Kurt Dreyer papers

Kurt Dreyer (1903-1945) was born in Hamburg, Germany on September 2, 1903. He grew up there and in Lehe near Bremen. After elementary school, the young man underwent commercial training. Even before his parents divorced in 1921, he returned to Hamburg to work as an accountant. In the mid-1920s Dreyer came into contact with the Nazi movement and joined the NSDAP in 1927. The following year he moved to Braunschweig, found a job in the Karstadt department store chain and started a family in 1932. In mid-1939, he accepted an offer from his company and moved to Essen an der Ruhr. Barely settled in, in the fall of the same year he received a call-up to the police reserve in Essen, which later became Reserve Police Battalion 67. From the end of May 1940 until February 1942, Kurt Dreyer was on "foreign assignment" in the Netherlands. This was followed by deployment to Poland from May 1942 to January 1945. In January 1945 Kurt Dreyer became a Soviet prisoner of war and died in April 1945. in a camp near Lviv, Ukraine. Biography by Hermann Spix, „Geschichte am Jürgensplatz e.V.“ The collection consists of two letters written by Kurt Dreyer, a member of the Essen Reserve Police Battalion 67, to his wife and son Hans-Jürgen in Essen regarding his actions in Krasnobród, Poland. In the first letter, dated 15 November 1942, he discusses his participation in a killing operation in Krasnobród on 13 November 1942 where accused partisans were placed in a barn and burned alive. He writes that he also shot at those who tried to escape, and that they later burned down the farmer’s house and executed the family as accomplices. He then discusses the capture and execution of 3 Jews on the evening of 14 November 1942. In the second letter, dated 18 November 1942, Kurt writes to his wife that he has a pair of boots taken from a woman he shot on Saturday to give to their son Hans-Jürgen. The woman’s boots likely belonged to one of the 3 Jews executed on 14 November that he discusses in his first letter. Typed transcriptions of both letters are included with the collection. Also included are copyprints of two photographs showing Hans-Jürgen wearing the boots, one with the caption “Meine Stiefel” (my boots).