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Eduard Strauch
Eduard Strauch served as commander of Einsatzkommando 2 and commander of the Security Police and SD in occupied Belarus. The profile reconstructs the person’s function in Latvia, occupied Belarus and Belgium through documented office, decisions, supervision or operational conduct. It does not assign every crime committed by an institution or region to one individual.
Confirmed findings
- Strauch commanded Einsatzkommando 2 from November 1941 and participated in the Rumbula mass killings near Riga.
- From February 1942 he headed the Security Police and SD in the General District of Belarus, directing an apparatus of arrests, deportations and mass murder.
- He was later transferred to Brussels and served in further Security Police and Waffen-SS posts.
Place in the chain of responsibility
Strauch held successive operational and territorial commands that made him responsible for policies and actions carried out by the forces under him. Figures reported for Latvia and Belarus overlap with the work of subordinate units and the broader occupation apparatus.
Key events and mechanisms
- the Rumbula massacres near Riga in late 1941
- mass killings in occupied Belarus, including a reported 55,000 Jewish victims over ten weeks under his security-police apparatus
The circle records authority, function and agency. Several profiles may describe different parts of the same persecution chain, so profile-level totals must not be added together.
Postwar accountability
The Einsatzgruppen Trial sentenced Strauch to death on 9 April 1948. Extradited to Belgium, he received another death sentence from a Liège court for the killing of prisoners of war. Neither sentence was carried out after Belgian authorities found him mentally unfit; he died in a custody hospital at Uccle on 15 September 1955.
Limits of the evidence
The regional figures cited in contemporary evidence describe operations by large organisations, not a discrete personal total for Strauch. His two death sentences were not executed, and disputes over his mental condition affected proceedings without erasing the documented command record.
Sources
The source set combines institutional, archival, trial or scholarly material from at least two independent publishers.