Erich Isselhorst

Erich Isselhorst (5 February 1906 – 23 February 1948) was a member of the Schutzstaffel (SS) before and during World War II, attaining the rank of SS-Standartenführer.

Between 1942 and 1943, during the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Isselhorst was an Einsatzkommando leader, tasked with the murdering of Jews in what is now Belarus and the Baltic states. Before and after, Isselhorst held posts within the Gestapo and SS in Cologne, Munich, Stuttgart and Strasbourg. In 1944, he participated in the Stalag Luft III murders.

After the war, he was tried and convicted for war crimes. He was sentenced to death by both British and French military courts and executed in France in 1948 was born in Saint-Avold, Lorraine, in 1906, which was then part of the German Empire but is now part of France. He was educated in Dortmund, Recklinghausen and Düsseldorf, where he graduated in 1925. He was employed in a rubber factory before studying law from 1927 to 1930 in Cologne and Munich. Isselhorst received his Doctor of Laws degree in 1931, once more returned to Düsseldorf, and joined the Nazi Party in August 1932.

Isselhorst ordered the execution of the captured British SAS members, as well as a number of French civilians, three French priests and four US airmen. The prisoners were taken over the Rhine river on trucks to Gaggenau on 21 November 1944. The leader of the execution commando, Karl Buck (reported as Karl Buck in "The Nazi Hunters", Damien Lewis, 2015), thought it unwise to leave mass graves of shot allied soldiers in an area so close to the front line. The prisoners were initially kept in a local jail but on or shortly after 25 November, they were taken to a local forest and shot in the head in a bomb crater. One prisoner attempted to escape, but was killed. Apart from Isselhorst, his second in command, Wilhelm Schneider was also executed for the war crime in January 1947. Buck was sentenced to death, but was reprieved and released in 1954.

In January 1945, Isselhorst was transferred to the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) in Berlin, where he remained until April. Isselhorst was arrested by US forces on 12 May 1945 in southern Bavaria.

Execution Isselhorst was sentenced to death by a British military court in June 1946 for the murder of British POWs, but handed over to the French. He was sentenced to death in May 1947 by a French military tribunal, and executed in Strasbourg on 23 February 1948.