Wolf-Heinrich Graf von Helldorf

Wolf-Heinrich Graf von Helldorf (born 14 October 1896 in Merseburg, died 15 August 1944 in Berlin) was a leading figure in the Nazi regime, being appointed by the Nazis as Police-President of Berlin, a post in which he remained for the last decade of his life. He was closely allied with Dr Josef Goebbels, Gauleiter of Berlin and Minister for Propaganda and Public Enlightenment. In July 1944 Helldorf sided with the anti-Hitler movement in their attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler and thus paradoxically earned a place in history as a German resistance fighter against the Nazi régime. As chief of the Berlin Police, Helldorf played an instrumental role in the harassment and plundering of Berlin's Jewish population in the early and mid 1930s. Joseph Goebbels mentioned in his diary on July 2, 1938, that "...Helldorf wants to construct a Jewish ghetto in Berlin. The rich Jews will be required to fund its construction." Helldorf was the organisational brains behind the arson and looting of Berlin's synagogues and Jewish businesses in the Kristallnacht pogroms of November 1938.

A landowner's son, Helldorf served as a lieutenant from 1915 in the First World War, and from 1918 was a member of a number of Freikorps, among them the well-known "Freikorps Roßbach". In 1920, he took part in the so-called Kapp Putsch, and thereafter had to flee to Italy and stay there for several months.

Between 1921 and 1928, Helldorf tried to distance himself from politics, and worked in farming.

Nevertheless, from 1924 to 1928, and again later in 1932, he was a member of state parliament ("Mitglied des Landtages"), first for the National Socialist Freedom Party (NSFP) in Prussia, and from 1925 for the NSDAP. In 1932, Helldorf was their factional chairman. According to Josef Goebbels diaries Von Helldorf did not join the NSDAP until 1930.

Already by 1931, he had joined the SA, and functioned as an SA leader in Berlin. The scope of his work got bigger in 1933 when he was also given responsibility for the SS's Berlin-Brandenburg leadership. At the same time, he was also elected to the Reichstag.

In March of the same year, he was named Police President of Potsdam, and from July 1935, he took on the same function in Berlin. Helldorf, an inveterate gambler, was notorious for arresting wealthy Jews, seizing their passports and then extorting huge bribes from them to secure their release and exit from Germany.

From 1938, it is asserted that Helldorf was in some form of communication with the military opposition to Hitler. For his participation in the July 20 Plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler at the Wolf's Lair in East Prussia, he was condemned by Roland Freisler at the "Volksgerichtshof" and later put to death at Plötzensee Prison. On Hitler's personal order Helldorf was made to watch the hanging of each of those sentenced to death, Witzleben et al, before being the last to be hanged.

Helldorf used his office for personal enrichment. In the Blomberg Affair, he first withheld from the top Nazi leadership evidence which contradicted the Gestapo's assertion that Blomberg's new wife had a criminal record for prostitution, then later leaked to the Wehrmacht leadership the same exculpatory evidence to create the implication that it had been in the possession of but withheld by the Gestapo. Similarly in the Fritsch affair, Helldorf possessed documentary information that would have exonerated Fritsch from the allegations that Fritsch paid for the services of homosexual prostitutes, it was a cavalry captain with a similar surname. After Fritsch's consequent dismissal as Commander in Chief of the Army, Helldorf then leaked to the army leadership the misidentification upon which Fritsch had been framed and disgraced.

On 20 July 1944, he supported the resistance action in Berlin through the police. His motivations are the subject of controversy, and may likely be traced more to opportunism than to any inner conviction on Helldorf's part.