Washington police chief who put SS insignia on his office door gets $1.5m to resign
To save money, the city of Kent in Washington gave State Assistant Police Chief Derek Kammerzell $1.5m to leave his job. A bargain – because the city says litigation to remove him would have cost taxpayers more.
Kammerzell, a 27-year department veteran, first was disciplined in July 2021 after a detective complained that an insignia used by high-ranking generals in Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich appeared on Kammerzell’s office door above his nameplate in September 2020.
An internal investigation concluded that Kammerzell knew full well the meaning of the insignia, which belonged to an “Obergruppenfuhrer” — a high official in Hitler’s dreaded paramilitary Schutzstaffel or SS, which was responsible for the systematic murders of millions of Jews and others in Europe during World War II.
Kammerzell also had been overheard joking about the Holocaust, according to the internal investigation, saying that his grandfather had died in the Holocaust — when he got drunk and fell out of a Nazi guard tower.
Posted: 12th, December 2022 | In: News Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
