Herbert Lange
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Herbert Lange (29 September 1909 – 20 April 1945) was an SS-Sturmbannfuhrer and commandant of the Chełmno extermination camp until 1942. He was responsible for numerous crimes against humanity including the murder of mental patients in Poland and Germany during the Aktion T4 euthanasia programme. He was killed in action by Allied troops during the Battle of Berlin in 1945.
Villainy edit
Lange entered Poland with Erich Naumann's Einsatzgruppen squadron, and was placed in charge of the Gestapo in Poznań. In 1940, he assumed command of an SS-Sonderkommando unit tasked with the murder of physically and mentally disabled Poles under the supervision of Ernst Damzog and Wilhelm Koppe. By mid-1940, he and his men were responsible for the murder of about 1,100 patients in Owińska, 2,750 patients at Kościan, 1,558 patients and 300 Poles at Działdowo, and hundreds of Poles at Fort VII where the mobile gas-chamber was invented. Their earlier hospital victims were usually shot in the back of the neck. The unit, equipped with a gas van, shuttled between hospitals, picking up patients and killing them with carbon monoxide. At one point, Wilhelm Rediess commissioned Lange's unit to exterminate 1, 558 mental patients in East Prussia.
In December 1941, Lange was appointed head of the Chełmno extermination camp, and tasked with the murder of 100, 000 Jews and the liquidation of the Łódź Ghetto. After he succeeded in this task, Lange stepped down from this post and was succeeded by Hans Bothmann. After this, Lange served as a criminal investigator under Arthur Nebe, and then participated in the suppression of partisans. After Chełmno went inactive, Arthur Greiser ordered Lange to return and resume the gassing operations for the final ten deportations.