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Limburg 1940-1945,
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Ulrich Matthaeas
∗ 11-07-1911 Hannover † 21-06-1994 (82)
- NSDAP - Survivors - German Front Soldiers -
- The Tears of Roermond
- Fred Cammaert, Het Verborgen Front – Geschiedenis van de georganiseerde illegaliteit in de provincie Limburg tijdens de Tweede Wereldoorlog. Doctorale scriptie 1994, Groningen
6. De Landelijke Organisatie voor hulp aan onderduikers • VIII-IX, p.621 ff - NS-Dokumentationsstelle der Stadt Krefeld Das Mahnmal im Grenzwald von Niederkrüchten
- Fred Cammaert, Oorlogsmisdadiger Ulrich Matthaeas en de falende naoorlogse Duitse justitie
- liberationroute.com • Razzia’s en verraad • Raids and betrayal • Razzien und Verrat
- maasniel.nl • Het verzet in wereldoorlog 2
- https://www.kreis-viersen.de/system/files/dokumente/marcus_klaus_hbv_58_2007_der_tod_im_luesekamp.pdf
Battalion commander and war criminal Ulrich Matthaeas after he was captured by the British
Photo taken from Heimatbuch des Kreises Viersen 58 (2007), p. 205. [7]
In the last winter of the Second World War Ulrich Matthaeas was commander of the 1st battalion of the airborne regiment Hübner and Ortskommandant (garrison commander) of Roermond. Since the Maas River, on which Roermond is located, formed the front at this location, he was also front section commander. How he and his paratroopers raged there, you can read in our story about the tears of Roermond. [1]
Here follows an abbreviated version. His actions at Roermond were motivated mainly by his paranoia about partisans, which can be explained in part by his experiences during his previous military career in Russia, France, and Belgium. He feared that the partisans would attack his battalion from the rear during the upcoming fighting. Therefore, he first used the male population to build fortifications and then planned to deport them to Germany as forced laborers for the war industry. Since hardly anyone came forward for this deportation, he had 14 men shot in the Elmpt Forest on the German side of the border near Roermond on December 26 and 27, 1944, after a mock trial. The fact that some of them (as it would later turn out) were Nazi sympathizers did not matter.
His most important helper in carrying out the terror was F.W. Held [2].
After being arrested at the end of the war, he was handed over to the Dutch military police in Dachau on February 17, 1946, who were to take him to camp Vught. They were to take a break in the Dutch military representation in Wiesbaden. On the way there they had mistreated Matthaeas so badly that they thought they had beaten him to death and they left him there in an open cellar. But he just had been pretending, and skipped out of town. After living under a false name for five years, he resumed his original name when he learned in 1952 that no arrest warrant had been issued for him in the Netherlands. Matthaeas even enlisted in 1956 under his own name in the newly established West German army Bundeswehr. [3]
Coincidentally, he was assigned there as an advisor to his former regiment commander Friedrich Hübner. The latter knew of his wartime past and immediately began to gather incriminating material against Matthaeas. An indictment followed, but was unsuccessful. [4]
He was never sentenced for his crimes, in part because after the war German justice was not purged of former National Socialists. The links below lead you from point 2 to Dutch and German texts.
Footnotes