Friedrich Karl Albrecht von Krosigk was born on December 14, 1892 in East Prussia. When he was 9 years old, his father was murdered in 1901, but the murderer was never identified. Like his father, Albrecht von Krosigk was to pursue a military career and so he attended the cadet schools in Plön in Holstein and then in Berlin-Lichterfelde. He took part in World War I as an officer cadet. He married in 1919, but the marriage was divorced in 1923.

After the war, Albrecht von Krosigk worked for the Berlin security police, became a commission agent in 1925, and worked as a traveling salesman until the mid-1930s. As a result, he lived temporarily in Duisburg, Hamburg, and finally at Motzstrasse 9 in Berlin.

By the early 1930s, he was convicted several times of theft and fraud. In 1936, he posed as one of his namesakes, the finance minister in Hitler’s cabinet, Count Schwerin von Krosigk, and swindled small amounts of money. However, this earned him a short stay in prison in the form of protective custody.

At the end of 1936, he came into conflict with the law for the first time because of his homosexuality and was sent to the Fuhlsbüttel concentration camp until his conviction. He spent three months there until the Hamburg district court sentenced him to six months in prison for violating § 175 of the Criminal Code. The section punished sexual acts between men, which, after the Nazis tightened § 175 in 1935, included any form of sexual acts or affection between men.

Back in Berlin in the autumn of 1937, he helped a Turkish-Jewish friend by falsifying documents in order for his friend to get around anti-Semitic occupational restrictions. He forged a document from the Berlin police chief which stated that “there was nothing wrong with selling his goods to German officials.” When this fraud was discovered, the police wanted him and when he was caught he was arrested in the company of a young man.

In the 1938 trial, Albrecht von Krosigk was sentenced by the Berlin district court to 18 months in prison and, based on the prison doctor’s report, to be committed to a psychiatric hospital.

His family appealed to the judiciary several times with requests for clemency and they managed to get him transferred to an “open house”, the Berlin Herzberge institution. In March 1941 he was transferred to the Brandenburg “Bernburg sanatorium and care facility”. There a doctor noted that “there are no physical or mental disorders that require medical treatment or care”. From then on he was placed in a so-called workhouse. However, his family was unable to get him released from the psychiatric hospital.

He died there at the age of 50 on May 22, 1942, allegedly from pneumonia. There is no indication so far that Albrecht von Krosigk was a victim of the euthanasia murders, even though Bernburg was one of the “euthanasia institutions” of the Nazi regime.

As a victim of the Nazi regime, a stumbling block was placed in his memory at his last place of residence at Motzstraße 9.