Erhard Kroeger or “Kröger” (24 March 1905, Riga - 28 September 1987) was a Latvian-born Baltic German SS officer involved in the resettlement of Baltic Germans before World War II, and later attached to General Vlasov and the German sponsored Russian Liberation Army of World War II.
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Erhard Kroeger grew up in Riga, Latvia, a member of the historic German minority there. In his youth he played ice hockey with Wilfried Strik-Strikfeldt. Kroeger made his name as an SS activist challenging the conservative Baltic German leadership of Wilhelm von Rüdiger and trying to Nazify the Latvian German minority before 1939.
“In July 1937 the new VOMI chief ordered Eric Mundel, who in 1935 had replaced Rüdiger as the leader of the Volksgemeinschaft [Latvian German minority association], to bring Kröger into the leadership.”[1]
At the height of the Sudetenland crisis and Hitler’s guarantees that he had no further territorial interests in Europe : “Kröger.…without authorization from Berlin, assured his followers that the Fuhrer had not abandoned them, implying that revision remained a possibility.”[2]
SS Oberführer Kroeger was admonished by his SS and VOMI superiors and visited Berlin in September 1939 where he was secretly advised of the Nazi plans to trade Latvia and Estonia to Stalin. In a post-war document he related :
“The only thing that rushed through my mind was the salvation of an essential and closely linked ethnic group which, it seemed to me, was at this moment already threatened with certain destruction without even knowing it.”[3]
At a meeting with Heinrich Himmler Kroeger stressed the serious hostility and animosity of the Communists to the Baltic Germans following the Russian civil war.
“The next day Himmler received him for a second time. He had spoken to Hitler, and he told Kroeger that “the Fuhrer agreed with the evacuation of the Baltic German community as a whole, but stipulated that this should be done with the approval of the Soviet government.” Himmler also reported that the Baltic Germans were to be settled in those parts of Poland annexed to the Reich, including Posen and West Prussia.”[4]
Erhard Kroeger then worked extremely hard to ensure as many as 60,000 Baltic Germans were allowed to leave Estonia and Latvia over the autumn of 1939 to be settled in Germany.
Following the Nazi attack on Soviet Union SS-Sturmbannführer Erhard Kröger was engaged in security details between June and November 1941, as part of an Einsatzgruppen.
In 1944 the SS took an interest in General Andrey Vlasov and his Russian Liberation Movement and in summer the head of the SS main leadership office, SS Obergruppenführer Gottlob Berger, specifically appointed Kroeger as a formal liaison officer between Vlasov and the SS.[5]
At war's end dived Kroeger: Until 1962 he lived under assumed names in the Federal Republic of Germany, Switzerland and in Bologna. After the District Court of Wuppertal on 10 January 1962 had an arrest warrant on suspicion Kroeger, during the war have been involved in massacres to be issued, he was on 31 Steinmaur Sünikon-December 1965 in the canton of Zurich arrested. The Land of North Rhine-Westphalia then made a formal extradition request. Kroeger argued that the killings were politically motivated and would therefore form after the Swiss law does not auslieferungswürdigen event. The Swiss Federal Court rejected this argument, however, from and agreed to his extradition. After the extradition to Germany and the issuance of a second arrest warrant on 22 February 1966 was Kroeger, 17 May 1966 until 5 October 1967 held in custody. [2] On 31 Kroeger was sentenced in July 1969 by the District Court of Tuebingen to three years and four months in prison. [3] The method was the subject of the mass killing of Jews in Western Ukraine between June 1941 and February 1942.