The beginning Two years and eight months after
Hitler's rise to power and nearly three years after his leave-taking of the army, on 1 October 1935, Braemer then aged 52 joined the
SS with the rank of
Standartenführer (regiment leader), and in this rank was posted as a "training consultant" to the General Staff of the
SS circuit or Ober­abschnitt known as
command Nord (not an army post), where he stayed until 15 April 1936, to be transferred to the
Ober­abschnitt Nordwest for one month, before being moved again to the
Oberabschnitt Nordsee, where he stayed until 1 July 1938. All three SS districts in question were at the time headquartered at
Altona in
Hamburg. In the course of his SS service Braemer gained two promotions, ultimately to
Bri­ga­de­füh­rer, the fourth-highest rank in the SS, a remarkably quick climb accomplished in less than 2 years and 9 months since joining the ranks. The latter rank of
Brigadeführer was conferred on him only after he had become member of the Nazi party sometime in 1937 (the exact date of his joining the
NSDAP has not been established) with the membership number 4012329. On 1 July 1938 Braemer was appointed to the rank of
Generalmajor of the
Wehrmacht, the same rank he last held in the Reichswehr, and was placed by the SS once again at the disposal of the army. At the time of mobilization mounted in preparation for the
Nazi attack on Poland Braemer was appointed as the Commander of the 580th Army Rear Area, a position abbreviated to "
Korück 580". He received that command on 26 August 1939, six days before the
invasion of Poland. Four days after becoming Korück 580, on 30 August 1939, Braemer gave the order for the formation of the
concentration camp at
Liepe, 8 kilometres west of the current German-Polish border, which camp was established on 1 September 1939, the first day of the
Second World War. As Korück 580 Braemer was also responsible for the creation of the camps located at Łopienek (Ruhental) and other localities.
Criminal activities Poland 's
Old Market Square of civilians randomly caught in a street
roundup (
łapanka in Polish) on 9 September 1939 (historical photo from ). 's Old Market Square of civilians randomly caught in a street roundup on 9 September 1939, which was part of
Bloody Sunday (historical photo from ). Shortly after the
strike on Poland Braemer found himself with the Nazi invasion force in the Polish region of
Cuyavia, where according to latest scholarship he was appointed by the
4th German Army in his capacity as Korück 580 the commandant of the northern Polish city of
Bydgoszcz, a position in which he formally styled himself in his written proclamations as the "chief in
executive authority" (
Inhaber der vollziehenden Gewalt in Bromberg). His short stint as the supremo of Bydgoszcz lasted with effect from 5 September 1939 some earlier published sources cite the date of 8 September 1939 for his assumption of this post. The dates are significant, as his appearance on the Bydgoszcz stage is said in some sources to have lasted for a total of only six days (although the far limit of his "tour of duty" is in fact uncertain). Within just
four days of Braemer's beginning to exercise his "executive authority" he became personally responsible for the murder of 370 Polish civilians in Bydgoszcz in the large-scale
pacification operations he ordered (the so-called
säuberungsaktionen or "cleanup operations"). These included the public execution by a firing squad in the city's historic
Old Market Square on 9 September 1939 of a large group of civilians randomly rounded up in the streets a short while earlier in the day (see the historical photographs to the right), a crime which provoked in the ensuing months a protest from the
Vatican (as the victims included
Catholic priests: see
Piotr Szarek). By 8 September 1939 the total number of civilian victims of Bydgoszcz executions grew to 200400 by various estimates; on 9 September 1939 another 120 were shot. The next day, 10 September 1939, in a Braemer-ordered raid on the working-class Bydgoszcz neighbourhood of "Swedish Heights" (
Szwederowo) between 120 and 200 civilians were killed, while another public execution staged on that day in the centrally located Old Market Square claimed 20 victims. It is said that the mass murders of civilians in Bydgoszcz went on at such a pace that Braemer, although a "competent commandant", eventually lost all count of how many had been killed and he allowed the slaughter to continue. Apparently the level of atrocities was such that on occasion it produced qualms of conscience in his own executioners, but never in Braemer himself (as evidenced by his entries in the personal diary he kept). While carrying out his actions against the townsfolk of Bydgoszcz, in reprisal for the stiff resistance that the civilian population put up against the German invaders after the Polish armed forces withdrew from the city on 4 September 1939, Braemer instituted at the same time
