Bernhard Wehner

Bernhard Wehner , also Bernd Wehner (born December 15, 1909 in Gera , † December 31, 1995 in Düsseldorf ) was a German criminal police officer and SS-Hauptsturmführer . During National Socialism he headed the “Reich Central Office for Investigating Capital Crimes ” in Amt V of the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA) and investigated spectacular cases such as the “ Bromberger Blutsonntag ” and the assassination attempt of July 20, 1944 on Adolf Hitler . After the end of theDuring the Second World War , he first worked as an author for the news magazine Der Spiegel . From 1954 until his retirement in 1970 he headed the Düsseldorf criminal investigation department. From 1967 he was editor of the specialist journal Kriminalistik and from 1975 to 1986 sole editor. According to the historian Patrick Wagner, with his journalistic work, especially for Der Spiegel , he established himself alongside Walter Zirpins as one of the "Kripo history politicians".

Life

Early years

Wehner grew up as the son of the chief customs inspector Gustav Wehner, who died in 1931, and his wife Rosa (née Hofmann), initially in Bad Lobenstein and Schleiz . The family moved to the Ruhr area at the end of the 1920s , where Wehner graduated from Essen's Humboldt-Oberrealschule in 1930 . He then studied law in Erlangen and from 1931 to 1933 in Cologne . In the spring of 1931 he joined the SA and the NSDAP ( membership number 518,544). “We high school graduates and students of that time,” he argued in 1989, “were, apart from our 'tendentious' upbringing at home and school (fathers were usually imperial officers), politically rather ignorant. Our whole environment - with very few exceptions - held that left 'Social Democrats and Communists, for's 1918, November criminals ' that our' soldiers winning the dagger . In the back have pushed "In the tense situation during the Great Depression have one longs for a political miracle.

On July 16, 1934, Wehner passed his first state examination and from July 20, 1934 worked as a legal advisor to the German Labor Front in Hamborn and Essen. Here he mainly dealt with the question of whether a waiver of collective wages after the enactment of the law on the order of national labor was still effective and led a model trial on the employee side up to the Reich Labor Court . In line with the National Socialist legal conception and the leadership idea , Wehner argued that a waiver of collective wages due to the duty of care of the manager of a company was ineffective. Using the same logic, he also justified the fact that strikes should be prohibited because they would be contrary to the benefit of the people and the state. In July 1935 Wehner was with the thesis "The effect of the Act on the Regulation of National Labor on the issue of wage waiver" at the University of Cologne Dr. jur. PhD .

July 1, 1935 Wehner began as Detective -Anwärter the police headquarters meal. In 1936/37 he completed the corresponding course at the Berlin-Charlottenburg Police Institute . Graduates of this college for criminologists were supposed to train professional networks after the Second World War . The graduates born in 1938/39, for example, who later found employment primarily in the BKA , were known as "Charlottenburgers".

Head of the "Reich Central Office for Combating Capital Crimes" of the RKPA

Wehner began his service in September 1937 as head of one of the three permanent homicide commissions of the Berlin criminal police control center. He was involved in the investigation into the bomb attack on Adolf Hitler in Munich's Bürgerbräukeller , which Georg Elser carried out on November 8, 1939. At the beginning of 1940 he was transferred to Office V of the Reich Security Main Office, the Reich Criminal Police Office (RKPA), where he initially headed the department for fraud and corruption offenses. In May 1940 he took over the "Reich Central Office for Combating Capital Crimes". In 1942 he was accepted into the SS as SS-Sturmbannführer (SS no. 414.073).

Wehner investigated some of the most spectacular and delicate cases during National Socialism. Wehner put it after the war that he brought his boss Arthur Nebe “some big chestnuts out of the fire”. From September 6 to December 15, 1939, he headed a special commission of the Berlin criminal police to investigate massacres of “ ethnic Germans ” that were committed in and around Bromberg in September 1939 and that became known as “ Bromberg Blood Sunday ”. Wehner put his results at the service of National Socialist propaganda by finding in his investigation of the events of Bromberg “unshakable evidence of the most terrible mass crimes in criminal history of the last centuries”, namely that the ethnic Germans “fell within the framework of a single, officially organized mass murder “Be. The number of victims of the "Bromberg Blood Sunday" is still controversial today. Wehner unofficially estimated the number at 5,800. During an interrogation by the public prosecutor's office in 1961, he stated that he had been ordered by a higher authority to publicly name the number of 58,000 victims for propaganda reasons.

