Nazi Berlin SA leader and Berlin police president who joined the 20 July plot and was executed
Born into a noble family in Merseburg, he went through the Freikorps and the Kapp Putsch and joined the Nazi Party in 1930. Leading the Berlin SA in 1931, he organized the antisemitic Kurfürstendamm riot, and as police president of Potsdam in 1933 and of Berlin from 1935 to 1944 he drove the persecution of the city’s Jews. The Brown Book and Soviet anti-fascist books cast him as an organizer of the Reichstag fire and a homosexual. In contact with the resistance from 1938, he was executed on 15 August 1944 after the failure of the 20 July plot.
Also known as: Wolf-Heinrich Graf von Helldorff · Wolf-Heinrich von Helldorf · Count Helldorff
Activities and affiliations
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1930–1944
Security, intelligence and policing
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1931–1933
Sturmabteilung (SA)Leader of SA-Gruppe Berlin-Brandenburg
Military command -
1933–1944
Germany state institutionsPolice President of BerlinMain
Security, intelligence and policing
From the Berlin SA to the 20 July Plot
Born into a noble family in Merseburg, he served as a hussar officer in the First World War. After the war he joined Freikorps Roßbach and others and took part in the Kapp Putsch of 1920. From 1924 to 1928 he sat in the Prussian Landtag for the National Socialist Freedom Movement. He joined the Nazi Party in August 1930, led the SA in Berlin-Brandenburg in 1931 and organized the antisemitic Kurfürstendamm riot of 12 September that year. In March 1933 he became a Reichstag deputy and police president of Potsdam, and from July 1935 to 1944 he was police president of Berlin, issuing guidelines against the city’s Jews and extorting money from Jews who emigrated; during the war his police took part in the deportations. The Brown Book named him with Heines as a leader of the squad that set the Reichstag on fire, and Soviet anti-fascist books portrayed him as a homosexual linked to van der Lubbe. From 1938 he was in contact with resistance circles around Beck and Witzleben, and in 1944 he met Stauffenberg several times. After the failure of the 20 July plot the People’s Court sentenced him to death, and he was executed at Plötzensee on 15 August.