Heinrich Josef Reiser (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 towards the end of World War II where he was involved in the repression of forced foreign labourers. 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") 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.
Life Reiser was the son of a bricklayer. As a child, he was raised a Catholic and initially attended the local elementary school. Since the family lived under financially limited conditions, Reiser, who was considered gifted, was sent in May 1913 for further education to an Italian branch of the men's order of the Fratelli delle Scuole Cristiane in Favria near Turin. While there, in addition to Italian, he learned French and English languages. After Italy entered World War I on the side of the Entente, however, Reiser was expelled from the country as an undesirable foreigner.
In Germany, he was subject to the law that forced men between ages to 16 and 60 who had not been drafted, to work in the arms industry. The law was to ensure these men could be monitored within the industries they worked in to ensure they weren't fomenting any political upheaval. In May 1917, he was conscripted into the Imperial German Army and assigned to the 26th Dragoon and 19th Uhlan regiments. He was captured and taken as a prisoner of war to England and was released in 1919 due to injuries. He was in a military hospital until October 1920.
From January 1921, he established a position as a technical correspondent in Stuttgart. During the interwar period Reiser attended commercial school in Stuttgart, where he learned an electrical trade. Afterwards he lived and worked as a technician as well as a merchant abroad for several years, initially working in Austria, Yugoslavia and Hungary before moving to Brazil in 1927 to work as a self-employed electrical engineer. In 1931, he became unemployed as a result of the Great Depression in Latin America and returned to Germany penniless. While in Brazil, he learned to speak both Portuguese and Spanish. His attempt to become self-employed in Germany failed, and Reiser was only able to interrupt his unemployment occasionally with temporary jobs.
Career In September 1931, Reiser was inducted as a member of the SS (SS No. 21,844) and on 1 February 1932, of the Nazi Party (membership number 887,100). He resigned from the church. On 20 September 1933, as an unemployed SS man, he was assigned to the Land Office of the Political Police (Württembergisches Politisches Landespolizeiamt), later the Gestapo, in Stuttgart as an auxiliary police officer. This was the beginning of Reiser's "real career," according to historian Michael Stolle, since "he had understood in time to back the right horse in crisis-ridden Germany."
According to the social historian Christoph Rass, Reiser was active in the following years "in important positions of the Nazi power apparatus" despite his relatively low SS rank. In July 1935, as SS-Untersturmführer, he became deputy head of the Württemberg office of the Security Service of the Reichsführer SS. On the 13 September 1936 he was promoted to SS-Obersturmführer. He was subsequently transferred to Gestapo's headquarters in Karlsruhe. In 1936 Reiser was married and it was the expectation that all SS officers should have four children but the marriage remained childless. This combined with the fact that his education was lacking, severely limited his career prospects. To compensate, he decided to leave the Catholic church, denying the religious education he received as a child and adopted the Nazi ideology of belief in Gottgläubig, espousing a belief in god but not following any particular church. At the same time to increase his career prospects, he took an educational course for police in Berlin between 4 May 1938 to 1 February 1939. After the course he was promoted on 1 March 1939 to Kriminalkommissar. From March to September 1939, Reiser was then deputy head of the Jewish Department of the Gestapo in Karlsruhe. In 1939, Reiser was seconded to the Einsatzkommando "Stossberg" in Tábor, Czech Republic, in charge of the Gestapo field office there, holding the position until October 1940, as part of Operation Southeast Croatia. His responsibilities were the arrest of German emigrants, Czech anti-fascists, communists and those who were identified on the . Reiser was involved in the anti-German uprising in Tábor in mid-October 1939 that was brutally suppressed by the Gestapo and the SD.
In June 1940, Reiser was then transferred to occupied Paris, where he headed the "Abwehr-Kommunismus-Marxismus" (Defense Communism-Marxism) unit at the commander of the Security Police and SD as SS-Hauptsturmführer until 1942, under command of Helmut Knochen. Reiser responsibility was monitoring and destroy the activities of the French Communist Party. He also acted as a translator for the Sonderkommando. During this period, Reister was involved in the search for Franz Dahlem who was part of the German communist emigre groups who had fled Germany into France protection.