In a similar way, Wehner stylized his activities after the war within the framework of the " Sonderunternehmens Völkerbund " on Crete in 1941. In Nebe's absence, Paul Werner had sent a commission of Berlin criminalists under the leadership of Wehner to Crete to identify partisans and have them tried by trial courts , who fought against German parachutists during the airborne battle of Crete . On the basis of the wanted lists drawn up by Wehner, 110 men were sentenced to death and shot, and 13 men were acquitted. Another 39 civilians were shot "in armed resistance or while trying to escape". According to Wehner, as in Bromberg, the criminalists had prevented worse things: “The expiatory actions against the Cretans intended by Göring were not carried out, and only those persons came before a court who could be convicted of murder, corpse-beating or other international law crimes that have been proven in individual cases. “Today the“ special enterprise League of Nations ”is counted among the crimes of the Wehrmacht .

Special orders also brought Wehner to Prague several times . First he investigated allegations against the Prime Minister of the Reich Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia , Alois Eliáš , who had poisoned the pro-German journalist Karel Lažnovský. Wehner concluded that it was more of a case of accidental food poisoning. The death of Lažnovský is still unclear. Members of the Czech resistance are now claiming that Lažnovský was actually poisoned. On May 27, 1942, Wehner and his colleague Horst Kopkow returned to Prague to investigate the assassination attempt on Reinhard Heydrich .

Wehner was also called in to investigate the public prosecutor Konrad Morgen's investigations against the former commandant of the Buchenwald concentration camp, Karl Otto Koch . Wehner's job was to prove at least one murder to Koch. He succeeded in doing this although, according to his own information, he had to deal with problems of a special kind: “In many cases, however, the grounds for suspicion were overwhelming. But one simply failed because of the multitude of killings ordered and fatal attempts. Nobody knew their way around any more… “As a result of this investigation, Koch and his wife Ilse , among others, were arrested because they were suspected of poisoning SS-Oberscharführer Koehler.

In his book The SS State , Eugen Kogon , who was a doctor's clerk in Buchenwald at the time of the investigation , accused Wehner of organizing and attending a poison test on four prisoners together with Morgen in order to determine the poison used in the disputed murder case. Wehner denied this and shifted responsibility to the head of the Gestapo Heinrich Müller and the camp doctor Erwin Ding-Schuler . Ding-Schuler himself had noted in his diary: “December 30–31, 1943 Special experiment on 4 people in the Koch / Hoven case. On the orders of group leader Nebe, the experiment was stopped in the presence of Dr. Morning and Dr. Wehner carried out. ”Kogon later withdrew his allegation. In the GDR , however, the claim remained virulent. Wehner was mentioned in the Brown Book published in the GDR in 1968 .

When Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg carried out the assassination attempt on Hitler on July 20, 1944 , Wehner was flown into Wolfsschanze with three other Berlin criminalists . Together with Albert Widmann and Horst Kopkow, he reconstructed the course of the crime here. He later organized the manhunt for Arthur Nebe, who was wanted as a co-conspirator.

Work for the news magazine Der Spiegel

At the end of the war , Wehner was initially interned. After he was released in early April 1946, he worked for a while as a driver for the British military authorities in Bad Harzburg . In 1948 he came into contact with the publisher of the first Hanoverian and soon afterwards Hamburg news magazine Der Spiegel , Rudolf Augstein . During an interrogation by the Public Prosecutor's Office at the Bremen Regional Court on January 26, 1960, Wehner explained:

“In 1948 I tried to become a journalist. By chance I came into contact with Mr. Augstein from Spiegel. Mr. Augstein had asked me about Nebe's career up to his execution and I heard that the Spiegel had a larger story about Nebe written by the writer Hans Rudolf Berndorf [sic!]. Augstein assumed that Nebe was the only senior detective and at the same time senior SS group leader who was also the only resistance fighter against the SS regime within the criminal police. But I knew that Nebe, if he was a resistance fighter at all, only wanted to secure himself practically because, to my knowledge, he was involved in many Nazi crimes. At the time I told Augstein what I knew and could imagine, whereupon I received the order from the Spiegel to write a crime story from the period before 1933 to 1945, in which Nebe was supposed to be the central thread. I wrote the story with my own knowledge, utilizing the available literature and after doing research on all the tangible men who were tangible at the time, from around mid-1949 to the end of 1949. "

- Bernd Wehner : during a public prosecutor's examination in 1960.

