Kurt Daleuge



kurt Daleuge

Kurt Daleuge centre - with other Police Officials


Kurt Daleuge was born on 15 September 1897, in Kreuzburg, Upper Silesia. During the First World War he served as a volunteer in an assault division. After receiving training to be an engineer at the Berlin Technical High School, Kurt Daleuge worked for a short time as a foreman in an engineering firm before becoming the leader of a unit in the notorious Rossbach Freikorps.

Daleuge was something of a swashbuckler and a rowdy in his early years and he joined the NSDAP in 1922, and on 22 March 1926 founded and led the first SA group in Berlin and Northern Germany. He was leader of the Berlin SA until 1928, he then transferred to the SS, where he organised special shock-battalions for surprise attacks on opponents hostile to the Nazi Party and for the next five years he was Commander of SS units in Eastern Germany. In the spring of 1933, Kurt Daleuge was closely linked to Hermann Goering and was given the special task of purging the police apparatus and political opponents of the Nazi regime. In May 1933 he was put in charge of the police division in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior and made Commander of all Prussian Police Forces. As the chief mediator between the SS and the Prussian State hierarchy, Daleuge transformed the Prussian police machine into an omnipotent instrument of the Nazis and a significant political factor in consolidating the new regime.

Kurt Daleuge was a coldly calculating figure, reputed to be an excellent organiser, he used the links he had forged with the Schutzpolizei and political police to attract discharged and restless police officers to the SS and to infiltrate the regular police with SS men. In 1933, Daleuge was appointed Ministerial Director and a Prussian State Councillor and became a member of the Reichstag, representing the electoral district of East Berlin. A year later he was appointed to the rank of SS- Obergruppenführer and in 1936 he became Commander of the German Ordnungspolizei – which comprised of the urban and administrative police, the coastal police, fire service, passive defence etc – and Chief of its High Command. Daleuge was already Chief of Security Police in the central office of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD).

Daleuge also established the Kameradschaftsbund Deutscher Polizeibeamten – a National Socialist umbrella organisation of police officials. Responsible for the suppression of internal revolt, for protecting the lives of Hitler and other Nazi leaders, Kurt Daleuge was the most powerful policeman in the SS, second in rank only to Heinrich Himmler, who controlled the political police. It was under Daleuge’s supervision that the Ordnungspolizei was comprehensively indoctrinated among Nazi and military lines. It was Kurt Daleuge who signed the orders to deport the Jews from the Reich in October 1941.

After the death of Reinhard Heydrich in Prague on 4 June 1942, Kurt Daleuge was appointed to the post of Deputy Protector of Bohemia and Moravia and he was later held responsible for the destruction of Lidice and other terrorist measures taken against the Czech population. He was executed by the Czechs on 23 October 1946.


Sources


Robert S. Wistrich, Who’s Who in Nazi Germany, Routledge, London and New York 1995


Gerald Reitlinger, The Final Solution, Vallentine, Mitchell & Co 1953


French L. Maclean, The Field Men, Schiffer Military History, Atglen, PA 1999


Photograph –  Bundesarchiv


© Holocaust Historical Society 2015