Rediess, Friedrich Wilhelm Otto.

Rediess, Friedrich Wilhelm Otto.\, born 10-10-1900 in Heinsberg, Germany a son of a justice employee. Friedrich attended primary school. On 22-06-1918 he was called up for the infantry in the 1st company of the Infantry Regiment 135. After the First World War he trained as an electrical engineer, and worked in this profession until 1932. During the crisis of 1929 he was briefly unemployed.

In 1924 Rediess became a member of the Völkisch-sozialer Block, a replacement organization of the banned NSDAP. On 06-01-1924, Dr. Alexander Glaser (1884-1934), Rudolf Xylander (1872-1946) and Dr. Rudolf Buttmann (1885-1947) founded the Völkischer Bloc in Bavaria (VBl) in Bamberg.

On 15-07-1925 he was readmitted to the NSDAP (another source states: 25-07-1925). From December 1926 to February 1932 Rediess was an NSDAP-Ortsgruppenleiter in Düsseldorf. On 01-01-1927 he also became a member of the Sturmabteilung. The Sturmabteilung (also called SA or Brownshirts) was a protective service (troop) founded by Adolf Hitler in 1921, with the main task of protecting the party meetings and demonstrations of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP), by means of violent intimidation, threats, assault and murder, against interruptions or other disruptions of the speeches of the party leaders by political opponents.

And from April 1929 he became a Sturmführer in the SA-Sturms 88 in Düsseldorf. On 22-07-1929 Rediess transferred from the SA to the SS.  After several promotions he reached the rank of an SS-Standartenführer on 08-03-1931. During this period he led several SS units in Essen and Düsseldorf. From 1932 onwards Rediess worked exclusively for the NSDAP. In July 1932 he took over the leadership of SS-Abschnitte XI, which was first located in Frankfurt am Main and from October 1933 in Wiesbaden.

In 1928, Rediess had unsuccessfully run for the Prussian Landtag. In the 1932 elections, he won a seat in parliament, which he held until 1933. After the NSDAP’s election victory in the German Reichstag elections of 1933 and in the German Reichstag elections of November 1933, he sat in the Reichstag until 1945. In the SS, Rediess commanded the Abschnitt XVI (from March 1934 to January 1935) in Magdeburg and the Oberabschnitt Südost (from January 1935 to February 1936), which was first located in Brieg and later in Breslau. On 20-04-1935, Rediess was promoted to SS-Gruppenführer. From February 1936, he was commander of the SS-Oberabschnitts Nordost in Königsberg. From 28-07-1938 to 19-06-1940, Rediess was HSSPF “Nordost”. (Higher) SS and Police Leader ((Higher) SS and Police Leader, appointed (H)SSPF). In this capacity he commanded two regiments of the SS-Totenkopfverbände in October 1939 and organised the deportation of East Prussian Jews in October and November 1940.

During a meeting with SS-Gruppenführer Wilhelm Karl Heinrich Koppe in Posen, the so-called Lange-Kommando was set up, which was led by SS-Hauptsturmführer Herbert Lange. Lange, age 35, was killed in action at Bernau bei Berlin during the Battle of Berlin on 20-04-1945.

This commando was in possession of a gas van. In consultation with Gauleiter Erich Koch,

1558 mentally handicapped people were murdered in a transit camp in Soldau between 21 March and 8 June 1940 as part of an Aktion T4. Koch was imprisoned in the prison of Barczewo (Wartenburg), a former monastery, from 1965. On 12-11-1986 Koch died in this prison at the age of 90. Aktion T4  was a campaign of mass murder by involuntary euthanasia which targeted people with disabilities in Nazi Germany.

Koppe then demanded 10 Reichsmark per murdered person from Rediess as compensation for the costs incurred. Rediess, who was in Norway by then, was not prepared to pay, although he himself had agreed on the premium. The case was submitted to Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, his verdict on this is unknown. Wilhelm Rediess (far left), with Josef Terboven,

 Vidkun Quisling and Rudolf Schiedermair, 1942. After Operation Weserübung, Rediess was transferred to Norway in June 1940 and worked together with Reichskommissar Josef Terboven and Norwegian police chief Jonas Lie. When the first Norwegian women became pregnant by the German occupiers from March 1941, the ideologically based project of Heinrich Himmler, the Lebensborn program, was also implemented in Norway. Approximately 8,000 children were born from that program.

Lebensborn was a secret, SS-initiated, state-registered association in Nazi Germany with the stated goal of increasing the number of children born who met the Nazi standards of “racially pure” and “healthy” Aryans, based on Nazi eugenics (also called “racial hygiene” by some eugenicists). Lebensborn was established by Heinrich Himmler, and provided welfare to its mostly unmarried mothers, encouraged anonymous births by unmarried women at their maternity homes, and mediated adoption of children by likewise “racially pure” and “healthy” parents, particularly SS members and their families. The Cross of Honour of the German Mother was given to the women who bore the most Aryan children. Abortion was legalized (and, more commonly, endorsed) by the Nazis for disabled and non-Germanic children, but strictly punished otherwise.

Death and burial ground of Rediess, Friedrich Wilhelm Otto.

On November 09-11-1941, Rediess was promoted to SS-Obergruppenführer . After the unconditional capitulation of the Wehrmacht, Rediess, age 44, committed suicide by shooting himself with his pistol after a drinking party with Reichskommissar Josef Terboven at his headquarters in Skaugum (official residence of Haakon and Mette-Marit). Rediess’s body and that of Terboven, were destroyed when Terboven blew himself up in his bunker using 50 kg of dynamite (another source states: a landmine. The bodies were never recovered.

Josef Terboven’s family survived in West Germany, although his daughter, Inga, in an event in 1964 unrelated to her father’s history, killed her two-year-old daughter by strangulation. Terboven’s wife, Ilse, died in 1972.

Message(s), tips or interesting graves for the webmaster:    robhopmans@outlook.com