Wehner's series Das Spiel ist aus - Arthur Nebe began in the September 29, 1949 issue of Spiegel . Splendor and misery of the German criminal police , which was continued with 30 sequels until mid-April 1950 and is thus the longest Spiegel series ever. According to Peter Merseburger , it was not Wehner who wrote the series, but Augstein in particular. At least in their intention, however, Wehner and Augstein agreed. Although the involvement of the criminal police in the crimes of National Socialism was not concealed, it was placed in the background in relation to the success of the criminal investigation. Nebe appeared in it as the embodiment of the “collective soul of Germany under Hitler: decent, but fearful and ambitious. [...] The professional group of the criminal police was of course not a collection of heroes and martyrs either. The family fathers predominated. Because that is Nebe's merit, at least in the eyes of the criminologists of the time: he saved the police from the Stapo and from various SS influences through a sometimes servile compliance. "

The series was already controversial at the time of its appearance. Augstein's journalistic teacher Harry Bohrer acknowledged the end of the series with a relieved "Thank God" and asked Augstein whether all Germans were bigger or smaller Nebes who never wanted evil but had become tools of the infernal. He thought the series was confused and glossed: "Sensational revelations about the cruelest and greatest crimes of the last quarter century with the most thorough consideration of all those aspects that drive a sexually neurotic audience to enthusiastic buying and thus guarantee compensation for the loss of the pornographic front page." Augstein, his According to biographer Peter Merseburger, a “relentless realist and cynic” with a “pronounced penchant for paradoxes”, defended the RKPA as a rather apolitical organization in letters to Spiegel readers and demanded that the criminal police of the Federal Republic of Germany should have central authority to issue instructions Maintain federal territory and also be able to fall back on their old experts. When the National Socialist past of Spiegel employees became known earlier , Augstein responded: “There was Kriminalrat Bernd Wehner, who became my police reporter, otherwise he was not an SS man, of course, but a captain of the criminal police who took over the criminal investigation department in Düsseldorf in 1954 . The case is already done with it. "

With the approach of dissolving the specific guilt of the perpetrators into the collective, Wehner established himself alongside Walter Zirpins as the " criminal history politician". His series was also read in the Federal Ministry of the Interior as an attempt to rehabilitate himself and other criminal investigators, such as Paul Werner, who were leading under National Socialism for the police force. Years later, however, Wehner was also one of the few who questioned the role of the criminal police under National Socialism, at least in part. In a series of articles in the specialist journal Kriminalistik in 1989 he dealt critically with Friedrike Wieking and the female criminal police , which she directs , with Paul Werner and above all with Arthur Nebe. He described the youth concentration camps of the "Third Reich" under the RKPA as "shame".

Wehner, according to a note from Augstein in December 1996, not particularly interested in politics and anything but a Nazi, worked for a while as a crime reporter for Der Spiegel . Peter Merseburger thinks it is very likely that it was Wehner who established contact between the news magazine and the former SS officers Horst Mahnke and Georg Wolff , who participated in the series Am Caffehandel - Germany , which started in the summer of 1950 and was notorious for its racist clichés Smugglers wrote. Similarly oriented Spiegel articles, which were supposed to warn against bait spikes from the American defense, e.g. B. Remember the name Hirschfeld , based on information from Wehner.

Re-entry into the police force

Wehner worked until 1954 as an editor for police issues of the mirror . But after going through the on January 31, 1951 Brunswick denazification committee is classified in Category V, he stepped on 1 August 1951 as Criminal Police Inspector in the urban district -Police Dortmund returned to the police one. For his reinstatement mainly had SPD - Bundestag Alfred Gleisner used well into Wehner to an experienced detective. Via a stopover at the Cologne Criminal Police Office, which was arranged by Willy Gay , Wehner was promoted to Criminal Councilor on October 1, 1954, to head of the Düsseldorf Criminal Police. It was also Willy Gay who proposed that Wehner be the editor of the specialist journal Kriminalistik .

Wehner's Nazi past, which he shared with many senior detectives, was publicly controversial. In September 1959, for example, the ÖTV trade union launched a campaign against an alleged comradeship of former high-ranking SS and SD leaders who allegedly blocked highly qualified and politically unaffected detective officers from advancing their careers. The ÖTV identified almost 60 leading criminalists in large cities in North Rhine-Westphalia . Wehner responded by trying to discredit one of the journalists involved behind the scenes with the rumor that he had already appeared criminally. In 1960 Wehner brought an action for insult against the editor-in-chief of the VVN weekly magazine Die Tat , Hans Piechotta , because he had taken up the claim that Wehner had been involved in poison tests in Buchenwald and had called him Heydrich's right-hand man. Piechotta, who was represented in court by Friedrich Karl Kaul , received a fine of 300  DM .

