Hellmuth Becker was born on 12 August 1902 in the small town of Alt Ruppin, then part of the German Empire. On 30 January 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany by President Paul von Hindenburg.
One month later, Becker became a member of the SS in Stettin, working briefly with Wilhelm Bittrich and Hermann Priess, high-ranking SS commanders.In July 1935, he was transferred to the SS-Death’s head unit “Upper Bavaria,” stationed at the SS training camp in Dachau. Dachau, situated near Munich, was established in March 1933 and became the first Nazi concentration camp. The first prisoner transports arrived in the camp on 22 March 1933. In October of the same year, Dachau’s commandant, Theodor Eicke, introduced a system of regulations which inflicted brutal punishments on prisoners for the slightest offenses.In 1938, Becker took part in the annexation of Austria and the occupation of the Sudetenland, a border region of Czechoslovakia containing an ethnic German majority. During this time, his unit, the First SS Battalion, was placed under the command of the Wehrmacht, the German armed forces.
The Second World War started on 1 September 1939 when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. During the invasion of Poland, Hellmuth Becker’s SS unit operated alongside the Wehrmacht in Upper Silesia. Serving under the 10th Army, led by then-General Walter von Reichenau, their mission was to “cleanse” occupied areas—actions that often meant violent reprisals and persecution of civilians.
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