Wolf Heinrich Graf von Helldorff

Early life

Helldorff was born in Merseburg, a noble landowner's son, Helldorff served as a lieutenant from 1915 in the First World War. He was a member of the Prussian Parliament from 1924 to 1928, and again in 1932.

He was also friends with the stage magician and psychic, Erik Jan Hanussen, who constantly lent him money for his debts. "The count was always in debt, and his private life was a wreck. He was separated from his wife and was on bad terms with his mother after welching on his promise to pay her rent. Sometimes he was behind in his own rent. On one occasion he 'forgot' to pay for a new Mercedes. And he was always late paying his personal tailor and the trainer he hired for his racehorse. There were other debts as well, all from a gambling habit Helldorff couldn't shake. Luckily, he could always count on a handout from Hanussen. All he had to do was sign an IOU, which Hanussen would add to his growing pile of chits he kept safe in his apartment."

Berlin chief of police

He became a member of the National Socialist Freedom Party in 1924, which served as a legal front for the Nazi Party when it was banned after the Beer Hall Putsch. The NSFP was reabsorbed into the NSDAP in 1926 after the latter was made legal again, and by 1931 Helldorff had joined the SA, functioning as an SA leader in Berlin. The scope of his work got bigger in 1933 when he was also given responsibility for the SS's Berlin-Brandenburg leadership. At the same time, he was also elected to the Reichstag.

In March of the same year, he was named Police President of Potsdam, and from July 1935, he took on the same function in Berlin, a post in which he remained for the last decade of his life. Helldorff, an inveterate gambler, was notorious for arresting wealthy Jews, seizing their passports and then extorting huge bribes from them to secure their release and exit from Germany.

He was closely allied with Dr. Joseph Goebbels, Gauleiter of Berlin and Minister for Propaganda and Public Enlightenment. As chief of the Berlin Police, Helldorff played an instrumental role in the harassment and plundering of Berlin's Jewish population in the early and mid-1930s. Joseph Goebbels mentioned in his diary on 2 July 1938, that "...Helldorff wants to construct a Jewish ghetto in Berlin. The rich Jews will be required to fund its construction." Helldorff was the organizational brains behind the arson and looting of Berlin's synagogues and Jewish businesses in the Kristallnacht pogroms of November 1938. On 8 November 1938, the day Kristallnacht began, he was quoted in the New York Times saying, "as a result of a police activity in the last few weeks the entire Jewish population of Berlin had been disarmed".

20 July Plot

It is asserted that Helldorff was in some form of communication with the military opposition to Hitler as early as 1938. This is especially the case in Hans Gisevius' book "To the Bitter End", in which Helldorff plays an important role in Gisevius' circle of conspirators and anti-Nazis.

On 20 July 1944, he was in communication with the coup d'état plotters. His planned role in the plot was to keep his police from interfering with the military takeover, then to aid the new government.

The fact that Helldorff sided with the anti-Hitler movement in their attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler earned him a place in history as a German resistance fighter against the Nazi régime.

Trial and execution

For his involvement in the 20 July plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler at the Wolf's Lair in East Prussia, Helldorf was condemned by Roland Freisler at the Volksgerichtshof and later put to death at Plötzensee Prison. So enraged was Hitler at Helldorf's participation in the plot that he insisted Helldorf be forced to watch his fellow conspirators being hanged before his own execution.