Criminalist in the FRG

After the Second World War, Wehner made a name for himself primarily with a study on the so-called dark field . In Die Latenz der Criminalaten (1957) he examined “phenomena of chance discoveries”, from which he derived estimates. His thesis that homicides in a ratio of 1: 3 to 1: 6 went undetected, attracted particular attention . Later studies assumed much lower rates of 30: 1, but also much higher rates of 1: 1.

In 1967 Wehner took over the editing of the specialist journal Kriminalistik . After he resigned from active police service as a detective director in 1970, he was the sole editor from 1975 to 1986. He remained co-editor beyond 1986. He was one of those who saw a "crime flood" break in over the Federal Republic. Above all, the "quality of crime" is increasing. He therefore spoke out in favor of a strong Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) that could develop cross-border defense concepts and supported the efforts of BKA President Horst Herold to introduce central electronic data processing for the police ( INPOL ).

Early on, Wehner was concerned with the possibilities that new media such as television offered the police. In 1970 he took the program Aktenzeichen XY ... unsolved against critics in protection. He also suggested the crime series Early Discussion (1972/73). Based on the meeting that Wehner held every morning at the Düsseldorf criminal police, so that the commissioners could inform each other about their investigations, the series endeavored to present a realistic depiction of everyday police investigations. Before that, there was already a collaboration with the television director Jürgen Roland for his crime series Stahlnetz .

For his services, Wehner was awarded the Beccaria Medal in silver (1966) and gold (1984) by the German Criminological Society . Horst Herold paid tribute to Wehner in the preface to his popular science history of the German criminal police , saying that he had "become a symbol in which his own life also embodied the history of the German criminal police" during his lifetime.

Fonts

• The impact of the Law on the Order of National Labor on the question of waiver of collective wages. Univ., Diss.-Cologne, 1936 ... Spez.-Diss.-Buchdr., Düren 1936.
• The Polish atrocities. Criminal investigation results. Jaedicke, Berlin 1942.
• The latency of the offenses. (The undetected crime). Federal Criminal Police Office, Wiesbaden 1957. [= Federal Criminal Police Office (Hrsg.): BKA series of police until autumn 1994. BKA series of publications, Volume 7]
• Preventive fight against crime. Working conference at the Federal Criminal Police Office in Wiesbaden from April 20 to 24, 1964 [= Federal Criminal Police Office (Hrsg.) Lectures on the occasion of the BKA conferences until 1992 (Federal Criminal Police Office) Wiesbaden. Volume 16]
• The crime - yesterday, today and - maybe - tomorrow. Lecture at the Law and Political Science Association e. V. in Düsseldorf on January 23, 1969. [Verl.-Anst. German Police], [Hilden] 1969.
• On the trail of the perpetrator. The history of the German criminal police. Lübbe, Bergisch Gladbach 1983, ISBN 3-7857-0331-7 .
• From injustice to disaster. The role of the criminal police in the Third Reich . In: Kriminalistik , 43, 1989, pp. 258-262, 335-340, 401-403, 546-549, 583-588, 665-670, 697-701.

literature

• Lutz Hachmeister : The enemy researcher. The career of SS leader Franz Alfred Six . CH Beck Verlag, Munich 1998, ISBN 3-406-43507-6 .
• Lutz Hachmeister: A German news magazine. The early mirror and its Nazi staff . In: L. Hachmeister, F. Siering (ed.): The gentlemen journalists. The elite of the German press after 1945 . CH Beck, Munich 2002, pp. 87-120, in particular pp. 108-110.
• Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945 . S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2003, ISBN 3-10-039309-0 .
• Stefan Noethen: Old comrades and new colleagues: Police in North Rhine-Westphalia 1945–1953 , Klartext-Verlag, Essen 2002, pp. ISBN 3-89861-110-8 .
• Gernot Steinhilper: "An institution has passed away". Obituary for Dr. Bernd Wehner. In: Kriminalistik 50 (1996), p. 82 f.
• Patrick Wagner : Hitler's Criminalists: The German Criminal Police and National Socialism between 1920 and 1960 . CH Beck, Munich 2003, ISBN 3-406-49402-1 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Bernhard Wehner in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

• Article series The game is over - Arthur Nebe. Glory and misery of the German criminal police.

1. ↑ ^{a b} 19. Continuation . In: Der Spiegel . No. 6 , 1950 ( online ).
2. ↑ 13. Continuation . In: Der Spiegel . No. 53 , 1949 ( online ).
3. ↑ 18. Continuation . In: Der Spiegel . No. 5 , 1950, pp. 27 ( online ).
4. ↑ ^{a b} 21. Continuation . In: Der Spiegel . No. 8 , 1950, p. 27 ( online ).
5. ↑ 25. Continuation . In: Der Spiegel . No. 12 , 1950 ( online ).
6. ↑ 26. Continuation . In: Der Spiegel . No. 13 , 1950 ( online ).
7. ↑ 9. Continuation . In: Der Spiegel . No. 49 , 1949 ( online ).

