English source-aligned edition
Rolf-Heinz Höppner
Rolf-Heinz Höppner served as de facto head of the Central Resettlement Office in Poznań and chief of the SD section in the Wartheland. The profile reconstructs the person’s function in Wartheland — Polish territories annexed to the Reich through documented office, decisions, supervision or operational conduct. It does not assign every crime committed by an institution or region to one individual.
Confirmed findings
- The Auschwitz Memorial identifies Höppner as the de facto head of the Central Resettlement Office in Poznań, although Inspector of the Sipo and SD Ernst Damzog was its formal superior.
- The UWZ organised the removal of Poles and Jews from the Wartheland and the settlement of ethnic Germans; Höppner combined its leadership with control of the regional SD section and the nationality-affairs office.
- On 16 July 1941 he sent Eichmann a memorandum reporting on a meeting in the Wartheland and proposing that Jews unable to work be killed by a “quick-acting agent”; the document was his own communication, not an independent decision to establish Kulmhof.
- The Regional Court in Poznań sentenced him to life imprisonment on 15 March 1949; after an amnesty he was released in early 1957 and returned to West Germany.
Place in the chain of responsibility
Höppner connects forced displacement, ethnic selection, confiscation and early planning for mass murder within a single regional apparatus. The memorandum of July 1941 is strong evidence of his own thinking and its transmission to the centre, but cannot be used to attribute to him the sole decision on the method or site of extermination.
Key events and mechanisms
- organising the Central Resettlement Office in Poznań from late 1939
- deporting Poles and Jews from the Wartheland and settling ethnic Germans
- the memorandum to Eichmann of 16 July 1941
- the trial in Poznań in March 1949 and release under an amnesty in 1957
The circle records authority, function and agency. Several profiles may describe different parts of the same persecution chain, so profile-level totals must not be added together.
Postwar accountability
Arrested by the British in July 1945 and interrogated in Nuremberg, he was extradited to Poland on 25 February 1947. The Regional Court in Poznań sentenced him to life imprisonment on 15 March 1949. In early 1957 he was released as a result of an amnesty and returned to West Germany, where he died in 1998.
Limits of the evidence
The memorandum of 16 July 1941 summarises discussions among several officials and contains Höppner's proposal; it does not prove that he personally decided to establish Kulmhof. Secondary accounts sometimes confuse his fate with Herbert Strickner's and incorrectly report a death sentence or execution. The profile adopts life imprisonment and release on the basis of a study that draws on the Polish trial records.
Sources
The source set combines institutional, archival, trial or scholarly material from at least two independent publishers.