Anton Dunckern

Anton Leonhard Dunckern (born June 29, 1905 in Munich ; † December 9, 1985 there ) was a German lawyer, police and SS leader.

Anton Dunckern (1937)

Live and act

Youth (1905 to 1930)

Dunckern was born in 1905 as the son of the judicial officer Leonhard Dunckern and his wife Maria, née Samper, in Munich, where he grew up with a younger sister. Also in Munich he attended elementary school and high school. After graduating from high school , he studied law at Munich University , which he completed in 1930 with the state examination. After the preparatory service for justice and administration, he passed the Great State Examination in the spring of 1933.

Even as a youth, Dunckern moved in the right-wing extremist environment: at the age of eighteen, he took part in the Hitler-Ludendorff putsch as a member of the paramilitary federal Oberland . It has not yet been clarified whether he belonged to that department of the federal Oberland that sealed off the Munich Ludwigsbrücke on the evening of November 8th and took part in the march to the Feldherrnhalle on the following day or whether he was a member of that part of the troop, who quartered in the Hofbräuhaus . In any case, on June 22, 1934, Adolf Hitler awarded him the Order of Blood No. 325 on the grounds of active participation in the November 9, 1923 survey . According to his own information from his SS regular role, Dunckern was a volunteer in the Reichswehr from October 1922 to spring 1924 ; In a questionnaire dated August 18, 1937, however, it was stated that he was a member of the Lauterbacher Freikorps from 1922 to 1925 . Dieter Wolfanger attributes these alleged contradictions (temporary volunteer, member of the Bund Oberland and Freikorps Lauterbach) to the multiple changing names and close interlinking of the right-wing combat units. He also points out that Dunckern may have met Heinrich Himmler in the Lauterbacher Freikorps and that the two men's later friendship could have its roots in this time.

Career in the SS (1930 to 1944)

Dunckern's official entry into the NSDAP ( membership number 315.601) and the SS (SS number 3.526) took place in September 1930.

As part of the coordination of Bavaria in March 1933, Dunckern was involved in the political maneuvers of the National Socialists in Bavaria, which led to the resignation of Prime Minister Heinrich Held : The SS men who were posted in front of the Bavarian State Chancellery to force a "change of government" were under his control Command. In April 1933, Dunckern was given a position with the Bavarian Political Police, which was subordinate to Reinhard Heydrich . Shortly before, he had passed the Great State Examination in Law.

When Heydrich took over the management of the Secret State Police Office in Berlin in April 1934 , Dunckern - meanwhile a councilor and department head - was one of the group of his employees from Munich whom he took with him to Berlin. In the months that followed, Dunckern took part, in Heydrich's words, “excellent at organizing this point”. On June 30, 1934 Dunckern headed the occasion of the Rohm Putsch made violent dispersal of a "bastion of reaction" and of resistance force offices of Hitler's conservative Vice Chancellor Franz von Papen in Berlin's government district, by an SS commando of members of the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler . Later that day, he probably led a group of three SS and Gestapo members who tried to shoot the disgraced party functionary Paul Schulz in a grove outside Berlin, but who escaped.

In mid-July 1934, Dunckern was transferred to the state police in Breslau and Liegnitz in order to take part in the reorganization of the police station there, which became necessary after the shooting of the Breslau police chief Edmund Heines and his closest colleagues as part of the wave of political cleansing of June 30, 1934 was.

After the reintegration of the Saar region into the German Reich in March 1935, Dunckern took over the management of the state police station in Saarbrücken , whose headquarters had been in the north wing of Saarbrücken Castle since April 1, 1935.

In his capacity as head of the Saarbrücken Stapo office, Dunckern also managed the field offices in Merzig , Neunkirchen , Saarlouis and St. Ingbert and was thus responsible for the entire Saarland area . In the spring of 1936 he was also commissioned to plan a Stapo post in Neustadt adW, which he carried out in 1937. From February 15, 1937 to 1938, he headed the Stapo offices in Saarbrücken and Neustadt in personal union. Gauleiter Josef Bürckel also appointed Dunckern his political advisor at this time.

In the spring of 1938, Dunckern moved back to the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) in Berlin, where he was given the task of preparing the appointment of inspectors for the Security Police and the SD . On February 1, 1939, he was appointed leader of the SD upper section center, which was followed a few weeks later by the appointment of inspector of the Sipo and SD center, based in Braunschweig .