• Bernhard Wehner: On the trail of the perpetrator. The history of the German criminal police. Lübbe, Bergisch Gladbach 1983, ISBN 3-7857-0331-7 .

1. ↑ p. 202f.
2. ↑ p. 205f.
3. ↑ pp. 227-229.
4. ↑ pp. 233-241.
5. ↑ pp. 236-238.
6. ↑ pp. 245-264.
7. ↑ pp. 292-300.
8. ↑ p. 7.

Further individual evidence:

1. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g} Stefan Noethen: Old comrades and new colleagues. Police in North Rhine-Westphalia 1945–1953. Essen 2003, p. 381f.
2. ^ Wehner: Unrechtsstaat. Pp. 335f., Cit. P. 335.
3. ↑ Dieter Schenk: The brown roots of the BKA . Frankfurt a. M. 2003, p. 73.
4. ^ Wehner: Criminalistic results in the elucidation of Polish atrocities against ethnic Germans . In: German journal for the entire judicial medicine , 34, 1941, No. 1-3, pp. 90-115, quoted. P. 90, 115. doi : 10.1007 / BF01793797
5. ↑ Helmut Krausnick, Hans-Heinrich Wilhelm: The troop of the Weltanschauung war. The Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police and the SD 1938 to 1942. Stuttgart 1981, p. 56.
6. ↑ Final report by General der Flieger Alexander Andrae, commandant of the fortress of Crete [5], from October 3, 1941 on the enterprise "League of Nations". In: Martin Seckendorf (ed.): Europe under the swastika. The occupation policy of German fascism in Yugoslavia, Greece, Albania, Italy and Hungary (1941–1945) . Volume 6. Berlin, Heidelberg 1992, ISBN 3-8226-1892-6 , pp. 171-172. You also: kreta-wiki.de
7. ^ Benjamin Frommer: National Cleansing. Retribution against Nazi Collaborators in PostWar Czechoslovakia. Cambridge 2005, p. 36f.
8. ^ Ernst Klee: The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945 . Frankfurt / M. 2005, p. 660.
9. ↑ Eugen Kogon: The SS State . Munich 1983, p. 326.
10. ↑ Brown Book. War and Nazi criminals in the Federal Republic and West Berlin. Berlin / East 1968, p. 83.
11. ↑ Quotation from Ronald Rathert: Crime and Conspiracy: Arthur Nebe. The detective chief of the Third Reich . Münster 2001, p. 17.
12. ↑ ^{a b c d} Peter Merseburger: Rudolf Augstein. Biography. Munich 2007, pp. 122–126, cited above. 125f., 128, 145-148.
13. ^ Otto Köhler: Rudolf Augstein. A life for Germany . Droemer, Munich 2002, ISBN 3-426-27253-9 , p. 271.
14. ↑ Patrick Wagner: The rehabilitation of Nazi criminalists. In: Ulrich Herbert (Ed.): Change processes in West Germany. Burden, integration, liberalization 1945–1980. Göttingen 2002, pp. 185-187, cit. P. 195.
15. ^ Wehner: Unrechtsstaat. Pp. 665-669.
16. ↑ Make a note of the name Hirschfeld . In: Der Spiegel . No. 53 , 1949 ( online ).
17. ^ Stephan Linck: Alte Charlottenburger - A network in the West German criminal investigation department . In Bürgerrechte & Polizei / CILIP , 92 (1/2009), pp. 20–28.
18. ^ Wagner: Resozialisierung , p. 197.
19. ^ Annette Weinke: The persecution of Nazi perpetrators in divided Germany. Dealing with the Past 1949–1969 or: A German-German Relationship Story in the Cold War. Paderborn 2002, p. 384; Karl Pfannenschwarz: The system of criminal conviction persecution in West Germany. Berlin (GDR) 1965, p. 77.
20. ^ Hans-Dieter Schwind: Criminology. A practice-oriented introduction with examples . 20th edition. Heidelberg 2010, p. 39.
21. ↑ Isabell Otto: Criminal crime hunters. For self-regulation of media violence. In: Irmela Schneider u. a. (Ed.): Discourse history of the media after 1945. Vol. 3. Media culture of the 70s , Wiesbaden 2004, p. 211.
22. ↑ Martin Compart: CRIME TV. Lexicon of crime series. Bertz-Verlag, Berlin 2000, p. 129.