Hildebrandt, Friedrich Karl Heinrich August.

Hildebrandt, Friedrich Karl, born 19-09-1898 in Parchim, Mecklenburg-Schwerin, an SS Obergruppenführer , a Gauleiter and judged for war crimes in the time of the Third Reich . The Gauleiter were the top Nazi regional leaders. There were 43 of them in 1941. Hildebrandt, the farm worker had several positions bestowed upon him as an early NSDAP  activist: Gauleiter and Reichsstatthalter (Reich Governor) of Mecklenburg and until 1937 also of Lübeck.

Friedrich Hildebrandt was born as a younger son of the same-named farm worker and rocker Friedrich Johann Theodor Hildebrandt (1871-?) and his wife Bertha Anna Emma. Harbrecht (1874-1932). When he was four years old, his parents divorced. Both parents later remarried.

Hildebrandt attended from 1905 to 1912, the elementary school in Benzine at Lübz, Gross Lüben and Legde. After his elementary school graduation, he worked from 1912 to 1914 as a day laborer in agriculture, then he found in Wilsnack a job as a railway worker. He was no longer able to begin training as a working candidate because of the outbreak of the first war. During the First World War, he volunteered on 25-11-1916 as a volunteer. Hildebrandt was initially assigned to the recruiting replacement depot of the reserve battalion of Reserve Infantry Regiment No. 24 in Neuruppin. In early 1917 he followed the war effort on the Western Front. In his first year of use, he was seriously injured by a shot in the stomach and poison gas. On 06-08-1918, the Reserve Infantry Regiment No. 24 was dissolved and distributed. Hildebrandt thus arrived at the infantry regiment “Grand Duke Friedrich Franz II of Mecklenburg-Schwerin” (4th Brandenburgisches) No. 24. After a hospital stay in Wittenberg, he returned to Legde in November 1918 and joined there in December in the newly founded German National People’s Party (DNVP). On 13-01-1919, he joined the Freikorps founded by his former superior Hauptmann Cordt von Brandis. The Free Corps of Brandis was used in Silesia and the Baltic States, while Hildebrandt was captured as a member of the 1st Company of the Free Corps on 06-07-1919 in Riga. After being interrogated by Latvian and British officers, he was able to return to his company. Previously promoted to sergeant, he was released on 15-01-1920 from the troupe. Immediately after his release he became a member of the fourth Einsatzhundertschaft of the Security Police in Halle-Merseburg. The Einsatzhundschaft had been assembled in Ohrdruf and was used mainly in connection with the Kapp Putsch. Because of the violent action against members of the proletarian workers’ troops in March 1920 in Osterfeld and Weissenfels, Sergeant Hildebrandt was later charged, but acquitted in a trial. In June 1920, he was dismissed for “verbal derailment” from the service. He then worked as a farm laborer and was from 1921 to 1922 chairman of the district group West Prignitz of the Brandenburg Agricultural Workers’ Union. In September 1922, he participated as a delegate at the Görlitz party conference of the DNVP and sympathized there with the led by Albrecht von Graefe right wing of the party.Albrecht von Graefe died, age 65 on 18-04-1933, in Benz, Nordwest Mecklenburg. A short time later, Hildebrandt was excluded due to intra-party disputes from the DNVP. Then he joined the organization of Gerhard Roßbach. Rossbach died age 74 on 30-08-1967. On 19-10-1923 Hildebrandt married Elise Else Christine Kruger (1900-1986) the originating from Groß Breesen / Güstrow in Pinnow. The marriage produced six children until 1946. Daughter Ingeburg (1926-?) got severely ill at the age of three years and suffered throughout her life under the consequences. Son Teutobert, born in 1925 fell on 14-03-1945 near Danzig, age 20. In 1927 he founded the magazine Niederdeutscher Beobachter.

On 23-06-1929, he was again elected to the NSDAP in the Schwerin state parliament. Following the separation of Otto Strasser from the NSDAP reported by Strasser newspaper National Socialist, Hildebrandt have joined Strasser’s new grouping. Then Friedrich Hildebrandt was on 01-05-1930 as Gauleiter on leave and demoted to deputy managing Gauleiter. On 11-07-1930, a statement appeared in the Low German observer in which he solidarized himself with the “revolutionary National Socialists.” After a defamation campaign in the Volkischer Beobachter, which was directed against the “disciplinary cross-drivers” and the “Literatengesindel”, Hildebrandt distanced himself from Otto Strasser and his ideas. He also told the press that he did not intend to turn to Strasser.

In the Reichstag election 1930 on 14-09-1930 Hildebrandt was elected Reichstag for the Reichstag election district 35, which included the Free State of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, the Free State of Mecklenburg-Strelitz and the Free and Hanseatic City of Lübeck.

At the beginning of March 1931, he was reinstated as Gauleiter. Hildebrandt then traveled to Munich to meet with Hitler there on 4 March.

