Heinrich Baab (27 July 1908 – 23 May 2001) was a secretary and

Gestapo The (, ), Syllabic abbreviation, abbreviated Gestapo (), was the official secret police of Nazi Germany and in German-occupied Europe. The force was created by Hermann Göring in 1933 by combining the various political police agencies of F ...

chief of

Frankfurt Frankfurt am Main () is the most populous city in the States of Germany, German state of Hesse. Its 773,068 inhabitants as of 2022 make it the List of cities in Germany by population, fifth-most populous city in Germany. Located in the forela ...

at the Lindenstraße station. The Gestapo (Secret State Police) was the official

secret police image:Putin-Stasi-Ausweis.png, 300px, Vladimir Putin's secret police identity card, issued by the East German Stasi while he was working as a Soviet KGB liaison officer from 1985 to 1989. Both organizations used similar forms of repression. Secre ...

Nazi Germany Nazi Germany, officially known as the German Reich and later the Greater German Reich, was the German Reich, German state between 1933 and 1945, when Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party controlled the country, transforming it into a Totalit ...

and

German-occupied Europe German-occupied Europe, or Nazi-occupied Europe, refers to the sovereign countries of Europe which were wholly or partly military occupation, militarily occupied and civil-occupied, including puppet states, by the (armed forces) and the governmen ...

. After the war in Europe ended, Heinrich Baab received a sentence of life imprisonment in March 1950 for his involvement in the

Final Solution The Final Solution or the Final Solution to the Jewish Question was a plan orchestrated by Nazi Germany during World War II for the genocide of individuals they defined as Jews. The "Final Solution to the Jewish question" was the official ...

as the head of Division IIB2. He was imprisoned from 1948 to 1973. On 6 April 1950 he was convicted of murdering 55 Jews from 1938 to 1943 and the attempted murders of 21 Jews, as well as for maltreatment of 29 Jewish prisoners in Frankfurt. His trial was five weeks long, with 157 witnesses testifying, including some of his victims. Heinrich Baab sent many of Frankfurt's Jews to camps from the rail station. Baab's supervisor at the Lindenstrasse station was Oswald Poche. Before joining the police in 1928 in

Stettin Szczecin ( , , ; ; ; or ) is the capital and largest city of the West Pomeranian Voivodeship in northwestern Poland. Located near the Baltic Sea and the German border, it is a major seaport, the largest city of northwestern Poland, and se ...

, Baab was a locksmith. Heinrich Baab's SS membership number was 306631 and his

Nazi Party The Nazi Party, officially the National Socialist German Workers' Party ( or NSDAP), was a far-right politics, far-right political party in Germany active between 1920 and 1945 that created and supported the ideology of Nazism. Its precursor ...

number was 1346669. Hermann Schramm, a German tenor who sang at the Frankfurt Opera, was a witness to the arrest of a Jewish woman caught with a tramway ticket in her handbag - evidence of her using public transport. Schramm attempted to intervene and was repeatedly struck in the face by Baab, but not arrested himself. Hermann Schramm testified against Baab at his trial. The Baab trial in Frankfurt was described by American journalist Kay Boyle in an article in ''

The New Yorker ''The New Yorker'' is an American magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. It was founded on February 21, 1925, by Harold Ross and his wife Jane Grant, a reporter for ''The New York T ...

'', later also published as an introduction to her story collection ''The Smoking Mountain''.Kay Boyle: ''The Smoking Mountain: Stories of Postwar Germany''. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1951 Baab served his sentence at Butzbach Prison. In clemency petitions, he portrayed himself as a victim who had gotten caught up in the Holocaust and was only a minor perpetrator. In 1972, Baab was granted clemency and released from prison. He died in 2001.

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Baab Heinrich, commander of the Judenreferat (Jewish Affairs Office)
at Yad Vashem {{DEFAULTSORT:Baab, Heinrich 1908 births 2001 deaths Gestapo personnel Holocaust perpetrators in Germany German police chiefs German police officers convicted of murder German prisoners sentenced to life imprisonment People convicted of murder by Germany Prisoners sentenced to life imprisonment by Germany People paroled from life sentence