Richard Glucks

As described by Rudolf Höss

Richard Glucks Biography

Richard Glucks was born on the 22 April 1889 and he served as an officer in World War One and joined the Nazi Party relatively late. Nevertheless, he was an SS Brigadier General before the start of the Second World War, and was appointed Inspector of Concentration Camps in autumn 1939.

From 1942 on, the Concentration Camps Inspectorate formed one of the four large divisions of the WVHA with a broad purview. Glucks had authority over all the Camp Commandants and was the person who gave the monthly orders for carrying out the “Final Solution” and “extermination through labour.”

Thus, Glucks was one of the key figures of the concentration camp system. Together with Himmler and Pohl, he decided how many of the deported Jews were to be killed and determined that the hair of the murdered people was to be collected and made into “hair-yarn stockings for U-boat crews and hair-felt stockings for the railroad.”

In 1943, Glucks was promoted to Major General of the Waffen –SS. After the end of the war, in May 1945, he is thought to have committed suicide in the Flensburg Naval Hospital, where he was supposedly being treated for a shock he had suffered in a bombing.

SS Gruppenfuhrer Richard Glucks was the second Inspector of Concentration Camps

“Glucks originally came from Dusseldorf and had spent several years before the First World War in the Argentine. When war broke out he got through the British control by smuggling himself on board a Norwegian ship and eventually reported for military service.

He served throughout the war as an artillery officer, after the war he was appointed a liaison officer with the armistice commission, and later on joined a Freikorps in the Ruhr district. Up to the time when Hitler assumed power, he was engaged in business activities.

Glucks was one of the early members of the Party and the SS. In the SS he first spent some years as a staff officer in the Senior Sector West, after which he commanded a regiment of the general SS in Schneidenmuhl. In 1936 he joined Eicke as a staff officer on the Concentration Camp Inspectorate.

Gluck’s attitude of mind was that of the typical office worker who has no knowledge of practical matters. He imagined that he could direct everything from his office desk. Under Eicke, he scarcely made his presence felt in connection with the camps, and the occasional visits which he paid to individual concentration camps, in Eicke’s company, had no practical effect on him, for he saw and learnt nothing.

Nor had he any influence with Eicke in this connection in his capacity as staff officer, for Eicke handled these matters himself, mostly through personal contact with the commandants during his inspections of the camps.

But Eicke held him in great esteem and Gluck’s opinions on questions dealing with personnel were practically decisive, to the disadvantage of the commandant’s staff. Various commandants had repeatedly tried to cold-shoulder Glucks, but his status with Eicke remained unassailable.

On the outbreak of war, as I have already stated, the active service guards were transferred for military duties and their places were taken by reservists from the general SS.

In addition, new formations of the Death’s Head units were built up from the younger age groups, which were intended at first to be used for strengthening the police and as occupation troops. Eicke became ‘General Inspector of the Death’s Head Formations and of the Concentration Camps,’ with Glucks as his chief of staff.

When Eicke was given the job of building up the Death’s Head Division, the general inspectorate of the Death Head formations was taken over by the administrative office of the Waffen-SS under Juttner and Glucks became Inspector of Concentration Camps and also subordinate to the administrative office (later the headquarters office) of the Waffen-SS. In 1941 the Inspectorate of Concentration Camps became incorporated in the Economic Administration Head Office as Department D.

The Reichsfuhrer SS never had any particular confidence in Glucks and had often considered employing him in a different capacity. But Eicke and Pohl always warmly supported him, and so he retained his position as Inspector.

Read more here: http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/holoprelude/glucks.html

The Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team
www.HolocaustResearchProject.org

Copyright Carmelo Lisciotto H.E.A.R.T 2009