Otto Drews

Portrait of Otto Drews, ca. 1939-1945

As part of his career in the public service of the police, Otto Drews (*30 May 1910 in Gerdauen, † after 1973) was deployed in "Aktion 1005" in Maly Trascjanec from the beginning of November 1943. He supervised the operation to remove the traces.

Otto Erich Drews attended the secondary school in his birthplace Gerdauen until he passed his intermediate school leaving examination. He then worked in the motor vehicle trade before joining the state police in Sensburg/East Prussia on 4 April 1929. From 1935 to the end of March 1937, Otto Drews, who was neither a member of the NSDAP, the Schutzstaffel (SS) nor the Sturmabteilung (SA), served his compulsory military service in the Wehrmacht and then returned to the police service.

In mid-1941, Drews was transferred to the police administration service and in January 1942, he was assigned to his new home office, the Kiel police headquarters, and promoted to police secretary with effect from 1 January 1942.¹ With effect from 1 April, Otto Drews was called up for long-term emergency service within the police with the rank of district chief constable and was assigned to the police training battalion V.

Afterwards, Drews arrived in Vienna-Purkersdorf in August 1943 via several intermediate stations to the police tank school there. Here, at the end of October 1943, Drews was assigned to a platoon of 30 to 35 men under the leadership of Otto Goldapp, which was transferred via Minsk to Smoleviche in Belarus and finally to Maly Trascjanec at the beginning of November 1943, where the platoon was assigned to a "special mission".²

Report by Otto Drews on the burning to death in Blahaǔščyna in November 1943

In the former SD camp at Maly Trascjanec, Drews was placed in a barrack together with 20 to 25 men from his platoon and assigned to "Sonderkommando 1005". Otto Goldapp informed the men that they had to guard "exhumation works":

"[Captured] Russian partisans would open graves containing Jews who had been shot by the SS in 1941 or 1942."³

Drews described his impressions of the events in the forest of Blahaǔščyna in the course of the public prosecutor's investigations against members of the "Sonderkommando 1005" as follows:

“[…] The corpses were pulled out of the graves with hooks. They were then carried on homemade stretchers by the prisoners to the pyre and placed there. The pyre consisted alternately of a layer of wood and a layer of corpses. [...]" ⁴

Otto Drews was assigned as a guard in the forest of Blahaǔščyna and was able to view the exhumation and burning of the murdered people. According to his own statement, Drews sometimes went to the pits and watched, among other things, the burning of three people to death by members of the SS in November 1943.⁵

In February 1944, Otto Drews and parts of his platoon were transferred back to Vienna-Purkersdorf via Smoleviche, Gdingen and Lodz. Detached to Salzburg, Drews and the rest of his platoon were ordered to procure quarters in Carinthia. In Carinthia, Otto Drews was placed under the command of the "Iltis" Einsatzgruppe, led by Paul Blobel, which was used to fight gangs. Drews met the end of the war in Villach, Austria.⁶

After the war, Drews asked for his emergency service duties to be lifted and for him to be reinstated in the security police.⁷ He began working for the state police in Schleswig-Holstein as a police officer, was promoted to senior police officer in 1951, and retired on 3 December 1966.⁸