Heinrich Reiser | |
|---|---|
 Reiser taken in 2 August 1955 | |
| Born | 17 October 1899 |
| Died | after 1963 |
| Allegiance | Nazi party |
| Service | Gestapo |
Heinrich Josef Reiser[1] (17 October 1899 in Ehingen; after 1963) was a German Nazi war criminal, SS officer as well as a member of the Gestapo and the SD. Reiser fought in World War I and was captured. After he was released, he became an electrician and worked in several countries including Brazil. When he returned to Germany in 1931, he became part of the rise of Nazism, his real career, first becoming an SS officer in 1932 and then a Gestapo officer where he worked to round up Jews and communists in Karlsruhe area in the late interwar period and then later in the Czech Republic after the war started. In 1940, he was sent to Paris to work in the Sonderkommando Rote Kapelle. In 1943, Reiser was in line to become the commanding officer of the Sonderkommando Rote Kapelle as a replacement for Karl Giering. He briefly held the position when Giering fell ill but was later transferred back to the Karlsruhe Gestapo[2] towards the end of World War II where he was involved in the repression of forced foreign labourers.[3] From 1950 onward, he was an intelligence officer of the Gehlen Organization and the resulting Federal Intelligence Service. He became a major proponent for the continued existence of anti-Nazi resistance organisations in West Germany after the war, including Red Orchestra ("Rote Kapelle")[4] and Schwarze Kapelle ("Black Orchestra"). This was an attempt to correct the perceived misperceptions of the Gestapo as a criminal organisation by identifying and purging former opponents of the Nazi regime from German public life and public opinion, in operations that were fully supported by the Gehlen organisation.[5]
- ^ Goda 2005, pp. 293–316.
- ^ Kesaris 1979, p. 340.
- ^ Kaňák, Vajskebr & Zumr 2021, pp. 230–260.
- ^ O'Sullivan 2010, p. 275.
- ^ Sälter 2016b, p. 388.