In July 1940, after the end of the French campaign, Dunckern returned to West Germany as chief of Einsatzgruppe II. Shortly afterwards he took quarters in Metz as commander of the security police and the SD in Saar-Lothringen (since October 3, 1940 Lorraine-Saarpfalz). In Metz, Dunckern, who was promoted to SS Brigade Leader in 1942 , was SS and Police Leader from the beginning of October 1944 to November 18, 1944 .

In the course of the occupation of Metz by American troops on the night of November 19-20, 1944, Dunckern became a prisoner of war. As the SS leader with the highest rank up to that point in time, who was captured in the area of ​​operations of the 3rd US Army, the American General George Patton interrogated him personally. Patton was also the one who decided that Dunckern should be considered a political prisoner and not a prisoner of war.

Dunckern was held prisoner in England until the beginning of April 1945. He was then transferred to a general camp in the United States , only to be brought back from the USA in the summer of 1946 and transferred to the Garmisch general camp. From autumn 1947 to spring 1953 he was imprisoned in the military prison in Metz. In the meantime he had been briefly relocated to Nuremberg three times to testify in the trials there .

On May 31 and July 1, 1953, Dunckern's trial as a war criminal took place before the Military Court of the 6th Region in Metz. He was sentenced to twenty years of forced labor and a twenty year residency ban.

Late years (1954 to 1985)

In June 1954, Dunckern was released early from prison in Loos, a district of Lille . He returned to his hometown Munich, where he was registered all his life. After being admitted to the Munich I and II district courts , Dunckern opened a law firm in 1956 in the Au district of Munich at Gebsattelstrasse 32. Privately, he lived in the neighboring Giesing district to the south at Untersbergstrasse 24 / IV.

In January 1962 he fell ill with encephalitis , which caused paralysis on one side and made him a nursing case. After his discharge from the hospital at the end of 1962, he spent most of his time at Gut Schlüterhof in Freising . Due to his age and his health declined Dunckern on 26 June 1970 to its admission as a lawyer .

In 1970/1971, the Munich public prosecutor's office investigated him on suspicion of being an accessory to murder . The subject of the investigation was the role of Dunckern's department in the deportation of French Jews , who were transported from the Drancy assembly camp near Paris via Novéant-sur-Moselle - a small town southwest of Metz - to Eastern Europe between 1942 and 1944 . Since Novéant (or Neuburg, as it was called after the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine) was the first train station on German territory, the French train escort teams were replaced there by German staff who provided the BdS office in Metz. Since Dunckern denied any involvement in this and could not be proven to the contrary, the proceedings against him were discontinued by order of May 3, 1971.

Dunckern died at the age of eighty after a serious illness in Munich. On December 13, 1985, he was buried in the city's east cemetery.

Since Dunckern's sisters were instructed to “bring all documents to an incinerator” after his death, there is no written legacy.

Promotions

Promotions in the SS :

• July 12, 1933: SS-Sturmführer
• March 20, 1934: SS-Obersturmführer
• April 20, 1934: SS-Hauptsturmführer
• 4th July 1934: SS-Sturmbannführer
• January 1, 1935: SS-Obersturmbannführer
• December 24, 1935: SS-Standartenführer
• September 20, 1939: SS-Oberführer
• 1942: SS brigade leader

Web links

• Anton Dunckern in the Saarland biographies

literature

• Le Courrier de Metz of June 2, 1951.
• Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich . Updated 2nd edition. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-596-16048-8 .
• Dieter Wolfanger: “Anton Dunckern. The first Gestapo chief of the Saarland and later commander of the security police and the SD in Lothringen-Saarpfalz ”, in: Yearbook for West German State History 18 (1992), pp. 303-324.

Footnotes

1. ^ Rainer Orth: The SD man Johannes Schmidt. The murderer of Chancellor Kurt von Schleicher? , Tectum Verlag, Marburg 2012, p. 86 ff.
2. ^ Rainer Orth: The SD man Johannes Schmidt. The murderer of Chancellor Kurt von Schleicher? , Tectum Verlag, Marburg 2012, p. 98 f.
3. ↑ General George Patton Interrogates a SS General, 1944, from: Eyewitness to History, eyewitnesstohistory.com (2008)
4. ↑ Obituary in Münchner Merkur from December 11, 1985.
5. ↑ Wolfanger: Dunckern, p. 322.