Arthur Harder, SS-Hauptsturmführer

SS Obersturmführer Arthur Harder

Trigger warning: This exhibition page deals explicitly with the murder of people and could be disturbing to visitors.

Karl Arthur Alexander Harder (*19 September 1910 Frankfurt / Main, † 3 February 1964 ibid.) was Paul Blobel’s adjutant from September to November 1943 and thus leader and organizer of the "Sonderkommando 1005" in Maly Trascjanec. He was jointly responsible for the exhumation of the mass graves in Blahaǔščyna and for the cremation of the bodies.

Harder was born as the son of a merchant and attended elementary and commercial school. From 1926 he completed a commercial apprenticeship and worked in his learned profession until 1938. As early as 1929, Harder joined the NSDAP and the brutal Sturmabteilung (SA). In 1930 he became a member of the Schutzstaffel (SS) and from 1938 he worked full-time in the Sicherheitsdienst of the Reichsführer SS (SD) in Düsseldorf. From the summer 1938 to the spring 1939, Harder completed military exercises lasting several weeks in an anti-aircraft regiment.¹ In 1940 he was promoted to officer (SS-Hauptsturmführer).²

After the illegal annexation of Poland in 1939, Arthur Harder served as a member of an Einsatzgruppe in the Poznan area. Subsequently, from 1940 to 1943, he was involved in the expulsion of Polish and Jewish people in the Warthegau as an employee of the Umwanderungszentrale in Lodz.

Arthur Harder denied the charges against him and his participation in "Sonderkommando 1005".

Arthur Harder's statement on his participation in a burning to death

In 1943, Harder became adjutant to SS Standartenführer Paul Blobel in the "Sonderkommando 1005" and from September to November 1943 he led the "Enterdungkommando" he had built up from Soviet prisoners of war in Maly Trascjanec. Arthur Harder was also involved in the burning to death of three Jewish people in the Blahaǔščyna forest.³

At the end of the war, Arthur Harder became a prisoner of war in what was then Yugoslavia. After his escape, he was arrested by British troops in Carinthia. In July 1946, the British released him from captivity and handed him over to US troops. Due to his SS affiliation, Harder initially remained in the Dachau internment camp before being transferred to Darmstadt. In 1948, Arthur Harder was released and worked at various locations as a bricklayer and, from 1952, as a merchant at Krupp in Frankfurt am Main.⁴

Participation in a burning to death at Maly Trascjanec

Presumably at the beginning of November 1943, Georg Heuser learned from a higher SS leader that some Jewish prisoners suspected of having carried out an assassination attempt on the BdS office were sentenced to a "special kind of death". The three prisoners were to be executed by burning alive on the same day at Blahaǔščyna.

As a member of "Sonderkommando 1005", Arthur Harder was ordered to prepare a pile of corpses for the execution. He arranged for one of the already erected piles to be covered with fir brushwood and had a thick stake inserted in the middle. In the late afternoon, several vehicles drove up, from which about ten SS leaders and SS subordinates from the BdS office, as well as two men and a woman, got out: The three prisoners had to undress and were led onto the prepared pile of corpses. The woman was tied to the erected stake and shortly afterwards the pyre was doused with fuel and set on fire. The woman emitted piercing screams of pain before she died. The third prisoner managed to jump down from the pyre. He rolled on the ground and screamed before he was shot.⁵