Strippel Arnold

Arnold Strippel (1911-94) was an SS man, employed in concentration camps from 1935 until the end of the war. First he was in Sachsenburg; then from July 1937 to March 1941 in Buchenwald as chief roll call leader (Rapportführer). From March 1941 he was initially in Natzweiler (Saar), from October 1941 in Majdanek Concentration Camp, from mid-May 1943 he was in charge of the forced labor camp in Peenemünde. From October 1943 to May 1944 he was commandant of the protective custody camp in Vught Concentration Camp in the Netherlands.

Thereafter he was active in Neuengamme Concentration Camp and its numerous satellites. In 1945 out of fear of the British, he initially went underground and lived partly under false names. In 1948 he was put into an internment camp because of his membership of the SS. But since there was not sufficient evidence against him, he was released from imprisonment. However, eventually he was sentenced by a court of jury in Frankfurt to lifelong imprisonment for the murder of prisoners in Buchenwald Concentration Camp. He petitioned for a revision of the judgment. The sentence was lifted and, in 1970, he was sentenced simply as an accessory to murder with a prison sentence of six years. For the excess imprisonment he had undergone, he received compensation of DM 121,500. He did not have to reenter prison although a court of jury in Dusseldorf in 1981 sentenced him as an accessory to murder in Majdanek Concentration Camp to three years and six months; he was regarded as unfit to serve a prison sentence.

In the mid-1960s the Hamburg public prosecutor’s office investigated him as being a possible participant in the murders in Bullenhuser Damm. He had been implicated of complicity by Trzebinski, Dreimann, Jauch and Frahm during the Curio-Haus trials. But the case was closed because the public prosecutor’s office decided there was too little evidence. After relatives of the victims of Bullenhuser Damm filed criminal charges in 1979, the public prosecutor resumed investigations. Finally, in 1983, it accused him of murder in 42 cases – of the 20 children, the prisoners’ four doctors and attendants and the Soviet prisoners-of-war. The case was suspended at the Hamburg regional court because Strippel was regarded as unfit to stand trial. Strippel died in 1994 in Frankfurt am Main.