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 28) After producing the required documents, birth and marriage certificates, and completing the official forms, Ilse Hackenholt had next gone to the court in Berlin-Schöneberg, the district in which she and her husband were last registered with the police during the war. The court accepted her version of events and eventually entered in the court records the official date of Lorenz Hackenholt's death as 31 December 1945. At this point in the interrogation, Ilse Hackenholt explained that she had taken out the official declaration of her husband's death entirely of her own volition, and not at the instigation of anyone else. It had been her decision alone in order to claim a war widow's pension which she believed was due to her. She now had to admit that her original statement — claiming that she had last heard from her husband on the Eastern Front in 1944 or 1945, a statement made under oath in a court of law, had been knowingly false: This statement was untrue. As this interrogation has shown, I knew that my husband came home on leave from the south and had eventually returned there. Also, the letter for my birthday in November 1944 was not the last sign of life from my husband. I have explained in detail that my husband sent someone after the war. It is not necessary for me to say any more about this. She continued to insist that she had committed perjury in the Berlin court solely in order to obtain the war widow's pension. Her statement continues: When I am cautioned that there are depositions from several witnesses that my husband survived the war, then I can say that this could be correct, but it does not alter the fact that I have not seen him since the war and have heard nothing from him since the mysterious note. The SK III/a officers then asked her why she had never made any attempt through official channels to enquire about her husband's fate, either from the Red Cross or the German Armed Forces Information Service, both of which kept records of troops killed or missing in action. Ilse Hackenholt admitted to never having made any such enquiries, but not through indifference to her husband's fate — whether he was alive or dead — but for quite a different reason: It was known to me that my husband, through his membership of the SS, had had something to do with the Jews and the Belzec Jews' camp. For this reason I did not consider it feasible to pursue enquiries. This was the first time that Ilse Hackenholt had admitted that she had known all along about her husband's service in the Belzec extermination camp. Until now she had steadfastly insisted that she never knew exactly where her husband was stationed because their correspondence went through a Field Post Number which she could no longer recall. She then contradicted another part of her previous statement, made four months earlier in Leutkirch, in which she claimed that her marriage to Lorenz had 'never been very    Back Page 28 Forward
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