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Hermann Schaper

SS officer

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 6, 2026
Entity authorityQ9291619 ↗
Source-derived summary

Hermann Schaper (August 1911 – 2002), was a German SS functionary during the Nazi era. He was a Holocaust perpetrator responsible for atrocities committed by the Einsatzgruppen in German-occupied Poland and the Soviet Union and was convicted after the war of numerous war crimes.

He is directly responsible for the murder in Jedwabne and other pogroms against Jews in the Podlachia region in 1941–1944; he never faced any punishment, however.

SS career

Schaper joined the Schutzstaffel and was promoted to the rank of SS-Untersturmführer on 20 April 1935. He achieved the rank of SS-Obersturmführer on 20 April 1937. Before the 1939 invasion of Poland, Schaper worked at the SD principal offices of Nazi Germany. During the German occupation of Poland Schaper served as commander of Kommando SS Zichenau-Schröttersburg – a Nazi Einsatzgruppe, one of five such formations created in eastern Poland and composed of 500–1000 functionaries of the SS and Gestapo. Schaper operated in the Płock (renamed Schröttersburg) district administered by Count von der Groeben. His superior was SS-Sturmbannführer Hartmut Pulmer, a Gestapo chief based in Ciechanów (renamed Zichenau).

Schaper's death squad was deployed in the newly formed Bezirk Bialystok district soon after the German invasion of the Soviet Union.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Hermann Schaper” is sS officer. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Hermann, Schaper and officer, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA dependable orientation record for establishing vocabulary, names and a first evidence trail. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1911, 2002, 1941, 1944—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1911-08-12. For this dossier, Hermann, Schaper and officer is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “sS officer” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q9291619. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1911, 2002, 1941 and 1944.

Critical limits

The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

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  • Locating named sources
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  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Hermann Schaper”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Hermann Schaper primary sources, Hermann Schaper archive and Hermann research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Hermann Schaper” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.