In the late summer of 1942, Reiser was ordered back to the Germany for assignment at the Gestapo HQ in Karlsruhe. However, he was only there for several weeks before being assigned in November 1942, to the Sonderkommando Rote Kapelle office in Paris, under command of SS Hauptsturmführer and Criminal Councillor Karl Giering in the investigation into the Red Orchestra espionage group.
Rote Kapelle
By the start of the war, Reiser had become a specialist in left-wing resistance organisations, for example the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). When he joined the Sonderkommando, he became Karl Giering's deputy. In June 1943, Reiser took command and management of the unit due to Giering being ill with throat cancer. In August 1943 he was turn replaced by Heinz Pannwitz who came from Berlin headquarters. Reiser was also directly involved in day-to-day operations of the unit. For example, he was part of the operations to arrest Hillel Katz who worked as a recruiter and personal assistant to Leopold Trepper and Henry Robinson, the leader of a Soviet espionage group in Europe that ran from 1937 to 1941. Reiser was promoted to SS-Hauptsturmführer by Heinrich Himmler personally for his work in the arrest of Robinson.
In September 1943, Reiser was ordered back to the Karlsruhe Gestapo station, where he was put in command of the counterintelligence unit due to a shortage of senior officials. As part of his remit he became the director of department IIE which administered the affairs of foreign workers in the region. In 1944, the counterintelligence unit was downgraded to a single desk, indicating its reduced function as the war was reaching it final stages, while department IIE was strengthened due to Nazi worries about an uprising by foreign forced labour, which in turn due to the approaching front, saw an increase in Nazi brutality towards forced labourers and the breakdown of legal norms. Reiser was ordered into the use of Sonderbehandlung, a euphemism for mass murder by Nazi functionaries and the SS of enemies of the Nazis and admitted after the war that he was involved in the killing of up to dozen people, although an enquiry after the war found the figure could be as high as ten times as much. Many were subject to “the most brutal torture” and others to “special treatment”, i.e. the murder of forced laborers.
In the summer of 1944, a group of Soviet prisoners of war escaped in the Karlsruhe region and formed a resistance organisation. Reiser formed a Sonderkommando Reiser to investigate and pursue the group. The unit was based in Ettlingen Prison, where it investigated hundreds of people, many of whom were sent to concentration camps. From September 1944, Reiser's health began to deteriorate in a condition that lasted until the end of the year, and he was removed from the service.
In January 1945, he was conscripted into the Wehrmacht and served in the 257th Infantry Division, in an operation to attack the advancing Allied front around Füssen. He was taken prisoner and released in the same year. He initially hid in Freiberg as the war came to its end. He was discovered and arrested in November 1947 and sent to an internment camp. In the autumn of 1948, Reiser was taken to France for interrogation and imprisoned at the Cherche-Midi prison. He was released on the 2 July 1949. Reiser was never brought to trial, although there was ample evidence for war crimes. There is speculation that this was due to him testifying against the Rote Kapelle and providing reports that he submitted to the French military intelligence agency Deuxième Bureau. Supposedly in 1948, while in French custody, Reiser had spread the rumours that the Red Orchestra was only "seemingly dead" and could be reactivated by the Soviet Union at any time. The British secret service and the American Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) then tried in vain to recruit Reiser as a "specialist".
After his release on the 2 July 1949, an investigation was initiated by the Karlsruhe public prosecutor's office on suspicion of mistreatment and murder of forced labourers, Reiser was imprisoned shortly afterwards, but released from custody in the spring of 1950 due to insufficient evidence. In the following year, the courts in Karlsruhe and Stuttgart dropped all prosecutions against Reiser. In the same year, Reiser passed the Denazification commission in Stuttgart.
Gehlen organisation