Ernst Heinrichsohn

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Ernst Heinrichsohn (born May 13, 1920 in Berlin ; † October 29, 1994 in Goldbach (Lower Franconia) ) was a German lawyer who participated in the deportation of Jews from France to Auschwitz as an SS member during the Nazi era .

Life

Heinrichsohn was drafted into the Wehrmacht in 1939 after graduating from high school , but was dismissed as unfit for military service. He began to study law, but was assigned to the Reich Main Security Office. In September 1940 he became an officer candidate in the Jewish Department of the German Security Police in France under Theodor Dannecker , and his direct superior was later Heinz Röthke . From 1943 he was an employee of the commander of the Sipo Kurt Lischka . In 1942 Heinrichsohn organized the deportation of tens of thousands of stateless and French Jews to Auschwitz in the subordinate rank of SS-Unterscharführer (NCO) in the function of a transport clerk. In addition to a recording of a meeting he had with the French prefect Jean Leguay , Heinrichsohn noted: "On Friday, August 28, 1942, the 25,000th Jew was deported." At this meeting Heinrichsohn also noted that the arrests were made of the “September Program” were carried out jointly by the “Police, Gendarmerie and Wehrmacht”.

When the transport was delayed on September 30, 1942, Heinrichsohn, who regularly monitored the departure from the Drancy assembly camp , also had the French Senator Pierre Masse (1879–1942) deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Heinrichsohn selected 35 bedridden elderly people from the Rothschild Hôpital for transport No. 45 on November 11, 1942 in order to increase the number of deportees.

Heinrichsohn studied law in Würzburg after the Second World War . Nothing is known about internment or denazification . He settled as a lawyer in Miltenberg and in 1952, as a CSU member, was elected the second honorary mayor of his community in Bürgstadt , from which his wife, who was married in 1946, came. Since 1960 he was the first mayor there, also on a part-time basis, and earned the reputation of the small town residents because he prevented incorporation. He was also a member of the Miltenberg district council .

On March 7, 1956, he was sentenced to death in absentia in France. Since persecution (and conviction) by the Allies formally prevented criminal prosecution in the Federal Republic of Germany, it was not until 1975 that this obstacle to the process in 1971 with the transfer agreement against the resistance of the influential FDP politician and former close collaborator of the National Socialist ambassador in Paris Otto Abetz , Ernst Achenbach , could be cleared.

When in 1976, on the initiative of French historian and Holocaust survivor Serge Klarsfeld, Heinrichsohn's involvement in the Holocaust became known, he denied in a declaration on honor that he was identical to a Gestapo agent called "Heinrichson" who was wanted in France. This declaration of honor worked not only in the community, but also on the board of the CSU, whose general secretary Edmund Stoiber did not want to intervene in a pending investigation with preliminary convictions.

Even before the start of the trial, Heinrichsohn had been re-elected mayor in 1978 with 85% of the vote and with no opposing candidacy from the SPD. In 1977, the Bamberg Higher Regional Court did not recognize the incriminating documents published by Klarsfeld and did not want to withdraw Heinrichsohn's license to practice as a lawyer. In June 1978 there was a political demonstration of around eighty French people organized by Serge Klarsfeld in Miltenberg. They sprayed Heinrichsohn's law office with swastikas, unfolded a banner with the inscription "Franz Josef Strauss protects Nazi criminal Heinrichsohn" and tore off the office sign.

Heinrichsohn organized the rail transport of Jews from the Drancy assembly camp: French lawyers imprisoned in Drancy, 1941

In 1979 Heinrichsohn, together with Lischka and Herbert Hagen, was charged with “having intentionally provided assistance to the willful and illegal, cruel, insidious killing of people for low motives”. The indictment was based u. a. to an expert report written by Wolfgang Scheffler . Röthke had already died in 1965, unmolested, although also sentenced to death in France.

Serge Klarsfeld had compiled a collection of documents from the Gestapo files found in Paris on behalf of the joint plaintiffs. a. Heinrichsohn's involvement in the deportation of Greek Jews and the deportation of Jewish children from France emerged. Heinrichsohn's lawyer Richard Huth, however, had denied the Romanian-born Serge Klarsfeld the right to speak for the French Jews. Heinrichsohn had declared in court that he lacked an awareness of wrongdoing, since he only found out about the murder of Jews after the end of the war. He only assigned Jews to work assignments. Heinrichsohn, however, was identified by witnesses; It was proven to him that he had small children and the sick deported, and the historian and Holocaust survivor Georges Wellers was able to describe Heinrichsohn's appearance as a witness from a paper he had already written in 1946 about the conditions in Drancy. Dannecker's assessment, recorded in writing on July 20, 1942 and initialed by Lischka after a joint business trip , that the “Jews are approaching their complete annihilation”, was also known to him.

