Interview with Andrea Mattes, granddaughter of Ernst Harloff, 2025

Wolfenbüttel Memorial

In 1935, the family moved to a village in the Hamburg Vier- und Marschlande district. Although they were now relatively secure, Ernst Harloff stole from parcels he was required to load at the station. On 12 December, 1942 he was arrested.

According to his own account, as a smoker he was mainly after tobacco. In fact, he also stole clothing and food. The circumstances were favourable: he could load parcels at the station without any checks and open them undisturbed. Because of the flourishing barter trade, he aroused no suspicion when he brought stolen goods home. Many victims apparently did not report their losses, since they had shipped rationed goods under false declarations and thereby violated laws themselves. Friends, relatives, and neighbours also benefited from Ernst Harloff’s thefts.

The police investigated not only Ernst Harloff but also his wife Emma for receiving stolen goods.

The Senior Public Prosecutor charged Ernst Harloff as a “dangerous habitual criminal,” “anti-social parasite,” and “war economy criminal,” alleging that he had “maliciously endangered” the population’s supply. This was unfounded, yet the court sentenced him to death for the thefts. His wife received two and a half years’ imprisonment and lost custody of her children.

On 17 August 1943, Ernst Harloff was transferred from Celle PenitentiaryThe sentence of penal servitude was imposed as a prison sentence for criminal offences along with the loss of civil rights. The milder prison sentence was imprisonment. Under the Nazi regime, the punitive measures imposed in penal servitude, particularly forced labour and deprivation, were significantly intensified. to Wolfenbüttel Prison. There he served “strict solitary confinement, shackled” in House II. On 23 August 1943, at 8:04 p.m., he was executed by guillotine.

His son Gerhard, five years old at the time of his parents’ arrest, long remained unaware of Ernst Harloff’s fate. Even long after the war, older family members rebuffed any inquiries. He eventually came to believe that his father had shot someone and had therefore been executed as a “war criminal.” His classmates accused him of this as well. He felt “somewhat ostracized and excluded.” Nevertheless, he tried to integrate as best he could into village life. To his own children he said that their grandfather “had not returned from the war.”

In 2020, Gerhard Harloff’s daughter Andrea Mattes learned of her grandfather’s execution. Together with the Wolfenbüttel Memorial she succeeded in finding information and documents about his conviction. For Gerhard Harloff, it was a great relief to know that his father had not been a murderer. Only the certificate of annulment issued by the Hamburg public prosecutor’s office helped him to understand the unjust nature of Nazi criminal justice. Andrea Mattes campaigned for compensation for her father.

On 15 October 2024, her father received a compensation payment under the General War Consequences Act. For him, it was not the money but the symbolic gesture that mattered.

Like her father, Andrea Mattes found it difficult to speak publicly about Ernst Harloff’s fate. Before attending a meeting of descendants in Wolfenbüttel, she feared she would encounter only relatives of resistance fighters. Then she realized how many others had been executed for minor offenses. Today she no longer finds it difficult to speak publicly about her grandfather’s story.