Fritz Dietrich was a German SS officer who held a doctoral degree (Ph.D.). His name is also seen as Emil Diedrich.

Career summary

Dietrich held the rank of SS-Obersturmbannführer

Obersturmbannführer

Obersturmbannführer was a paramilitary Nazi Party rank used by both the SA and the SS. It was created in May 1933 to fill the need for an additional field grade officer rank above Sturmbannführer as the SA expanded. It became an SS rank at the same time...

. From September 1941 to November 1943 he served as the SS police chief (SS und PolizeiStandortführer ) in Liepāja

Liepaja

Liepāja ; ), is a republican city in western Latvia, located on the Baltic Sea directly at 21°E. It is the largest city in the Kurzeme Region of Latvia, the third largest city in Latvia after Riga and Daugavpils and an important ice-free port...

 (German

German language

German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....

:Libau), Latvia

Latvia

Latvia , officially the Republic of Latvia , is a country in the Baltic region of Northern Europe. It is bordered to the north by Estonia , to the south by Lithuania , to the east by the Russian Federation , to the southeast by Belarus and shares maritime borders to the west with Sweden...

. Police units under his command carried out a number of massacres of Jews and other people in Liepāja

Liepāja massacres

The Liepāja massacres were a series of mass executions, many in public or semi-public, in and near the city of Liepāja , on the west coast of Latvia in 1941 after the Nazi occupation of Latvia. The main perpetrators were detachments of the Einsatzgruppen, the Sicherheitsdienst or SD, the...

. The largest of the Liepāja massacres took place on three days from Monday, December 15 to Wednesday, December 17, 1941. On December 13, Karzemes Vārds published an order by Dietrich which required all Jews in the city to remain in their residences on Monday, December 15 and December 16, 1941.

War crimes trial

After World War II

World War II

World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...

 he was tried, convicted and sentenced to death for war crimes, but not for his actions in Latvia. Dietrich had ordered the shooting of seven Allied prisoners of war who had parachuted from disabled airplanes. In 1948 Dietrich was hanged, at Landsberg Prison. The trials of Dietrich and others were known as the "Flyers Cases" and were part of what has since become known as the Dachau Trials for war crimes.