ethnic cleansing policies against the Jewish minority of the town (which numbered about 2,000 before the War), being able as a result to report on 14 November 1939, in the 11th week of the war, that "the Jewish question does not arise in Bydgoszcz... because during the
säuberungsaktionen all the Jews who did not deem it advisable to flee from the city beforehand were eliminated". The Bydgoszcz massacres are the primary reason for which some German historians have considered Braemer an "extremist" among the Nazi
Wehrmacht's corps of generals. Others have described him as a "fanatical Nazi" who resorted to (by then, i.e. in September 1939) "unheard-of brutality". Little is known of Braemer's activities immediately following his disappearance from the Bydgoszcz scene, a community on which he left an indelible mark, and there is no clear record of his departure as such. Historians (such as
Stani­sław Na­wro­cki) have merely noted that he did not play any role in the occupation of the historical region of
Greater Poland (Wielkopolska), i.e. of the lands to the
west of Cuyavia where Bydgoszcz is located, thereby suggesting that his activities were of interest to researchers in other areas. It is on record, however, that Braemer continued as Korück 580 (a position which put him in charge of
"law and order" in areas under
Nazi occupation) for a total of nearly 21 months until 19 May 1941. After his appointment as Korück 580 came to an end on 19 May 1941, Braemer spent 35 days, until 24 June 1941, officially mothballed in the
füh­rer­re­ser­ve or officers' reserve pool within the German Army High Command (
Oberkommando des Heeres) as his new assignment was being prepared for him.
The Baltic and Byelorussia Two days after the commencement of the
Operation Barbarossa (the German attack on the
Soviet Union), Braemer was appointed the
Wehr­macht­befehls­haber or supreme military commander of the so-called
Reichskommissariat Ostland, a Nazi régime established in the combined occupied territory of the
Baltic states, parts of northeastern
Poland and western
Byelo­russia, headquartered in
Riga, the capital of
Latvia (again in the general region of his birth, 380 km to the north-east of his native Königsberg). He was to hold this office during the period of about 2 years and 10 months between 24 June 1941 and 20 April 1944. In some reports his appointment to this post was already finalized in the planning stages on 27 May 1941. In this capacity Braemer was heavily implicated in the mass murder of the Jewish population in the territories under his command. He was responsible for, among other things, promulgating legislation that laid the legal and operational groundwork on the basis of which whole Jewish communities numbering thousands of people were exterminated in the Holocaust. Thus for example, on 25 September 1941 Braemer issued his "Guidelines for Military Security and Maintenance of Quiet and Order" which specifically stipulated the "imperative elimination" of, among others, "Jews and philosemitic elements (
judenfreundliche Kreise)". The pivotal role that Braemer played in the Holocaust of the Jewish populations in Byelorussia has been described by the German historian
Hannes Heer. Braemer has been shown to possess the notorious distinction of having originated the first annihilation operations against the
Jewish ghettos in ByeloRussia: the
Smilavichy ghetto, whose 1,338 inhabitants were murdered on 14 October 1941; the
Koidanovo ghetto, with its 1,000 victims on 21 October 1941; followed by the murder of 5,900 people in the predominantly Jewish town of
Slutsk on 27 and 28 October 1941 in a massacre sometimes euphemistically referred to as the "
Slutsk Affair" and that just to begin with. Braemer's service in the
Ostland was considered so meritorious by both the Wehrmacht and the SS that he was rewarded with two military promotions,
viz., to
Ge­ne­ral­leut­nant (a rank roughly corresponding to
major-general) on 1 July 1941, just a week after arrival, and later, 14 months into his tour of duty, on 1 September 1942, as a reward for a job well done, to
Ge­ne­ral der Ka­val­le­rie z.v. ("general of the cavalry", the second-highest general officer rank roughly equivalent to
lieutenant general, a "prestigious" cachet within the echelons of the German military); and then again on the last day of his assignment with an SS promotion to the rank of
Grup­pen­füh­rer, the third-highest SS rank overall.
