Alfred Aedtner

Alfred Aedtner (* 1925 in Seidenberg ; † April 2, 2005 in Gaggenau ) was a German criminalist and investigator against Nazi criminals .

Life

Alfred Aedtner was born at the end of 1925 in Alt-Seidenberg, Silesia, the son of a worker. His father died when he was 16 years old. After school, Aedtner registered as a cadet at a military school. At the beginning of 1944 he volunteered in the Wehrmacht and became a soldier on the Western Front. There he was injured in his right eye by a shrapnel and was taken to a military hospital in Singen on Lake Constance. He experienced the end of the Second World War with a friend in Oberschopfheim in the Black Forest.

On January 2, 1948, he took up a job with the police in Gaggenau. Aedtner was transferred to Ludwigsburg shortly after the central office of the state justice administrations to investigate National Socialist crimes was set up in Ludwigsburg. Here he was used in the preliminary investigations against defendants in the later Auschwitz trial . He did his Abitur in 1961 and studied at the Freiburg Police College. There he received his diploma in 1964.

Aedtner investigated numerous cases of National Socialist crimes. So he conducted investigations and a. against Hans Stark . For decades he tried to track down Aribert Heim , who had committed numerous crimes in Mauthausen concentration camp. Here he often worked closely with Simon Wiesenthal . He was also involved in the investigation of the detachment commander at Auschwitz, the early 1980s, Karl Pöllmann (1917-after 1985) involved.

Aedtner retired in April 1983. Even after his retirement, the search for National Socialist perpetrators persisted. In the mid-1980s he was involved in the investigation into the mass murders of Police Battalion 322 ( above all Gottlieb Nagel, Josef Uhl and Gerhard Riedel). In addition, he built an archive with the wanted files of his former authority on former Nazis. Under the title “Alfred Aedtner. Ein deutsches Schicksal “a documentary about his criminal activities was released in 1987.

Alfred Aedtner was severely diabetic and spent the last years of his life in a nursing home in Gaggenau. He died in early April 2005 at the age of 79. He had been married to Eleonore Aedtner, born Ackermann, since 1948. The marriage had a son, Harald (born 1949).

literature

• Nicholas Kulish and Souad Mekhennet: Dr. Death. The long hunt for the most wanted Nazi criminal . CH Beck, Munich 2015, ISBN 978-3-406-67262-0 .
• Alfred Aedtner: " Shot on the spot" . In: Der Spiegel . No. 44 , 1986 ( online ).