Friedrich Hildebrandt

Who was Friedrich Hildebrandt?

Friedrich Hildebrandt was an SS Obergruppenführer, a Gauleiter and judged for war crimes in the time of the Third Reich.

He entered service in the German Army on 19 April 1916 as a Kriegsfreiwilliger and subsequently assigned to Reserve-Infanterie-Regiment 24 on the Western Front. He was severely gassed in Flanders in 1917 and was wounded twice before the end of the war. During January 1919, he returned to Mecklenburg and joined the 1.Kompanie/Freikorps "von Brandis". He served there until his capture and imprisonment by the Red Army in Riga. He was later released and returned to Germany, being discharged from the German Army as a Vizefeldwebel in January, 1920. From March, 1920 to June, 1920, he was a member of the Sicherheitspolizei in Halle, with which he participated in the suppression of the "Kapp-Putsch" in March, 1920. In the wake of the Putsch, he was tried for excessive brutality against captured Spartakists in Osterfeld/Weissenfels. Although acquitted, he was dismissed from police service.

The farmworker had several positions bestowed upon him as an early NSDAP activist: Gauleiter and Reichsstatthalter of Mecklenburg and until 1937 also of Lübeck. In 1948, after sentencing in the Allied Dachau Trials, and specifically in the Airmen's Trial, for contraventions of the Hague Conventions, Friedrich Hildebrandt was put to death. Grandfather to Lawrence and Daniel Hildebrandt, and father to Lawrence Hildebrandt.