Background
Gottlob Berger was born on 16 July 1896 in Gorstetten, Germany.
Gottlob Berger was born on 16 July 1896 in Gorstetten, Germany.
He attended Volksschule (elementary school) and Realschule (junior high school) and then teacher training in Nürtingen. He volunteered for military service at the beginning of World War I, and rose to the rank of Leutnant in the infantry by the time of his discharge in 1919.
Berger became a physical education instructor and coach, and was a champion runner, swimmer, and boxer. He also joined the Black Reichswehr. establishing arms depots and getting interested in military affairs. As an early member of the Brownshirts (SA), Berger showed a Machiavellian aptitude for rising in the Nazi hierarchy.
Appointed SS Obergruppenfuehrer on 1 July 1940, he spent the next five years as one of Himmler’s principal lieutenants, heading the SS administrative office (Hauptamt) and serving as CofS for the VVaffen-SS, where he showed genius as a recruiter. One particular triumph at a time of man power shortage was to form a unit of convicted poachers. Under his longtime friend and protege Oskar Dirlewanger, a twice-condemned pedophile, the poachers became the NCO cadre of the infamous Dirlewanger brigade (below). Berger also was an adviser to Alfred Rosenberg and a major link between him and Himmler after July 1942, when these men had overlapping authority in the USSR. For some months Berger directed all operations in the occupied Eastern Territories. He was elected to the Reichstag in Aug 1943 from the district of Duesseldorf East. Seeing visions of postwar European unity, Berger was president of the German-Croat Society and the German- Flemish Study Group.
The portly Swabian helped establish the puppet state of Slovakia, and during the month of Sep 1944 he was SS chief in Prague with responsibility for extreme pacification efforts that had become necessary. Murderously effective, he brought in the SS Sondcrkommando Dirlewanger, which meanwhile had been used by Bach-Zelewski in Warsaw.
As the end approached and some Nazi leaders worried about war crimes charges, Schel-Lenberg brought Berger into a plan to save Jews and foreign internees from last-moment extermination and to block Kaltgnbrunner from doing this. The deadly Berger has been characterized as “a simple, elementary character, full of honest good nature, indefinite garrulity, and unsophisticated emotion”. So the SS chieftain was all the more befuddled by his instructions on what to do with leaders of a separatist threat in Bavaria and Austria and with foreign internees who might be valuable as hostages, the so-called Prominente. In a final discussion of the problems, the fuehrer shouted “Shoot them all! Shoot them all!” Berger did not understand whether, as chief of the POW administration, he should shoot all the separatists, all the internees, or all of the above. “Berger's accounts of his activities in these last days are all characterized by indistinct and sometimes inconsistent loquacity” (ibid.). It appears that he ended up taking considerable personal risk in saving the hostages (the Niederdorf Group) at the last moment. Several eyewitness accounts put him on the scene as the adventure reached its happy climax, but Berger is not mentioned in the memoirs of Fey von Hassel, who was there. Berger was sentenced 2 Apr 1949 at Nuremberg to 25 years at hard labor for killing Jews. After serving six and a half years of a commuted 10-year sentence, he was freed at the end of 1951. He died 5 Jan 1975 at Gerstetten.
As head of the administrative office of the SS (SS-FIauptarnt) Berger proved himself a tough and ruthless organizer.