Dagmar Imgart

Dagmar Imgart b. Atterling (born June 8, 1896 in Ramsberg , municipality of Lindesberg , Sweden ; † August 30, 1980 in Seeheim-Jugenheim ) was a Swedish-German agent of the Gestapo who, among other things, was the head of the Una-Sancta movement, Father Max Josef Metzger and denounced the members of the Kaufmann-Will-Kreis and handed them over to the People's Court .

Until the seizure of power in 1933

Dagmar Imgart was born as the daughter of a farmer in the central Swedish province of Örebro , where she completed school as well as courses in housekeeping, porcelain painting and nursing. A retirement period as a so-called "late girl" took her to Stettin in 1922 , where she taught the teacher Dr. Otto Imgart met and married on October 28, 1922. Due to her husband's frequent school changes, the Imgarts lived alternately in Anklam , Wittenberg and finally, from 1925, in Halberstadt . Their only child Birgitta was born here.

Her husband seemed unsuitable for school lessons and therefore did not achieve the social status that Dagmar Imgart was doggedly longing for. Her husband was a member of the Greifswalder Wingolf and the Wingolf Association Argentina to Strasbourg . With this membership he took over the honorary function of the federal statistician of the "Verband Alter Wingolfiten" in 1925 and finally became federal archivist in 1927; an activity that suited his social shyness and his meticulous work as an amateur historian very much. Through this activity of her husband, Dagmar Imgart also got more contact with pastors and academics.

After the seizure of power in 1933, Christian connections came under increasing pressure from the NS student union . The Wingolfs connections dissolved from 1934, the Wingolfsbund finally in 1935. The question of the whereabouts of the federal archive with all archives including the individual connections arose because they did not want to give this to the central archive in Würzburg as planned by the rulers . Inspired by his wife Dagmar, Otto Imgart developed the plan to move to the Wingolfshaus in Giessen as federal archivist , where the essential parts of the archive had been located since 1898. Since the office was connected with a salary and the house of the Giessen Wingolf allowed a very representative living, the Imgarts moved to Giessen in 1936. This step also results from Otto Imgart's early retirement in 1934, as he allegedly did not seem nervous enough to cope with school work.

Worked as a Gestapo agent

Through the Giessen Wingolf, Dagmar Imgart came into contact with church circles and higher social classes, as it suited her pathological urge for validity, which her contemporaries later described. At some meetings of the remaining old gentlemen of Wingolf, Dagmar Imgart urged himself, whereby a number of pastors who belonged to the Confessing Church quickly noticed their enthusiasm for National Socialism . Dagmar Imgart was recruited by the Gestapo in 1941, for which she was able to travel to Sweden during the war and received gifts and money. As agent V140, code name “Babs”, she was assigned to the Gestapo department “Church Enlightenment”. She now traveled to Darmstadt and Berlin on behalf of the Gestapo . According to contemporary witnesses, she seems to have threatened a number of people with her "good connections" to Berlin.

On behalf of the Gestapo, she became a member of the Una Sancta movement in 1941 and, from 1942, forced herself into the circle around the pastor and orientalist Alfred Kaufmann , who was also a member of the Giessen Wingolf. In this so-called Kaufmann-Will circle she acted as agent provocateur and regularly briefed the Gestapo; the members of the circle were arrested on February 6 and 7, 1942, based on information from Dagmar Imgart. The Wingolfit pastor Ernst Steiner was beaten to death in the Gestapo prison in Darmstadt , in the proceedings before the People's Court in Darmstadt in August 1942, Heinrich Will and Alfred Kaufmann were sentenced to death , the women of the district to several years in prison . Heinrich Will's wife Elisabeth was deported to Auschwitz and murdered. Dagmar Imgart was apparently arrested on the evening of the Gestapo operation and released the next day on the grounds that she had a daughter to look after; their camouflage was thus preserved from the outside. Heinrich Will was executed on February 19, 1943 in the Frankfurt-Preungesheim prison .

Due to her membership in the ecumenical Una-Sancta and her ability to travel to Sweden as a Swedish citizen during the war, Father Max Josef Metzger ("Brother Paulus") asked whether Dagmar Imgart would not send a letter to the Archbishop of Uppsala Erling Could deliver oath. She agreed and immediately handed the letter to the Gestapo. It was Metzger's manifesto for a future free and democratic Germany. Metzger was arrested on June 29, 1943 for treason and sentenced to death on October 14, 1943; he was executed on April 17, 1944 in Brandenburg .

In August 1944 Otto Imgart was drafted into the rank of SS-Unterscharfuhrer as a guard of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp . In January Dagmar Imgart traveled to Sweden with her daughter; her husband died of typhus on April 25, 1945 as a concentration camp guard .

Legal review after 1945

Dagmar Imgart was expelled from Sweden on September 13, 1946 after interrogation by the Swedish police; she stayed briefly in the Ochsenzoll asylum , a psychiatric hospital in Hamburg-Langenhorn, before she was indicted in the ruling chamber in Gießen in 1947 and sentenced to 10 years in a labor camp on August 18, 1947 after a sensational trial. She went to prison in Darmstadt, which was suspended due to her appeal. On October 31, 1949, the regional court in Giessen refused to open the main proceedings; after a trial before the Limburg jury court , Dagmar Imgart was acquitted on October 31, 1951 . This judgment was on revision on 29 January 1953 by the Federal Court of Justice annulled (3 con 248/52) and the cause for a new trial to the Circuit Court of the District Court Kassel directed. On November 16, 1954, this sentenced one year and three months in prison for complicity in deprivation of liberty . Another appeal was rejected by the Federal Court of Justice on June 28, 1956 (3 StR 366/55). In February 1957, Dagmar Imgart began her prison sentence in the women's prison in Frankfurt-Preungesheim , which after the pre- trial detention was taken into account, was only five to six months. On June 14, 1957, she was released on parole with suspension of the remainder of her sentence .

She first moved to Zwingenberg (Bergstrasse) and in 1960 to Bensheim . Dagmar Imgart died on August 30, 1980 at the age of 84 in Seeheim-Jugenheim .

literature

• Kurt Heyne: Resistance in Gießen and the surrounding area 1933-45 (= messages from the Upper Hessian History Association Gießen, new episode 71). Giessen 1986 (on the Kaufmann-Will-Kreis p. 216 ff)
• Bertin Gentges et al. a .: Heinrich Will - life and work . Giessen 1993 (p. 329f. Dagmar Imgart's life data)
• LG Kassel, November 16, 1954 . In: Justice and Nazi crimes . Collection of German criminal judgments for Nazi homicidal crimes 1945–1966 , Vol. XII, edited by Adelheid L. Rüter-Ehlermann, HH Fuchs and CF Rüter . University Press, Amsterdam 1974, pp. 743-858 No. 409.
• Johan Perwe: Svenska i Gestapos tjänst. V140 Babs. Carlssons Bokförlag, Stockholm 2011. (Swedish)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ In the judgment of the People's Court, she is quoted as "former Swede, current member of the Reich Imgart von Gießen" .
2. ^ Karl Dienst: Politics and Religious Culture in Hesse and Nassau between State Change (1918) and National Revolution (1933) . Causes and consequences. Lang, Peter GmbH, 2010, ISBN 978-3-631-60469-4 , p. 242 (note 29).
3. ↑ November 16, 1954 . chroniknet. Retrieved July 23, 2010.