Background
Heinrich Lohse was born on 2 September 1896 in Mühlenbarbek.
Heinrich Lohse was born on 2 September 1896 in Mühlenbarbek.
He was appointed Gauleiter of Schleswig-Holstein from 1925 and represented the same electoral district as Nazi member of the Reichstag after 12 November 1933. Oberprasident of Schleswig-Holstein and Prussian State Councillor from 1933, Lohse was made SA-Gruppenfuhrer in February 1934. From 1941 to 1944 Lohse was Reich Kommissar, Ostland, with his headquarters in Riga during the period when the ‘Final Solution' was carried out in the Baltic States and Belarus with the utmost brutality.
According to his secret instructions on 27 July 1941, the inmates of the ghettoes under his jurisdiction were to receive ‘only the amount of food that the rest of the population could spare and in no case more than was sufficient to sustain life’. His declared object was to safeguard minimal measures ‘until such time as the more intensive measures for the “Final Solution” can be put into effect’. Lohse was nonetheless sufficiently disturbed by the mass shootings and sustained pogroms carried out in the Vilna ghetto and other places to query on 15 November 1941 whether ‘all Jews, regardless of age or sex, or their usefulness to the economy [for instance, skilled workers in the Wehrmacht’s ordnance factories) were to be liquidated'. The reply which came from the Ministry of Eastern Territories on 18 December 1941 made it clear that ‘the demands of the economy be ignored’ and referred Lohse to the Higher SS and Police Leaders.
For all his concern about irreplaceable Jewish workers, Lohse was not the man openly to challenge the authority of Himmler’s police. After the war, Lohse was tried by a British court and sentenced in January 1948 to ten years’ penal servitude. He was freed in February 1951 because of ill-health and was able to draw a pension from the local authorities in Schleswig-Holstein. Under parliamentary pressure, the Bonn government withdrew the pension, not because of war crimes committed in Russia but because Lohse was adjudged to have been an enemy of democracy during his term as district leader of Schleswig-Holstein.
He died in his home town of Muhlenbarbek bei Steinburg in Schleswig-Holstein on 25 February 1964.