Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- List of tables
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Glossary
- Introduction
- 1 ‘I went to school with quite a number of Jewish co-religionists and never knew hatred for Jews’: childhood, youth and early adulthood, 1905–1932
- 2 ‘In terms of his character he is irreproachable in every respect’: Nazi Party membership and career in the SS Security Service, 1932–1939
- 3 ‘Pity that the scoundrel didn't perish’: brother's imprisonment and career stagnation, 1939–1941
- 4 ‘So, we've finished off the first Jews’: SS-Einsatzkommando 9 and deployment in the East, June–July 1941
- 5 ‘In Vileyka, the Jews had to be liquidated in their entirety’: genocide of Belarusian Jewry, July–October 1941
- 6 ‘Was it thinkable that I, a jurist and a soldier, would do such a thing?’: suspension from the Reich Security Main Office and reinstatement until the war's end, 1941–1945
- 7 ‘My son, who has not yet returned home from the war’: post-war submergence and reintegration into West German society, 1945–1959
- 8 ‘A trial of this magnitude has never previously taken place before a German court’: arrest and trial, February 1959–June 1962
- 9 ‘A limited, lower middle class, status-and-promotion seeking philistine’: imprisonment and early release, 1962–1975
- 10 ‘A chess game of egos’: Wundkanal and aftermath, 1975–1990
- Concluding thoughts
- Notes
- Sources and literature cited
- Index
1 - ‘I went to school with quite a number of Jewish co-religionists and never knew hatred for Jews’: childhood, youth and early adulthood, 1905–1932
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 April 2016
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- List of tables
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Glossary
- Introduction
- 1 ‘I went to school with quite a number of Jewish co-religionists and never knew hatred for Jews’: childhood, youth and early adulthood, 1905–1932
- 2 ‘In terms of his character he is irreproachable in every respect’: Nazi Party membership and career in the SS Security Service, 1932–1939
- 3 ‘Pity that the scoundrel didn't perish’: brother's imprisonment and career stagnation, 1939–1941
- 4 ‘So, we've finished off the first Jews’: SS-Einsatzkommando 9 and deployment in the East, June–July 1941
- 5 ‘In Vileyka, the Jews had to be liquidated in their entirety’: genocide of Belarusian Jewry, July–October 1941
- 6 ‘Was it thinkable that I, a jurist and a soldier, would do such a thing?’: suspension from the Reich Security Main Office and reinstatement until the war's end, 1941–1945
- 7 ‘My son, who has not yet returned home from the war’: post-war submergence and reintegration into West German society, 1945–1959
- 8 ‘A trial of this magnitude has never previously taken place before a German court’: arrest and trial, February 1959–June 1962
- 9 ‘A limited, lower middle class, status-and-promotion seeking philistine’: imprisonment and early release, 1962–1975
- 10 ‘A chess game of egos’: Wundkanal and aftermath, 1975–1990
- Concluding thoughts
- Notes
- Sources and literature cited
- Index
Summary
On 14 November 1903, the 24-year-old professional soldier Corporal (Unteroffizier) Peter Filbert of the First Grand Ducal Hessian Lifeguards Infantry Regiment No. 115 (Leibgarde-Infanterie-Regiment (1. Großherzoglich Hessisches) Nr. 115) married the 22-year-old Christiane Kühner, an ironing woman, in Darmstadt. Both were Protestant, as were their respective parents, with the exception of Kühner's mother, Franziska Kühner, née Weiß, who was Catholic. The Lifeguards Infantry Regiment No. 115, garrisoned in Darmstadt, had been founded on 11 March 1621 and was as such the oldest of all German infantry regiments (see Figure 1).
At ten o'clock on the morning of 8 September 1905, Karl Wilhelm Alfred was born in Darmstadt as the youngest of the three children of Peter and Christiane Filbert. Their first child, Lina (see Figure 2), had been born on 26 July 1902 – almost sixteen months before her parents married – in Heidelberg, the birthplace of her mother. Their second child, Alfred's older brother Otto (see Figure 3), had been born on 10 May 1904 in Darmstadt. Alfred would spend the first six years of his life in the Darmstadt garrison of the Lifeguards, at which his father was stationed. During this time his father was promoted to company sergeant major (Kompaniefeldwebel, also known by the slang term Spieß). Filbert would later state, ‘We had a good life then. Of course I wanted to become a soldier. […] After all – the Guards! I was enthusiastic […] as a child.’ In 1911, when Alfred was six, Peter Filbert was taken on by the postal administration as a telegraph inspector. This meant that the family had to leave Darmstadt and move to nearby Worms. It was here that Karl Wilhelm Alfred, known simply as Alfred, went to school. After attending the junior school (Mittelschule) and the upper secondary school (Oberrealschule) in Worms, he left the latter with his secondary school certificate (mittlere Reife) in March 1922 and began an apprenticeship at the Commerz– und Privatbank in Mannheim on 1 April of the same year. During this time he lived with his parents in Worms.
Filbert would later describe his upbringing as ‘proper’ (korrekt). In his home and family life, he knew only ‘command and order’ (Befehl und Ordnung).
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- Information
- The Making of an SS KillerThe Life of Colonel Alfred Filbert, 1905–1990, pp. 8 - 20Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2016