The Katzmann Report

By Paul R. Bartrop, Professor Emeritus of History, Florida Gulf Coast University

Eighty years ago this month, on June 30, 1943, Fritz Katzmann, a German SS and Police Leader, submitted a report that is arguably one of the most important pieces of evidence relating to the Nazis during the Holocaust, as it pertained to a single district. During the war years, Katzmann perpetrated the Holocaust in several places: the cities of Kattowitz (Katowice), Radom, Lemberg (Lvov, Lviv) and Danzig (Gdansk), as well as throughout the entire District of Galicia in that part of occupied Poland known to the Nazis as the Generalgovernment.

Katzmann was born on May 6, 1906, joining the Nazi paramilitary SA organization in December 1927 at the young age of 21. He joined the Nazi party in September 1928 and transferred from the SA to the SS on July 1, 1930. On Aug. 20, 1931, he was commissioned as an SS- Untersturmführer (second lieutenant) and, on Dec. 1, 1932, was promoted to SS- Hauptsturmführer (captain), before further promotions in April 1933 (SS- Sturmbannführer , or major) and SS- Obersturmbannführer (lieutenant colonel) on Jan. 30, 1934 — the first anniversary of Hitler’s ascent to office. Further promotions accrued throughout the 1930s, combined with several command positions in various districts.

With the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, Katzmann became the first SS and Police Leader (SSPF) of occupied Radom. Here, in the spring of 1940, he set up the Radom ghetto, accompanied by a brutal reign for the tens of thousands of Jews living there.

Following Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, Katzmann became SS and Police Leader for the District of Galicia on August 8, 1941, based in Lvov (Lviv, then called Lemberg).

In November 1941, Katzmann ordered that 80,000 Jews be confined to the Lvov ghetto. In the city outskirts, he also established the Janowska concentration camp. The number of those killed at Janowska has been a matter of dispute, ranging from the unlikely Soviet figure of up to 500,000, to a more realistic (though horrible, nevertheless) number estimated at between 35,000 and 40,000. It has been further approximated that up to 60,000 Jews were murdered overall on Katzmann’s command by the end of 1941. In 1942, Katzmann organized further transports that took Jews from Lvov to the death camp of Bełżec.

Katzmann was promoted to SSGruppenführer and lieutenant general of police on Jan. 30, 1943. During the first half of 1943, he organized the death of over 140,000 Jews within the overall vicinity of Galicia.

On June 30, 1943, just over two years after arriving in Lvov, Katzmann delivered what was effectively one of the most important testimonies relating to the extermination process in Poland and the extermination of Polish Jews during the Holocaust. Entitled Lösung der Judenfrage im Distrikt Galizien (The Solution of the Jewish Question in the District of Galicia), it was a nicely crafted report bound in leather, addressed to Katzmann’s superior based in Kraków, SS- Obergruppenführer Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger. Documenting and summarizing Aktion Reinhard in Galicia up to that point of the year, the report chronicled that by June 27, 1943, a total of 434,329 Jews had been expelled (read murdered), and that the district of Galicia was now free of Jews ( Judenrein ) — except for those who were under Krüger’s direct control. The 62-page report was illustrated lavishly with photographs detailing how Nazi antisemitic persecution took place and was carried into action.

Katzmann wrote his report in Berlin after returning to Germany from Poland and receiving a new assignment on April 20, 1943. With Galicia Judenrein , Katzmann’s job was seen to be completed and he was transferred elsewhere.

Between April 20, 1943 and May 8, 1945, he was SS commander of Military District XX (Vistula/Danzig/West Prussia), headquartered in Danzig. On July 1, 1944, he was promoted to SS- Obergruppenführer in the Waffen-SS and oversaw the organization of gas chambers and crematoria at Stutthof concentration camp, where tens of thousands more Jews were murdered. He was given the assignment of liquidating the Stutthof camp and all its 105 sub-camps, ahead of the advancing Red Army. Gassing with Zyklon B at Stutthof had begun already in June.

Katzmann experienced the end of the war on the island of Fehmarn, off the coast of Schleswig. He escaped immediate prosecution, living for years under a false identity in Württemberg as “Bruno Albrecht.” In March 1956, Bruno Albrecht was registered in Darmstadt, where his family lived, but a planned transfer to Argentina did not materialize owing to Katzmann’s ill health at that time. He died on Sept. 19, 1957 in the Alice Hospital in Darmstadt.

The Katzmann Report was used as evidence in the Nuremberg Trials (USA No. L-18, Exhibit-277) and numerous other proceedings against war criminals abroad. Various editions were published after the war, including one that was heavily edited by communist authorities in Poland. A full uncensored text of the report was finally published in 2009.

Paul R. Bartrop is Professor Emeritus of History and the former Director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Research at Florida Gulf Coast University.