Einsatzgruppe IV

During the invasion of Poland in September 1939, Bischoff served as the commander of Einsatzkommando 1/IV (a sub-unit of Lothar Beutel's Einsatzgruppe IV) which was deployed in the northern Polish territories of Pomerania, Warsaw, Białystok and Polesie. Bischoff's unit was involved in the bloody pacification of Bydgoszcz (Bromberg) along with the mass-killing of ethnic Poles carried out as part of Operation Tannenberg, the Nazi ethnic cleansing campaign targeting Poland's intelligentsia and other members of the nation's elite.

On 27 September 1939 Bischoff and his Einsatzkommando staged a raid on the town of Pułtusk. The action ended with the mass-expulsion of the town's large Jewish population from their homes, followed by their deportation across the Narew River into the Soviet-occupied east.^[3] In October 1939 Einsatzgruppe IV was placed under the command of SS-Standartenführer Josef Albert Meisinger and stationed in Warsaw, where it took part in the initial round-up of the city's Jewish residents, setting in motion their eventual ghettoization.

Poznań & Magdeburg

Following the dissolution of Einsatzgruppe IV in November 1939, Bischoff was transferred to the newly annexed Polish territory of Reichsgau Wartheland and served as chief of the Gestapo for the city of Poznań (Posen). In this capacity Bischoff was also the acting commandant of the Fort VII concentration camp, which was initially called "KZ Posen" and in 1939 became "Übergangslager (transit camp) Fort VII". While primarily a detention center, Fort VII also served as a regular execution site for many local Poles, Jews and the physically or mentally disabled. Prisoners usually remained in the camp for about six months, before being sentenced to death, a long prison term or transfer to a larger concentration camp.^[4]

Bischoff was promoted to the rank of SS-Obersturmbannführer (Lieutenant Colonel) in September 1941 and returned to Germany, where he had been appointed chief of the State Police Headquarters (Staatspolizeileitstelle) in Magdeburg. Bischoff played a central role in orchestrating the deportation of the Jews from Magdeburg and the nearby towns of Stendal, Dessau, Bernburg and Aschersleben. Hundreds of German Jews were deported by the SS and security services between November 1942 and March 1943. The initial wave of deportees were routed mainly to the ghettoes of Theresienstadt and Warsaw, while later rail transports were dispatched directly to Auschwitz-Birkenau.^[5]

Mittelbau-Dora

In February 1944 the SS police and security services in the Nordhausen district (which surrounded Mittelwerk and the adjunct camp of Mittelbau-Dora) were placed under the authority of Bischoff's organization, now headquartered in Ilfeld. Counter-sabotage operations began soon after, mainly targeting the numerous resistance organizations operating among the prisoners working in the tunnels at Mittelwerk and those imprisoned in the camp at Dora.^[7]

At Bischoff's direction, Mittelbau-Dora's Politische Abteilung (Political Department) had the leaders of the camp's Russian, French and Communist inmates rounded up in November 1944 and interned in solitary confinement. Many of those taken into custody were interrogated under torture with some later being executed.^[8] In February 1945 the SS administration of Mittelbau-Dora was reorganized under former Auschwitz commandant Richard Baer. Under this new arrangement, Bischoff took over as chief of the camp's Sicherheitsdienst (SD) bureau.

As chief of the camp's SD, Bischoff supervised a wave of executions at Mittelbau-Dora in March 1945 that saw hundreds of prisoners, mostly Soviet POWs, killed in a series of mass-hangings. He also ordered the surviving leadership of the camp's resistance organizations to be shot by firing squad prior to the liberation of Mittelbau-Dora by the US Army in April 1945.^[9] In all, roughly 20,000 people died at either Mittelwerk or Mittelbau-Dora between 1943 and 1945.

Essen-Dora trial

On 17 November 1967 Bischoff and two other former SS officers who had served with him at Mittelbau-Dora, were indicted for war crimes by the district court in Essen. The charges against Bischoff stemmed from his involvement in the series of mass executions that occurred at Mittelbau-Dora between February–April 1945. He was also charged with the use of torture on prisoners under interrogation. Bischoff entered a plea of not guilty.^[11]

The trial (known as the Essen-Dora Process) began in November 1967 and would continue for two and a half years. The proceedings included the testimony of over 300 witnesses, among them former Nazi Armaments Minister Albert Speer and the famed inventor of the V-2 rocket, Wernher von Braun, now a premier rocket scientist in the United States. The eminent East German jurist Friedrich Karl Kaul served as counsel for the plaintiffs.

On 5 May 1970 the case against Bischoff was postponed by the court due to reasons of his poor health.^[12] He was thus able to avoid being formally convicted of war crimes. The case against Bischoff was dropped on the grounds that:

If the main hearings were to be continued, there were serious grounds for assuming that the defendant ... would be accused of being guilty of murder in a manner which, according to experts, would lead to an excessive rise of blood pressure.^[13]

Other attempts to prosecute Bischoff for his wartime activities also met with little success. An investigation by the district court of West Berlin into his involvement with the Einsatzgruppen killings in Bydgoszcz was discontinued in 1971, citing a lack of evidence. A further effort to prosecute Bischoff, this time for atrocities committed during his tenure as the Gestapo chief of Poznań, was likewise abandoned in 1976, once again owing to Bischoff's precarious health. Bischoff continued to reside in West Germany for the remainder of his life. He died in Hamburg on 5 January 1993.^[14]