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Willi Krüger * 1886

Müggenkampstraße 3 (Eimsbüttel, Eimsbüttel)

gedemütigt / entrechtet
Flucht in den Tod
04.01.1937

Willi Joachim Gustav Krüger, born 6 Jan. 1886 in Parchim, death by suicide 4 Jan. 1937 in Altona-Blankenese

Müggenkampstraße 3

When the police escorted the rent-boy and later blackmailer Theodor Gehring to Müggenkampstraße 3 during an investigation in February 1939, and he pointed out the "crime scene” of a former "customer,” Willi Krüger had already been dead for more than two years.

His body was found floating in the Elbe at Falkensteiner Ufer across from the Falkenschlucht on 4 January 1937 at 8am. Willi Krüger had apparently committed suicide shortly before his 51st birthday. It is not known whether his reasons for doing so were a possible denunciation and resulting arrest, or that he was possibly being blackmailed. According to Theodor Gehring’s statement to the police, he had first met Krüger in the Große Freiheit and then had sex with him in his apartment in Eimsbüttel. Willi Krüger was known to the police, as his photograph was included in a police catalogue, by means of which Theodor Gehring positively identified him as a sexual partner.

During the police investigation in 1939, tenants of Krüger’s apartment building stated that he was known to be a "homo” and that he had committed suicide by drowning himself in the Elbe.

Little more is known about Krüger, other than that he was born in 1886 in Parchim in Mecklenburg, that he moved into the apartment at Müggenkamptraße 3 in 1935, that he was unmarried and worked as a plumber. He lived alone in the ground-floor apartment, and was listed as a "business manager” in the Hamburg Address Book.

Theodor Gehring was executed on 9 July 1942 (see Biography: Henry Heitmann).

Translator: Amy Lee

Kindly supported by the Hermann Reemtsma Stiftung, Hamburg.

Stand: October 2016
© Bernhard Rosenkranz(†) / Ulf Bollmann

Quellen: StaH 213-11 Staatsanwaltschaft Landgericht – Strafsachen, 3834/40; 332-5, 4914 (Eintrag Nr. 7); Dank an Dr. Gottfried Lorenz für den 2008 erfolgten Hinweis aufgrund seiner umfangreichen Forschungen zu Theodor Gehring; Rosenkranz/Bollmann/Lorenz, Homosexuellen-Verfolgung, S. 42 u. 227.