Dirk Kuhl

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Dirk Kuhl (* 1940 in Hamburg ) is a retired German elementary school teacher and the only child of Günter Kuhl , the head of the Secret State Police (Gestapo) in Braunschweig who was convicted and executed as a Nazi war criminal at the end of 1948 . For decades, Dirk Kuhl has been giving lectures about his life as a child of a Nazi criminal and has taken part in discussions with children of Nazi victims.

Live and act

In 1961, Kuhl graduated from Ernst-Moritz-Arndt-Gymnasium in Remscheid . Only at the age of 18 did he find out from his uncle the actual circumstances of his father's death and his crimes during the Nazi era . The trigger was that Dirk Kuhl had asked why he was the only one in his class to use the plane on a school trip to Berlin at the end of the 1950s instead of taking the bus through the GDR like everyone else . The reason was that because of her husband's Nazi past, his mother feared that her son might be arrested by the GDR authorities while taking a bus trip. Up until this point, Dirk Kuhl's mother had always led him to believe that his father had “ died of an illness in a British prisoner of war ” and was otherwise “charming and a good dancer” and had “done nothing wrong”.

The father

Kuhl's father, Günter Kuhl, was a doctor of law , Obersturmbannführer and from November 1942 to early April 1945 (→ handover of the city of Braunschweig ) head of the Gestapo in Braunschweig. Among other things, Günter Kuhl was also responsible for the Hallendorf labor education camp set up in the spring of 1940 on the initiative of Friedrich Jeckeln , one of his predecessors in office, in which forced laborers had to work for the Reichswerke Hermann Göring in Salzgitter , just under 20 km south-west of Braunschweig , with around 3,000 of these forced laborers died or were murdered. The admission to the notorious concentration camp-like camp, also known as "Camp 21" , was the heaviest punishment for the inmates, especially Poles and Eastern workers , and meant an acute danger to their lives.

Dirk Kuhl found out that his father was involved in at least some of these deaths or was present at shootings. After the end of the war, Günter Kuhl was indicted by a British military court, among other things, sentenced to death and hanged on December 9, 1948 in Hameln prison.

Falling out with mother

After Dirk Kuhl learned of the true identity of his father and his execution, his relationship with his mother deteriorated rapidly. He felt “lied to and betrayed”, while his mother - even in the presence of his Jewish wife - exclusively emphasized the supposed advantages and positive qualities of her husband. The fact that it did not come to a final break was due to Kuhl's Jewish wife.

First marriage

Dirk Kuhl met his future wife (died 1994) during his studies in Düsseldorf . She was Jewish and came from the Ukraine , where, as a four-year-old child and one of only two people in hiding , she had survived a massacre by an SS task force of the local Jewish population. The couple decided not to have children in order to save them the trauma of such a family history. Today Dirk Kuhl lives with his second wife in Baisweil in the Ostallgäu .

Coming up with the father's deeds through the son

Dirk Kuhl made it his business to give public lectures, for example in front of young people, and to give and attend interviews about his family history , his father's deeds, his mother's repression and his dealings with and the way he coped with his own family history to participate in (international) discussion groups.

Among other things, this resulted in a documentary film that has his life as its content: An Impossible Friendship between Michael Richter and Bernd Wiedemann from 1998 tells of the friendship between the “child of the perpetrators” Dirk Kuhl and the “child of the victim” Charles Samson Munn, son of a survivor the Auschwitz extermination camp and the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp .

Know each other, both had about the international group "To Reflect and Trust" (thinking and trust) of the Israeli psychologists , psychotherapists and Holocaust researcher Dan Bar-On . In this group, Bar-On brought the descendants of Nazi victims and perpetrators together so that they could learn to better deal with their own family history by telling and discussing each other.

On November 27, 2017, Bayerischer Rundfunk broadcast the film My Father, the Nazi: “He Didn't Understand Nothing” , in which Dirk Kuhl tells his family story.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Martin Kröger: No grace of late birth from November 10, 2004 on jungle.world.
  2. ↑ EMA-ABI year 1961 on E-Mail-Adresse-rs.de
  3. ↑ a b Dirk Kuhl: “It's not easy as a perpetrator child!” On waterboelles.de
  4. ↑ a b Waltraud Sennebogen: Dealing with the "great silence" on erinnerungsparlament.de.
  5. ↑ a b son of a Gestapo officer speaks to students in Kempten on October 4, 2012 on all-in.de.
  6. ↑ a b c d Philipp Gessler: victims are children, perpetrators kids and family heritage In: taz.am weekend of 13 November of 2004.
  7. ↑ Manuel Böhnke: If your own father is a perpetrator from May 21, 2019 on rga.de ( Remscheider General-Anzeiger ).
  8. ^ Gerd Wysocki: The Secret State Police in the state of Braunschweig. Police law and police practice under National Socialism. Campus Verlag, Frankfurt / New York, 1997, ISBN 3-593-35835-2 , p. 75, FN 138.
  9. ^ Gudrun Fiedler , Hans-Ulrich Ludewig : Forced Labor and War Economy in the State of Braunschweig 1939–1945. In: Sources and research on the Braunschweig national history. No. 39, Appelhans, Braunschweig 2003, ISBN 3-930-29278-5 , p. 99.
  10. ^ Gerd Wysocki: Forced labor in the steel company: Salzgitter and the Reichswerke "Hermann Göring" 1937–1945. Magni-Buchladen, Braunschweig 1982, p. 133.
  11. ↑ Post World War II hangings under British jurisdiction at Hameln Prison in Germany. Retrieved January 13, 2020 .
  12. ↑ Son of a Gestapo officer speaks to students in Kempten on October 4, 2012 on all-in.de.
  13. ↑ Bernhild Vögel: ... and in Braunschweig? Materials and tips for exploring the city 1930–1945. 2nd updated edition. 1996, p. 156.
  14. ↑ EMA student Dirk Kuhl, son of a Nazi perpetrator on waterboelles.de from May 17, 2019.
  15. ↑ An Impossible Friendship Provobis 1998.
  16. ↑ Michael Hollenbach: The legacy of the Nazis from June 8, 2014 on Deutschlandfunk .
  17. ↑ My father, the Nazi: "He didn't understand anything" on br.de.
personal data
SURNAME Kuhl, Dirk
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German teacher
DATE OF BIRTH 1940
PLACE OF BIRTH Hamburg