Background
Helmut Knochen was born on 14 March 1910 in Magdeburg, the son of a school teacher.
Helmut Knochen was born on 14 March 1910 in Magdeburg, the son of a school teacher.
He studied at the Universities of Leipzig, Halle and Gottingen, obtaining his doctorate in 1935 with a thesis on an English playwright.
Knochen had joined the SA on 1 May 1933 and worked for a time as an editor in the official press agency of the Nazi Party before entering the Security Service (SD) in 1937. For the next three years he worked in Amt VI (SD Ausland), studying the refugee press in France, Belgium and Holland.
After his highly successful role in the kidnapping of two British intelligence agents at Venlo (for which he was awarded the Iron Cross, First and Second Class), the young SS Colonel was chosen to lead a special commando of about twenty men into France in June 1940. The task of this small unit, which was responsible to Himmler and Heydrich in Berlin, was to keep an eye on all enemies of the Nazi régime in France, chiefly Jews, communists. Freemasons, anti-fascists and German refugees. As Himmler’s representative in France, Knochen found himself hampered by the German military administration under General Otto von Stuelpnagel which fiercely opposed any encroachment on its domain.
Not until May 1942 did Knochen’s security police achieve its administrative autonomy. By this time in sole charge of the Gestapo-SD in France, the cultured, polished Knochen succeeded in reorganizing and extending his apparatus despite interference from Berlin, where Heinrich Muller, who had succeeded Heydrich, resented his subtle methods and independent temperament. Knochen remained at his post until 18 August 1944, when he was recalled to Berlin by Ernst Kaltenbrunner who stripped him of his rank, a decision later reversed by Himmler. Knochen hid after the war, but was eventually caught and sentenced to life imprisonment by a British court in June 1946 for the execution of captured airmen.
On 10 October 1946 he was handed over to the French authorities and, after a long internment, eventually appeared before a Parisian military tribunal which sentenced him to death on 9 October 1954. A presidential decree commuted the sentence to forced labour for life on 10 April 1958.
Knochen's sentence was once more reduced by a decree of 31 December 1959 to twenty years' penal servitude from the date of sentence. He was pardoned and repatriated by General de Gaulle early in 1963, retiring in comfort to Baden-Baden where he has been living on a West German government pension.