Wappenhaus, Waldemar.

Wappenhaus, Waldemar, born 21-10-1893 in Berlin, Josef Goebbels (did you know)  was the Gauleiter of Berlin and Propaganda Minister. Wappenhaus was the son of the professor Friedrich Wappenhans, visited a cadet school in Karlsruhe from 1902 and then the Hauptkadettenanstalt in Berlin-Lichterfelde . At the beginning of July 1914 Wappenhans was promoted to Leutnant. After the outbreak of the First World War, Wappenhans was a member of the 5th Badian Infantry Regiment No. 113 , and became a battalion commander in the infantry regiment in September 1914. In April 1915, Wappenhans came to the hospital , where he remained until January 1916. After his release from the hospital, he was transferred to the aircraft group and trained at the observer field aircraft section 55. After another wound in December 1916, another hospital stay followed until March 1917. Afterwards, he was employed as a pilot at the 300th Pasha Air Base and 305 in Palestine. In September 1918 he was still the leader of the battlefield 27 on the western front.

After the war, Wappenhans was deployed at the border guard in Silesia, leaving the army in the rank of Leutnant. In October 1923 his marriage took place. He then became a trainee at Halpaus-Cigaretten and eventually became branch manager in Gdańsk. Later he became a representative for Gdańsk Goldwasser.  He belonged to the German-national assembly and acted as chairman of the Gdańsk Aviation Association. About SS Obergruppenführer Werner Lorenz

  made Wappenhans at the beginning of 1930 acquainted with the Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler.  He then joined the NSDAP (member 456.090)  and SS (member 22.924) on 01-02-1931.

At the end of the war, Lorenz was captured and held in an internment camp in England. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison at the Rusha Trial at Nuremberg on 10-03-1948. Later, his sentence was reduced to 15 years in 1951. Lorenz was released early in 1955 and died in Hamburg on 13-03-1974, age 82.
At the same time, Wappenhaus became chief of staff of the SS section of Danzig until November 1931. Afterwards, he was appointed to the SS section VII in Danzig, and from February 1932 to September 1932. From September 1932 to 1 April 1933 he was commander of the 19th century. SS-Standarte “Westfalen-Nord”  In March 1933 he was elected to the Prussian Landtag, to which he belonged until the dissolution of the corporation in October 1933.

From April 1933 to December 1933 he was commander of the SS “Weser” and then until the end of October 1934 commander of the SS Standarte “Ostfriesland” succeeding SS-Standartenführer Theodor Berkelmann . Berkelmann died on 28-12-1943, age 49 of a brain tumor.

After that, Wappenhaus was a leader for special use in the SS “Northeast” section. From early April 1935 he became commander of the SS section IX in Würzburg. After divorcing his wife in 1930, he, now a SS Sturmbannführer, married again in 1935; Two sons and four daughters came out of marriage.
Wappenhans met Hermann Goering,  who was known to him from the Kadettenschule Karlsruhe in 1935, and returned to the Luftwaffe in January 1936. Wappenhans became an officer of the Luftwaffe, and from the beginning of March 1937 until the middle of April 1937 he completed an exercise in the Enlightenment Group No. 127. In addition, he took SS section XVII in Augsburg from April 1938 on wards, and from May 1938 on became Chief of Staff of the SS section “Ostsee ” . From November 1938 he was the leader of the SS section XXXIII in Schwerin until 01-01-1942.

After the outbreak of the Second World War, he was the director of the “Fern Aufklarung England”, headquartered in Goslar until the end of November 1940. Since he was only active as an instructor in the Luftwaffe due to a heart muscle weakness, The active SS service, after which he completed a police training course at the Headquarters of the Ordnungspolizei , where he was active until the beginning of September 1941, now a SS Brigadeführer .
From 04-09-1941 to 01-09-1942, he was an SS- and SSPF in Volhynia-Brest-Litovsk, and then SSPF in Nikolayev until April 1943, and from 04-10-1942 to October 1943, SSPF Dniepropetrovsk-Krivoi-Rog, promoted in September 1943 to SS Gruppenführer  and Generalleutnant der Polizei. In this function, he announced:
“The actions are carried out in such a way that the resettlement’s in the main cities and the districts are as simultaneous as possible. I note that some incidents will be unavoidable in the scope of the major actions, and that the smooth running so far has been all the more remarkable. ”
In Volhynia the Jewish communities were extinguished. In September 1942 the SS in Wolodymyr-Wolynskyj shot 13.500 Jewish ghetto inhabitants . In total, some 160,000 Jews were killed by the massacres in Volhynia from May to December 1942.
As of October 1943, Wappenhans was an SSPF for the special SSPF “Ukraine” SS Obergruppenführer Hans-Adolf Prützmann , where he was the commander of a combat group until January 1944. After that, he was on leave of absence due to illness. In an investigation in April 1944,
“He makes an excited and exhausted impression. […] I believe it is urgently necessary for the physician to come to rest in peace and catch himself again. ” Shortly before the war ended, Prützmann was captured by the Allies. He committed suicide while in custody, on 21-05-1945, age 43.
In January 1945 Wappenhans was transferred to Generalfeldmarschall Walter Model

  on the western front. Toward the end of the war, he was ordered to go to Berlin. Wappenhans descended to Hahnenklee, where his family lived.
Under the wrong name “Hans Seemann”, Wappenhans worked as an agricultural worker and successfully applied to the British property control in September 1945 for a post as commissioner for seized assets of former national socialists in the district of Hanover.
In November 1949 Wappenhans was unmasked, but protected by the British Intelligence Service  before being arrested by the Hanover Police. He received new papers on his real name and was interrogated by interrogators of the Intelligence Service at Herford about the partisan control in Russia and about the fight against the enemy in Germany. Wappenhans wrote down his statements in writing on 75 machine-written pages. He denies the knowledge of Jewish jubilation, and later he would have known this in Russia, and then complained that this had happened without his knowledge. After that he had to be responsible for the denazification before the court in Bielefeld. Afterwards, he worked for the coffee importer Heimbs & Co.  in Braunschweig, his wife was a born Heimbs, Carl Heimbs  had been a sponsor of the naturalization of Adolf Hitler (did you know) in 1932.
Total casualties among the Waffen-SS will probably never be known, but one estimate indicates that they suffered 180.000 dead, 400.000 wounded, and 40.000 missing. World War II casualties indicates that the Waffen-SS suffered 314.000 killed and missing, or 34.9 per cent. By comparison, the United States Army suffered 318.274 killed and missing in all theatres of the war.