A black and white portrait of Helmut Looß: He wears his uniform without a cap. His collar patch identifies him as a Hauptsturmführer. He is not looking directly into the camera.
Helmut Looß in the spring of 1940 as a Hauptsturmführer of the SD. He later attained the position of Ic officer of the 16th SS Panzergrenadier Division ”Reichsführer SS”. © BArch, R 9361-III/121436

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
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

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.

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.

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 cover page of the book "Der Glaube des deutschen Arbeiters" (The faith of the German worker) by Helmut Looß. The title is in Fraktur script, as is the name below of the Drei-Adler publishing house where the book was published.
    Cover of the book ”The Faith of the German Worker”. © private archive Carlo Gentile
  • The 1944 service assessment for Helmut Looß provides information about his physical and mental condition, his behaviour, his ideological attitude as well as his conduct in combat. His superiors assess Looß' qualities exclusively positively and describe him as a convinced National Socialist of above-average mental and physical abilities with extensive experience in fighting partisans.
    Personnel evaluation of Helmut Looß, signed by Max Simon, who describes him as an ”old, staunch National Socialist with a corresponding approach to life.” © BArch, R 9361-III/541071
  • A full-body shot of Helmut Looß in black and white: he is wearing a dark suit with tie, but without a hat. Looß is standing straight in front of the camera and looking directly at the photographer. A park landscape can be seen in the background.
    Helmut Looß in civilian clothes in the first months of the war. © BArch, R 9361-III-121436

The postwar period

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

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 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

© Project ‘The Massacres in Occupied Italy (1943-1945): Integrating the Perpetrators’ Memories’

2023

Text: CC BY NC SA 4.0

Seitenanfang