On February 11, 1980, Heinrichsohn was sentenced to six years in prison by the Cologne jury court, Lischka to ten and Hagen to twelve years. Bürgstadt's residents stood behind their mayor during the trial and collected the 200,000 DM bail with which he was supposed to live at large during the review of the proceedings; however, he was arrested in March 1980 because of the risk of fleeing . On July 16, 1981, the Federal Court of Justice upheld the judgments.

On June 3, 1982, he was released early by order of the Bamberg Higher Regional Court after the Bayreuth Regional Court had refused in March 1982 because the two-thirds deadline had not yet expired. In 1987, his remaining sentence was waived. Heinrichsohn showed no sense of guilt and went through perjury proceedings, since in the proceedings against Count Modest von Korff he stuck to his statement that he knew nothing about the murder of the Jews. After all, he lived with his new wife in a neighboring town of Bürgstadt.

The opening of the trial in Cologne was a later success for Serge Klarsfeld and his wife Beate Klarsfeld in their efforts to bring the German and French Holocaust perpetrators to justice. The relatively high prison sentences for the defendants were a novelty in the case law of the Federal Republic of Germany.

Bürgstadts residents were convinced after the conviction of the innocence of their fellow citizen, the journalist Lea Rosh documented these statements in several television features for registration D .

literature

  • Serge Klarsfeld : Vichy - Auschwitz. The “Final Solution of the Jewish Question” in France , Translated from the French by Ahlrich Meyer, Nördlingen 1989; New edition 2007 by WBG , Darmstadt, ISBN 978-3-534-20793-0 .
  • Bernhard Brunner: The France Complex. The National Socialist crimes in France and the justice system of the Federal Republic of Germany , Wallstein, Göttingen 2004, ISBN 3-89244-693-8 .
  • Ahlrich Meyer : perpetrator under interrogation. The “Final Solution of the Jewish Question” in France 1940–1944 , Darmstadt 2005, ISBN 3-534-17564-6
  • Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945? S. Fischer, Frankfurt 2003, ISBN 3-596-16048-0 .
  • Claudia Moisel: France and the German war crimes. The criminal prosecution of German war and Nazi crimes after 1945 , Wallstein, Göttingen 2004 ISBN 3-89244-749-7 .
  • Michael Mayer : States as perpetrators. Ministerial bureaucracy and “Jewish policy” in Nazi Germany and Vichy France. A comparison . With a foreword by Horst Möller and Georges-Henri Soutou. Oldenbourg, Munich 2010, ISBN 978-3-486-58945-0 (also Diss. Munich 2007).
  • Rudolf Hirsch : About the final solution. Trial reports on the Lischka trial in Cologne and the Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt / M. Greifenverlag, Rudolstadt 1982. New edition: To the final solution. Process reports , Dietz, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-320-02020-X .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Biographical information from the Cologne trial with Bernhard Brunner: Der Frankreich -komplex , p. 63f. A photo as a soldier on p. 65.
  2. ↑ Serge Klarsfeld, Vichy - Auschwitz , p. 208.
  3. ^ Note printed in Serge Klarsfeld, Vichy - Auschwitz , p. 465f, here p. 466.
  4. ↑ Serge Klarsfeld, Vichy - Auschwitz , p. 465.
  5. ↑ Ahlrich Meyer: perpetrators in interrogation. , Darmstadt 2005, p. 247
  6. ↑ Serge Klarsfeld, Vichy - Auschwitz , p. 208.
  7. ↑ Ahlrich Meyer: perpetrators in interrogation. , Darmstadt 2005, p. 253
  8. ^ Bernhard Brunner: The France Complex , p. 326.
  9. ^ Bernhard Brunner: The France Complex , p. 327.
  10. ↑ The number of demonstrators is in Bernhard Brunner: The France complex , p. 328, who quotes from the investigation files of the public prosecutor's office, at around eighty and at Spiegel, April 30, 1979, slightly different at seventy
  11. ^ Indictment, quoted in Bernhard Brunner: Der Frankreich -komplex , p. 339.
  12. ↑ Serge Klarsfeld, Vichy - Auschwitz , p. 212.
  13. ^ Richard Huth archive link ( memento from January 25, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) at Singelmann and Bach
  14. ↑ Bernhard Brunner: The France Complex , p. 345.
  15. ^ Bernhard Brunner: The France Complex , p. 346.
  16. ↑ Quoted from Claudia Moisel: France and the German war crimes , p. 234.
  17. ^ The guarantee in: Die Zeit , March 7, 1980.
  18. ^ Bernhard Brunner: The France Complex , p. 369.
  19. ^ Bernhard Brunner: The France Complex , p. 358.
  20. ^ Judith Weißhaar: Lea Rosh remembers Bürgstadt , in: Anne Klein (ed.): The Lischka process: a Jewish-French-German memory story. A picture reading book . Berlin: Metropol 2013, pp. 183–190
personal data
SURNAME Heinrichsohn, Ernst
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German lawyer and perpetrator of the Holocaust
DATE OF BIRTH May 13, 1920
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH October 29, 1994
Place of death Goldbach (Lower Franconia)