Herbert Lange (1909 – 1945)

Herbert Lange is one of the main perpetrators of the National Socialist murder of patients in occupied Poland. Born in Pomerania in 1901, Lange first took a law degree. In 1932, he became member of the NSDAP and the SA. A year later, he changed to the SS, where he was promoted to Hauptsturmführer in 1941. In 1933, he joined the police force, where he served as chief inspector, among others in the state police office of Aachen. From there, Lange was assigned to Einsatzgruppe (task force) VI in Poland in September 1939. Until October 1939, he headed the Gestapo prison in Poznań.

At the end of 1939, he became the head of »Sonderkommando Lange«. By the summer of 1940, this unit had murdered more than 6,000 Polish and Jewish patients from the hospitals and nursing homes in the »Warthegau«, in East and West Prussia and other annexed areas by means of exhaust gases from »gas vans«. As of December 1941, »Sonderkommando Lange« used the same method to kill tens of thousands of Jews and Roma classed as »unfit to work« in the extermination camp of Kulmhof (Chełmno), whose first commander Lange was until April 1942. In the Central Office for Reich Security, he was subsequently put in charge of the persecution of the Resistance. Lange probably fell near Bernau on 20 April 1945.