judicial Authorities for Investigation of National Socialist Crimes in Ludwigsburg issued a first information-request in the context of proceeding against Erich Ehrlinger, a RSHA leader and Kommandeur of both the SS and Einsatz squad B in White Russia. Looß was heard as a witness during these and other proceedings in Hamburg, Berlin, Koblenz, and Flensburg. In 1964 the trial began in Essen of Albert Rapp, his predecessor as head of Sonderkommando 7a; Rapp would be sentenced to life in prison.
The Bremen proceedings of 1965

In 1965 legal proceedings against Looß opened in Bremen on account of his activities on the Eastern Front. In March 1968, he issued a detailed statement ascribing the crimes he was charged with – for example the massacre of civilians in the Roslavl prison near Smolensk – to others. As the suspicions against him gained substance, the Bremen city administration examined his case again. On 31 July 1968 the Bremen prosecution levelled charges against Looß, while at the same time passing the information request from Ludwigsburg on to Bremen’s Personnel Commission, which suspended him from his teaching activity. On 20 Oct., the pretrial hearing opened in Bremen; on 17 Dec. 1968, the Bremen city administration withdrew his tenured civil-service status on account of fraud. Looß appealed, disputing all the charges against him. Although the appeal was turned down, in July 1969 his right to a half salary was recognized. Meanwhile the proceedings related to the events in Belarus continued. They ended on 2 Dec. 1969 with a guilty verdict – but the charges were considered as lapsed by statute. Looß thus tried again to appeal, without success. He died on 25 Nov. 1988 in Lilienthal near Bremen; his ashes were interred on 2 Dec.

Sources

The main source for reconstructing Helmut Looß’s military career and biography until 1945 is the personnel documentation in the German Federal Archives, 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 Sicherheitsdienst der SS und seine Religionspolitik 1933-1941, Paderborn, Schöningh Verlag, 2002.

Carlo Gentile, Wehrmacht und Waffen-SS im Partisanenkrieg: Italien 1943-1945, Paderborn, Schöningh Verlag, 2012, pp. 313-317.

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

2023

Text: CC BY NC SA 4.0

Helmut Looß

Training and war experience

Youthful rejection of Weimar Republic; volkish culture and the Aufbauschule

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

The postwar period

Evading trial

Living underground

Looß very skilfully hid his Nazi past, thus circumventing the denazification process.

A new identity

Primary school teacher in Bremen

The investigations of RSHA members in the 1960s

The Bremen proceedings of 1965

Information on data protection

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