Otto Goldapp
First Lieutenant Otto Hugo Goldapp
Otto Hugo Goldapp (*2 January 1898 in Szargitten / †1984, East Prussia) was a member of the Schutzpolizei (protection police) and a police battalion on former Soviet territory and played a decisive role in the "Aktion 1005" in Maly Trascjanec.
Goldapp attended elementary school in his birthplace from the age of 6 to 14 and then worked on his father's farm until he was drafted as a soldier for the First World War.1 He returned in 1919 and served in a gendarmerie unit in Tilsit in the winter of 1919/20. From June 1920 Goldapp was an official at various police stations in Germany. In 1923 he was transferred to the police in Hamburg, where he said he remained until his retirement in 1958.2
From March to August 1939 Goldapp, who was a member of the NSDAP with retroactive effect from April 1937, worked as a police officer in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.3 From September to November 1940, according to his own statement, Otto Goldapp was on duty in German-occupied Poland as a member of Police Battalion 305.4
At the beginning of October 1943, Otto Goldapp was transferred to Belarus with his police unit: Via Minsk he arrived at Maly Trascjanec, where he met SS-Hauptsturmführer Max Krahner. In an interrogation by the Hamburg public prosecutor's office in February 1960, Goldapp described his first impressions of the former SD camp near Maly Trascjanec:5
"[...] In addition, there were about 2 - 3 barracks a little apart and fenced in, in which about 50 - 60 Jews were located [...]. The Jews there walked around freely and were not guarded. In any case, I did not see any guards […]”.6
Protocol of Otto Goldapp’s interrogation of 30 January 1959
In Maly Trascjanec, Otto Goldapp and his unit were deployed on the orders of SS Hauptsturmführer Arthur Harder as guards during "Aktion 1005" in the Blahaǔščyna forest. Contrary to Goldapp's description of having played a rather passive role in the "exhumation action", he was accused in witness testimonies of having been involved in the murder of the prisoners of the labour commandos by shooting and gassing.7
Otto Goldapp spent at least four weeks on duty exhuming the mass graves in the forest of Blahaǔščyna and remained in Maly Trascjanec until Christmas 1943. After his deployment in Blahaǔščyna, Goldapp was involved in further "exhumation operations" in Pinsk and near Brest-Litovsk.
Goldapp met the end of the war in Klagenfurt, where he was transferred later during the war. Here, according to his own statement, he took over object protection tasks for the gendarmerie and returned to the police service in Hamburg after May 1945.8
Responsible for content: Johanna Schweppe, Frank Wobig
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1 Vgl. StAnw Hamburg 213-12 0597-001, S. 15; 36 u. 221.
2 Cf. ibid., pp. 24 and 28.
3 Cf. ibid.
4 Cf. ibid., pp. 24ff and 36.
5 Cf. ibid., p. 37.
6 ibid.
7 Cf. ibid., pp. 36ff and 41.
8 Cf. ibid., pp. 36ff and 39f.