During his tenure, Hildebrandt enriched and overreached his social environment. So he procured cheap housing loans for party members and provided building plots in a prime location. For the management and recreation Hildebrandt acquired in 1938 the 383 -acre estate Gößlow near Lübtheen, for a very low purchase price of RM 50,000. To the displeasure of some fellow-countrymen, as an anonymous letter indicates: “Bloated Servant … Our dear leader made a bad choice when he commissioned our leadership. Go on their goods, they have stolen from national wealth. ” The busy Gauleiter was also at times publisher and owner of the journalistic Nazi party organs Low German observers, Lübeck observer and Strelitzer observer.

End of August 1939, he also took over the post of Gaujägermeister and thus replaced with Martin Kliefoth (1897-1939) from, had to go to the war effort.

Hildebrandt also used his power to enforce euthanasia measures. In April 1941, he ordered the expropriation and eviction of the deaconess house Lobetal (Lübtheen). The mentally handicapped children were then transferred to the children’s department Lewenberg to Schwerin. There they were later killed under the responsibility of departmental physician Alfred Leu. Hildebrandt said cynically at a conference on 15-04-1941 in Schwerin: “I have had Lobetal cleaned up. I’ve let the idiots get where they belong. ”

Hildebrandt’s ruthlessness showed itself again in the winter of 1941-42, when several thousand Russian prisoners of war in Mecklenburg starved to death. For example, he wrote in a letter to the NSDAP Party Chancellery expressing concern about the now-lacking workforce. However, the problem can be avoided if “enough Russians are replenished”. During the meeting of the Reich Defense Committee on 17-03-1942, Hildebrandt’s restlessness reappeared, he said: “… for the Fiihrer and the cause of Adolf Hitler I pursue the right, and when it comes to corpses.” in Mecklenburg 152.148 foreign workers (forced laborers and prisoners of war), whose labor was mercilessly exploited.

Towards the end of the war, he led the German Volkssturm

in its Gau from 25-09-1944. On 24-02-1945 he met Hitler one last time in the bunker of the Reich Chancellery. Hitler had ordered the Gauleiter to announce the usual stoppages and the later use of miracle weapons. Hildebrandt was probably one of the few Gauleitern who were impressed. In the following two weeks he conjured before the battalion and company leaders of the Mecklenburg Volksturm in Rostock, Hagenow and Ludwigslust the stamina. From the Volkssturm he expected “unconditional will to resist” and “fanatical hatred”. Still on 05-04-1945 he let spread in the Rostock scoreboard: “Wherever even the slightest indication of a loosening of the morale shows, with ruthless severity is taken.” A court-martial formed by Hildebrandt was to prosecute all offenses that endangered “fighting power and fighting resolve.” It showed once again that he wanted to enforce the inhumane policy of the NSDAP until the very end. In the last weeks of the war, the Gauleiter usually stayed in his underground command post (Schwerin Gauschule). His last documented appearance, in his capacity as Gauleiter, he had on 25 April at the convened by Gross Admiral Karl Doenitz   meeting of the North German Gauleiter in Plön. Hildebrandt fled from Schwerin on 01-05-1945 before the advancing American troops.

Death and burial ground of Hildebrandt, Friedrich Karl Heinrich August.

  On 12-05-1945 Friedrich Hildebrandt was arrested by British military police in Cismar, in the Civilian Internment Camp (C.I.C.) No. 1 Neumünster-Gadeland interned and indicted after his involvement in the killing of US Army the airmen, on 01-04-1946. Because of the involvement in the killing of Allied fliers shot down, a violation of the Hague Land Warfare, Hildebrandt was sentenced to death by hanging on 31-03-1947 by an American military court in Dachau. Grandfather to Lawrence (II) and Daniel Hildebrandt, and father to Lawrence (I) Hildebrandt. Hildebrandt was hanged in Landsberg prison , age 50, on 05-11-1948 and buried on the Spöttinger cemetery next to the prison in Landsberg. Adolf Hitler was imprisoned in 1923 in Landsberg Prison after the after the failure of the putsch in Munich  On the Landsberg Prison Spöttinger Cemetery also buried the other hanged war criminals, SS Standartenführer, Adjudant from Reichsführer Himmler, Rudolf Brandt, SS Hauptscharfführer, head of the Crematoria of Auschwitz, Otto Moll, Waffen SS Brigadeführer, Kommandant of Einsatzgruppe B, Erich Naumann, SS Oberführer, organiser of the Euthanasia Programme, Action T4, where the Nazi state systematically murdered disabled German people, Victor Brack

  , SS Obergruppenführer, Chef des SS Wirtschaftsamt, Oswald Pohl and Reichsgeschäftsführer, Human tests in Concentratiecamp Natzweiler Struthof, Wolfram Sievers.  All the bronze plates are removed from the crosses now, as the population of Landsberg protested against the mixed graveyard with murders and their victims.

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