Goebbels went so far as to discuss Braemer's "political ideas" in his
diaries (entry for 24 November 1941).
Conflict with Lohse Nazi approval of Braemer was not universal, however. During his tenure as the
Wehrmachtbefehlshaber or territorial military commander of the
Reichskommissariat Ostland, Braemer had (presumably) an immediate superior in the person of
Reichskommissar (and
Gauleiter)
Hinrich Lohse, the overall governor of the
Ostland who was likewise headquartered in Riga, Latvia. While Lohse's slapping of Braemer on the face in public at the
Riga Opera House during the banquet celebrating
Hitler's birthday on 20 April 1944 probably should not be made too much of, it is indicative nonetheless of the tensions simmering within the Nazi leadership in the
Ostland and points at least to the possibility that even to high-ranking (but non-Wehrmacht and non-SS) Nazis like Lohse the methods used by Braemer in the implementation of the Holocaust might have seemed objectionable (if only on economic grounds, by depriving his administration of needed workforce), even if the event has also been put down to the incipient panic in the face of looming defeat or to personal rivalries between two Nazi
apparatchiks vying for a position of pre-eminence within the
Ostland bureaucracy. In some reports the punch from Lohse (meted out in response to Braemer's applying to Lohse the unparliamentary epithet of
dummes Luder "silly rotter") is said literally to have knocked Braemer to the ground. But the knockout blow appears to have been invested with figurative significance as well, as the incident marks Braemer's exit from the scene in Riga (on orders from the Wehrmacht which removed him that very day not only from the commandership of the
Ostland but from active duty altogether) and, conversely, his
promotion by the SS to the aforementioned higher rank of
gruppenführer on the same day. Braemer was 61-years' old at the time.
The end game After his retirement on 20 April 1944 from the position of
Wehrmachtbefehlshaber in the
Ostland an office to which Braemer was first appointed on 24 June 1941 but which from 30 January 1942 onwards he had been holding concurrently with his (second) SS posting on the command of
Oberabschnitt Nord­see, an SS beat headquartered at
Altona near
Hamburg he continued on active duty in the latter (non-army) post for 6 months and 3 weeks longer, until 9 November 1944, even while being rusticated by the army to the
Führerreserve or officers' reserve pool within the
German Army High Command (
Oberkommando des Heeres) with effect from 20 April 1944. After nearly nine months in reserve, on 17 January 1945 Braemer was suddenly recalled by the Wehrmacht to active duty as a so-called "general on special assignment" (
General zur besonderen Verwendung) and in that capacity posted to the Military District Command I at Königsberg, his native place (
Wehr­kreis I (Königs­berg); 1722 January 1945), only to shift after just
five days doubtless in connection with the
tightening vice grip by the
Soviet forces investing the city to the Military District Command II at Stettin in Western Pomerania (
Wehrkreis II (Stettin)), some 480 kilometres (overland) away from Königsberg and its
Eastern front, where he spent the following 19 days in a similar capacity (as a "general on special assignment") between 22 January and 10 February 1945. Finally, during the ensuing 22 days between 10 February and 4 March 1945 Braemer exercised (
ersatz) "military authority" as a
Korück (for definition,
see above) or
rear-army-area commander for the Wehrmacht's
11th Army a largely fictitious formation contrived on paper by
Himmler for the sake of providing employment to the rapidly increasing cadre of unemployed SS functionaries (see
11th SS Panzer Army) before being relegated once more and for the last time to the
Führerreserve of the German Army High Command on 4 March 1945, two months before
the end of the War. == Aftermath ==