Willibald Schallert, 1896-1961 At the Labour Department's special agency responsible for the "Labour Deployment of Jews and Gypsies" As leader of "Special Ageny J" at Hamburg's Labour Department, Schallert had dictatorial powers over the forced labour assignments of Jews, and Sinti and Roma. His unscrupulous conduct led to the deaths of many people. Willibald Schallert was born in Berlin on 2 April 1896 as the son of a warehouse clerk. After attending a Volksschule and apprenticing as a window dresser, he joined the navy in the First World War before subsequently taking part in the Freikorps battles in the Baltic States. He later found employment as a butler, taxi driver, shipyard worker, and in the catering trade. Schallert was unemployed when he joined the Nazi Party and SA (Storm Troopers) in 1930. As an "old warrior" of the National Socialists, he received a post at the Altona Labour Office in the summer of 1933. At the Hamburg Labour Office in late 1938, he assigned newly unemployed Jews to dirty and hard, forced manual labour. From May until December 1940, Schallert presided over a subsidiary of the Łódż Labour Department within the annexed "Reichgau Wartheland" in Poland. After a violent act committed in an alcoholic rage, he was sent back to Hamburg. Here, from January 1941 until the end of the war, he was in charge of the Labour Department's special agency for the "Labour Deployment of Jews and Gypsies", located at Sägerplatz. Beginning in late 1940, this agency worked closely with the Gestapo to deploy Jewish men aged eighteen to sixty and Jewish women aged eighteen to fifty-five, to perform forced labour for businesses and state authorities. In late February 1943, Jewish boys over fourteen and Jewish girls over fifteen also had to perform forced labour, and the maximum age for Jewish men was increased to sixty-five years. After the deportations began, it was in Schallert's power to protect a forced labourer from transport by declaring him or her as being indispensible. In many cases, his position gave him power to extort gifts from his victims and to coerce women sexually. He denounced "Non-Aryans", who incurred his displeasure, to the Gestapo, thus precipitating their deportations. In accord with the nationwide "Factory Action" of 20 February 1943, aimed at deporting Jewish spouses in so-called "mixed marriages", Schallert denounced seventeen Jewish husbands who had incurred his displeasure to the Gestapo, and had them transported to Auschwitz. Fifteen of them were murdered. Schallert's authority also extended to the sons and daughters of "mixed marriages" who were required to do forced labour. Unpredictable and often drunk, he became the terror of anyone standing under threat of "evacuation". Because of his position of unlimited power, he earned the nickname "General of the Jews". In August 1945, Schallert was arrested in Hamburg-Blankenese by the British military police, but was released after ten months of detention. Preliminary investigations into suspected crimes against humanity began in 1947, but were suspended a year later by Hamburg's state court. Schallert appeared in the court again in 1950, and this time was sentenced to three and a half years imprisonment. He was released after less than a year. He died in Hamburg on 9 September 1961.