German WWII Preliminary Record for POW Report for Dr. Hans Heinrich Lammers-Dr. Lammers was a German lawyer and prominent Nazi politician. From 1933 until 1945 he served as Chief of the Reich Chancellery under Adolf Hitler. In 1932, Lammers joined the Nazi Party and achieved rapid promotions: he was appointed head of the police department, and after the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 he was appointed State Secretary and Chief of the Reich Chancellery. At the recommendation of Interior Reichsminister Frick, he became the center of communications and chief legal adviser for all government departments. From 1 December 1937, he was a member of Hitler's cabinet as a Reichsminister. On 30 August 1939, immediately prior to the outbreak of the Second World War, Lammers was appointed by Hitler to the six-person Council of Ministers for Defense of the Reich, which was set up to operate as a "war cabinet. Lammers become "one of the most important men in Nazi Germany". From the vantage point of most government officers, Lammers seemed to speak on behalf of Hitler, the ultimate authority within the Reich.
Lammers was also one of the first officials to sign government correspondence with "Heil Hitler", which became a requisite greeting for civil servants and eventually in some cases, failure to use it was considered an "overt sign of dissidence", which could trigger attention from the Gestapo. In 1940, Lammers was also promoted to honorary SS-Obergruppenführer.
Arrested in Bad Gastein in May of ’45, he was a defense witness during the Ministries Trial, and in April 1946, Lammers was a witness at the Nuremberg trials. Starting in April 1949, he was tried in the Ministries Trial, one of the subsequent Nuremberg trials, and was sentenced to 20 years in prison. The sentence was later commuted to 10 years by US High Commissioner John J. McCloy, and he was released from Landsberg Prison in January of 1951. Lammers died in January of 1962 in Düsseldorf and was buried in Berchtesgaden in the same plot as were his wife and daughter.
Note: These are original vintage reprints of Prisoner of War Preliminary reports These are guaranteed as described. This paperwork would have been a prisoner “intake form”, with all of the individual’s personal details including the prisoner's name, fingerprints, place of birth, next of kin, date of capture, date of arrival, date of transfer, physical description, distinguishing marks, etc.
Copies of these would have been supplied to the different departments that needed access to this information. This is one of the vintage reprints that survived from the infamous Allied prisoner-of-war camp in the Palace Hotel of Mondorf-les-Bains, in Luxembourg, code named "Camp Ashcan". Each card is annotated "CCPWE #32", an abbreviation for the Central Continental Prisoner of War Enclosure #32. Operating from May to August 1945, it served as a processing station and interrogation center for the 86 most prominent surviving Nazi leaders prior to their trial in Nuremberg, including Hermann Göring and Karl Dönitz.