Henning Graf von Bassewitz Behr, 1900 - 1949 Higher SS and Police Commander in Military District X, 1943-1945 Himmler's last Statthalter in northern Germany © Bundesarchiv Georg Henning Graf von Bassewitz-Behr, a major landowner from Mecklenburg, was from 1943 to 1945 the last Higher SS and Police Commander (HSSPF) in Military District X (Hamburg, Schleswig-Holstein, and parts of modern Lower Saxony). Therefore, he represented various functions of the "SS Reich Chief and Head of the German Police" Heinrich Himmler, although with considerable room for manoeuvre. As HSSPF, Bassewitz-Behr was responsible for a multiple of murderous crimes in northern Germany during the final two years of the war; these included the deportations, the abuse and killing of foreign forced labourers, and the crimes committed during the concentration camp evacuations. Georg Henning Graf von Bassewitz-Behr was born on 21 March 1900 at his family's Lützow manor estate. The young nobleman took the First World War as a personal catastrophe in many ways. Similarly to Karl Kaufmann, he volunteered for military service, but did not see frontline action. This feeling of being born too late was combined with disappointment at Germany's defeat and the fear of expropriation resulting from the subsequent revolutionary confusion. During the 1920s, Bassewitz-Behr managed his estates in Mecklenburg. Following the agricultural crisis, he unsuccessfully tried to emigrate to South-West Africa, before finally seeing in the Nazi movement a remedy against the political problems of the time and the spectre of class war. Himmler's SS offered the promise of transforming the aristocratic authority he thought was already lost, allowing him to assert a leading role in society. Beginning in 1932, he was a member of the motorised SS formations, first in Schwerin, then in Hamburg. In 1936 Himmler called him to Berlin as an inspector of the SS vehicular department. His actual career within the Nazi terror apparatus began in 1941, as Bassewitz-Behr worked as a logistics expert for the "Command Staff of the SS Reich Chief" during the assault on the Soviet Union. From August to November 1941, he assisted in the exploitation of the Baltic region's resources as an agricultural advisor within the staff of Adolf Prützmann, HSSPF for Ostland. As the SS and Police Chief for Dnipropetrovsk, Bassewitz-Behr subsequently participated in the murder of thousands of civilians and partisans in the Ukrain, under the guise of a "police security" action, while also coordinating the massacres of Jews. After being transferred to the staff of Erich von dem Bach, the ruthless HSSPF for Central Russia, in August 1942, now as deputy HSSPF, Bassewitz-Behr began working in Mogilev (Belorussia), organising "bandit Suppression" and the annihilation of the Jews. On 20 December 1942, he sent a teletype to Himmler reporting the results of the murderous major offensive that was code-named "Operation Hamburg": 6,172 "enemy losses" against 7 dead SS members, as well as "large amounts" of booty. Bassewitz-Behr's radicalisation during his deployment in the occupied Soviet regions was to influence hid subsequent activities in northern Germany. Beginning in Mid-February 1943, became at first provisionally, and then officially, after his promotion to SS Gruppenführer on 20 April 1943, the HSSPF for Military District X, as well as the chief of the SS North Sea Upper Division. His HSSPF activities in Hamburg were much more heavily influenced by his war experiences than those of his predecessors Prützmann and Querner. Thereby, his deportations of Hamburg Jews were more extreme. Furthermore, he saw the 1943 summer air raids on Hamburg as a reason to tyrannise the city's foreigners and forced labourers. In order to "discipline" ostensible troublemakers and looters, he expanded the ranks of the security police, and encouraged the "timely use of firearms." Just ten days after the air raids, he reported to Himmler on the implementation of his orders: sixteen foreign workers had been shot, "each example being very deterrent." In view of the Allied advances during the final months of the war, Bassewitz-Behr was given the assignment of rounding up all the forced labourers, prisoners-of-war, and concentration camp inmates in Military District X. His orders involved forcing some 1,000 inmates from the Fuhlsbüttel Gestapo Prison on a foot march to the "education through labour camp" in Kiel Russee, while another seventy-one inmates were murdered in the bunker in the Neuengamme concentration camp. In the spring of 1945, some 15,000 Neuengamme concentration camp inmates lost their lives through death marches, train transports, hunger, or random violence by SS guards. The complexity of the Nazi command structures allowed Bassewitz-Behr to be acquitted by a British military court in 1947. However, he was shortly thereafter extradited to the Soviet Union, where he was sentenced to twenty-five years penal labour in the Kolyma region of eastern Siberia.