Embezzled by a notorious Nazi war criminal

My paternal great-great-grandfather was Max Kornicker, born 11 May 1853 in Posen (now Poznań), in what was then the Kingdom of Prussia. He had several siblings, one of whom was Louis, born 12 September 1855.

Louis married Jenny Moos in Berlin in 1888, moved to his new bride's hometown of Erfurt, Thuringia, and founded a factory in the city manufacturing woollen goods. He died in 1919 and it's presumed that Wollwarenfabrik L. Kornicker passed to a son, as a building application was signed in 1921 by an 'L. Kornicker'.

This is where events take a turn. While scouring the internet for more information about the company, I discovered multiple references to Wollwarenfabrik L. Kornicker in relation to the notorious Nazi child molester and war criminal Oskar Dirlewanger.

It appears that in 1928 Dirlewanger resigned his position in the NSDAP to take up a senior role in my great-great-granduncle's company, embezzling money from the business over a four-year period and donating it to the Sturmabteilung (SA), who were colloquially known as the "Brownshirts". These funds helped the Brownshirts buy weapons that would have been used against those to whom they were ideologically and otherwise opposed, including Jews, communists, trade unionists and even shopkeepers who stocked the wrong brand of cigarettes. It feels like a cruel irony that money embezzled from a Jewish family was used to inflict misery on other Jewish families, but such private acts of theft gave way to an even more sinister programme of state expropriation once the Nazi authorities consolidated power in the 1930s. In 1938, the Brownshirts were instrumental in carrying out the Kristallnacht pogrom alongside the Schutzstaffel (SS), resulting in the arrest of over 30,000 Jewish men, as well as the destruction of thousands of synagogues and Jewish businesses throughout Nazi Germany.

Dirlewanger represents the absolute worst of humanity. He was a known violent antisemite long before his association with the Brownshirts, was convicted of the rape of a 13-year-old girl in 1935, and his behaviour during the war—while leading a penal military unit of the Waffen-SS—was so depraved that I'd rather not write the details here. We're talking about mass murder and throwing babies into fire to burn to death levels of absolute depravity.

Another disquieting twist in the story is that Wollwarenfabrik L. Kornicker was sold in 1935 to Erfurter Maschinenfabrik (ERMA), who manufactured many of the firearms used by the SA, SS and Heer (German Army) in their campaign of murder throughout Europe and beyond. The manufacture of these weapons during the war involved the use of slave labour (Zwangsarbeitslager), with around 2000 workers housed in barracks in Erfurt.

There are many gaps in the records in Thuringia and as such I haven't been able to discover whether Louis's son survived the Shoah. His mother's family had already emigrated to New York by the late nineteenth century, so perhaps that route was available to him. If he did survive, and subsequently learned of Dirlewanger's crimes—not to mention the role ERMA played in furnishing the German war machine—I can’t imagine how it felt knowing that his family’s business became so entwined with the darkest chapters of the twentieth century. It's difficult enough to process my own relationship to this history, three or four generations removed.

Thanks to Anne Palmowski at the Stadtarchiv in Erfurt for her help locating the documents that allowed me to confirm much of the above.