The ‘Disappearance’ of SS-Hauptscharführer Lorenz Hackenholt A Report on the 1959-63 West German Police Search for Lorenz Hackenholt, the Gas Chamber Expert of the Aktion Reinhard Extermination Camps © Michael Tregenza (Page 9) last days of the war Hackenholt had been living in the Trieste area in northern Italy with a women Bauer knew only as 'Monika'. She could still be sheltering him. [20] The investigators now discovered that Bauer was not alone in claiming that he had met Hackenholt after the war. While interrogating another former SS-guard from the Sobibor camp, Fritz Rehwald, they learned that the wanted war criminal had approached him for help sometime after the war. But Rehwald could not recall exactly where or when the meeting had taken place, only that Hackenholt was apparently running a motor accessory shop at Neuburg-an-der-Donau. This was of particular significance to the investigators: Neuburg is only 15 kilometers from Ingolstadt. [21] Having obtained such seemingly conclusive evidence of Hackenholt's survival after the war, one can only wonder why the investigators then waited over four months before searching Ilse Hackenholt's private premises in Tiefenbach, her business premises in Leutkirch, and the Hackenholt family home in Gelsenkirchen. However, at 07:00 on the morning of 8 July 1961, the Hackenholt house at Goerrerstrasse 8 was entered by two officers from SK III/a accompanied by two officers from the Bundeskriminalamt in Wiesbaden, the headquarters of the West German Kriminalpolizei. The search warrant had been issued the previous day by a local magistrate in Gelsenkirchen on the grounds that 'there was a strong suspicion that Hackenholt had, or still has contact with his mother, and to find any correspondence or other evidence of his present whereabouts'. [22] A great deal of correspondence was indeed found, but none of it from the missing Lorenz Hackenholt. The letters were mainly requests to and replies from the Russian Half Moon Organization, the Russian equivalent of the Red Cross, concerning Hackenholt's possible fate. All the enquiries had been written by his sister Anna who, when asked about this lengthy correspondence — obviously an exceedingly big effort on her part to discover what had happened to her brother — replied that she only wanted to be convinced of his death. All the other women present, six female members of the Hackenholt family - his mother and five sisters, and a tenant who was a war widow — concurred with this reply, but had no answer to the question why neither the mother nor the wife had ever made any effort to find the missing male member of the family. When asked on what grounds they were so certain that no correspondence had been received from Lorenz since a certain date before the end of the war, they made no reply and only attempted to convince the police officers that in spite of this apparent lack of correspondence, the relationship between Hackenholt and his wife, and indeed the rest of the family had been good. When pressed further, and asked why — if as was now believed — and, the women merely shrugged their shoulders. _______________ [20] Ibid., p. 1684. Statement by Erich Bauer on 1.3.1960 in Berlin-Tegel prison. [21] SK III/a, Daily Duty Log, Entry No. K.5462. Report by the Examining Magistrate at the Regional Court in Munich I to the Bavarian State Police in Munich, dated 6.3.1961. [22] ZStL 208 AR-Z 252/59 (Belzec Case), p. 1370. Search Warrant No. 7 Gs 1116/61, dated 7.7.1961.    Back Page 9 Forward
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