English source-aligned edition
Heinz Errelis
Heinz Errelis served as head of the Gestapo field office in Grodno, subordinate to KdS Białystok. The profile reconstructs the person’s function in Grodno, Kiełbasin and the Białystok District 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
- The Cologne Regional Court judgment and archival studies identify Errelis as head of the Gestapo field office in Grodno from December 1941; more than a dozen officers were subordinate to him, and the office formed part of the KdS Białystok structure.
- The court found that although Errelis delegated day-to-day Jewish affairs to subordinates, he retained authority over the office and personally supervised some transports from the Grodno ghettos and the Kiełbasin assembly camp.
- The Bielefeld Regional Court sentenced him on 14 April 1967 to six years and six months' imprisonment for aiding some of the deportations that led to extermination; the judgment became final following the Federal Court of Justice appeal decision of 5 February 1970.
- In a separate trial, the Cologne Regional Court acquitted Errelis in 1968 of allegations of specific killings committed personally because the evidence was insufficient. That outcome must not be conflated with the deportation conviction, nor may the allegations that ended in acquittal be presented as facts.
Place in the chain of responsibility
Errelis represents the field-office level: between the regional KdS and the officers managing ghettos, the assembly point and transports. The judgments make it possible to separate proven aiding of deportations from specific killings that the Cologne court did not find proven.
Key events and mechanisms
- taking charge of the Gestapo field office in Grodno in December 1941
- the office's supervision of deportations from the Grodno ghettos and Kiełbasin in the winter of 1942–1943
- transfer from Grodno in spring 1943
- the Bielefeld Regional Court judgment of 14 April 1967
- acquittal on separate murder charges in Cologne in 1968 and the Bielefeld judgment becoming final in 1970
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
After British captivity, he escaped from the camp at Rimini in 1947 and lived under a false name until 1950. The Bielefeld Regional Court sentenced him in 1967 to six years and six months' imprisonment; after appellate review, he began serving the sentence in 1970 and was conditionally released in 1974. He died in Bochum in 1994.
Limits of the evidence
The Cologne judgment did not confirm the allegations of personal killing, and the profile does not repeat them as facts. Leadership of the field office must not be equated with personally carrying out every act of his subordinates. Some secondary English-language indexes use the form ‘Heinz Erreles’; the canonical spelling ‘Heinz Errelis’ appears in the German judgment, the IPN inventory and current scholarship. His date of death is confirmed by later academic literature.
Sources
The source set combines institutional, archival, trial or scholarly material from at least two independent publishers.