Friedrich Karl Bauer

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Friedrich Karl Bauer , also Friedrich-Karl Bauer , (born May 22, 1912 in Stettin ; † 1991 ) was a German Gestapo officer, SS-Obersturmführer and later employee of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution , who lived and worked in West Germany. 1954 was from kidnapped by the GDR State Security from West Germany and kidnapped in the GDR. There he was sentenced to a long prison term in a secret trial for activities directed against the GDR. After eleven and a half years in GDR imprisonment in Bautzen II prison , Bauer was ransomed by the Federal Republic of Germany in 1965 - meanwhile with serious health problems due to inadequate medical treatment and abuse.

Life until the end of the Nazi regime

Bauer was a detective by profession. From March 1939 he was a member of the Gestapo in Prague . As a detective commissioner, he was transferred to the security police in Stettin at the end of 1944 . Bauer had been a member of the NSDAP since June 1930 with membership number 247.163. On November 1, 1933, he joined the General SS (SS No. 123.816). On September 13, 1936, Bauer was promoted to SS-Untersturmführer . His last rank was SS-Obersturmführer .

On November 1, 1933, Bauer was hired by the Stettin criminal police as a criminal investigator. In June 1938 he was transferred to the border police commissioner in Waldshut / Upper Rhine as a post leader . In the course of the annexation of the Czech Republic , he came to the Gestapo in Prague on March 15, 1939, where he was a senior detective assistant in the Bohemia and Moravia Department until May 1943. From May 1943 to June 1943, Bauer completed a so-called selection course for commissioner candidates in Prague and then attended another course in Bernau near Berlin until the end of August this year . After that he worked in various departments. In June 1944, Bauer completed a course to become a detective commissioner at the police school in Rabka-Zdrój . He was then appointed detective inspector and then transferred to the security police in Frankfurt (Oder) . In January 1945 the Bauer office was closed. He and his colleagues were used to defend Szczecin. Bauer was wounded in the process.

Post-war activity

After 1945, Bauer went to the western zones of Germany , from which the Federal Republic of Germany emerged. In 1949 he was hired by the CIA . At the beginning of the 1950s he applied to the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV). At the end of 1952, Bauer became a full-time employee there and was part of the Hanover branch. Internally, this was called the Federal Intelligence Service Lower Saxony (Bunast NS). The task of the Bunast was to obtain information from the GDR . Bauer lived and worked in Goslar . He had to initiate connections by addressing people who lived in the GDR and who appeared suitable for espionage work. He should recruit these people and, after probation, lead them as V-people .

Bauer also had the task of observing the nearby so-called border to the GDR, its fortifications and the surveillance measures by the German border police .

Kidnapping in the GDR and sentenced there

One of the informants recruited by Bauer was the teacher Friedrich Wilhelm Schulz, who lived in a town in the Harz Mountains in the GDR and often crossed the border with little security to the Federal Republic of Germany in order to do small business to improve his livelihood. Bauer recruited Schulz in June 1953, who, however, had signed up as a secret informant for the State Security on November 3, 1952 under the code name "Onion" .

Schulz was a double agent of the GDR, which Bauer was not aware of. On July 17, 1954, Bauer was kidnapped in West German territory with Schulz as a decoy to the GDR. During a supposed meeting with Schulz near the Eckertal near Bad Harzburg , Bauer was beaten to the ground, tied up and kidnapped to the GDR by agents of the State Secretariat for State Security who had penetrated into West German territory . Bauer is one of the 400 or so residents of the Federal Republic who were kidnapped from the Federal Republic by the MfS / SfS between 1949 and 1989. The kidnappings were aimed at “bringing the victims to justice in the GDR”. They were sentenced to long prison terms in political processes controlled by the Ministry for State Security (MfS).

At the behest of the SfS, a secret trial against Bauer was opened on September 14, 1955 before the Rostock District Court . He was accused of criminal acts against the population of Czechoslovakia during World War II in Prague and current crimes against the GDR , applying the Allied provisions that were still valid at the time , namely Control Council Act No. 10 and Control Council Directive No. 38 . Bauer's kidnapping was ignored. The fact alone that he was in German-occupied Prague during the war and that his job was with the Gestapo was proof for the court that Bauer was a war criminal . He was not accused of specific criminal offenses, and victims were not named. No witnesses were summoned and the court did not investigate. Bauer himself admitted that he was involved in arrests of members of the Czechoslovak resistance as part of his work as a senior detective assistant . He denied having anything to do with convictions and torture. In return, the court introduced the contents of a letter from the Ministry of the Interior of the Czechoslovak Republic dated May 16, 1955, in which it was alleged that Bauer was one of the “most feared employees” of the Gestapo. The "most staunch resistance fighters were handed over to him for interrogation, during which he had forced them to confess with terrible abuse." The court used these statements as a basis for the conviction and declared them credible with the following words:

“In addition, the court had no reason to doubt the correctness of the communication about the behavior of the accused in Prague, as it came from an organ of the state power of the Czechoslovak Republic, with which the GDR is closely connected. For this reason, the court did not consider it necessary to comply with the request of the defense and to hear further witnesses on this point. "

- GDR Justice and Nazi Crimes , Ed. CF Rüter, Amsterdam University Press 2003, Volume III, p. 623. Retrieved from the search for proceedings on December 12, 2015

The crimes against the GDR were justified primarily with the violation of Article 6 of the constitution of the GDR and in particular the boycotts . The verdict was pronounced a day later. The court sentenced Bauer to life imprisonment .

Bauer appeals against this judgment . This was heard before the Supreme Court of the GDR in Berlin on November 4, 1955. The conviction under the control council regulations was lifted, which remained because of the violation of the constitution of the GDR. The application of the Control Council Laws and the Control Council Directive had been suspended for the GDR by the Council of Ministers of the USSR on September 20. Therefore, different paragraphs were used for the trial for the alleged crimes in Prague. Now Bauer has been convicted of alleged Nazi crimes for "aiding and abetting murder in four cases - §§ 49, 211 StGB". The life sentence remained.

Time in GDR detention

Even during his pre-trial detention, Bauer was used as a witness in the Gehlen trial against Karli Bandelow , Ewald Misera and others, which was brought on in November 1954 as part of the State Secretariat for State Security's "Aktion Pfeil". Bauer's testimony did not concern the defendants themselves, but was directed against the Gehlen organization in general. The trial ended with the death sentences of Bandelow and Misera. The remaining defendants were sentenced to several years in prison. While in custody, Bauer was strictly isolated for nine years; he was housed in a separate part of the Bautzen prison. During his imprisonment, Bauer suffered several serious illnesses, so that he was 70% disabled when he was released in 1965.

Return to the Federal Republic

Little was known about Bauer's fate in the Federal Republic. The BfVS had made unsuccessful investigations. It was even suspected that Bauer had defected voluntarily as a double agent for the State Security Service, because the SfS had staged his abduction in such a way that it looked like a voluntary withdrawal to the GDR. From 1961, the new head of the procurement department at the BfVS, Hans Josef Horchem, took care of the Bauer case, which his predecessors with the comment “no further clarification is possible. All attempts to get Bauer out of the GDR have failed ”was concluded. There were difficult negotiations with the GDR about a prisoner ransom . The negotiator for the GDR, the lawyer Wolfgang Vogel , repeatedly stated that from the perspective of the GDR a release was not possible. According to Horchem's assumption, the reason was the GDR authorities' concern that Bauer's release could result in reports in the West German press that would again address the “inhuman practices of the MfS”. After all, in Horchem's time, Bauer was the last BfS employee in GDR custody when suddenly Bauer's release was ordered as part of an agent exchange campaign in which the Soviet Union was involved. On December 9, 1965, Bauer returned to the Federal Republic. It was only through Bauer's statements after his return that the authorities were informed of Friedrich Wilhelm Schulz's role. It turned out that he had fled to the Federal Republic as early as 1957. Schulz was tried and sentenced to seven years in prison. Only now did Bauer notice that the BfV had already stopped all salary payments three months after his kidnapping in 1954 and that he had been "switched off" as an agent. A criminal complaint filed by his brother with the Bad Harzburg police for kidnapping in 1954 had not been processed. All investigations into this process had been prohibited by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution.

Two months after his return, Bauer was compelled by the Federal Ministry of the Interior to sign a declaration according to which he would no longer have to make any claims after having paid half of the remuneration due during his imprisonment in the GDR. After successfully challenging this signature given out of ignorance of the legal situation, he was finally fully compensated in the spring of 1967 and also received a service certificate. Nevertheless, he was downgraded to a lower ranking post.

Trials against kidnappers

After the reunification of Germany , prosecutors in Berlin brought charges against five other Stasi employees involved in the kidnapping of jointly committed deprivation of liberty . In the subsequent process in 1998 the head of the Magdeburg District Administration of the State Security (BVS) Gerhard M. and two of his employees were sentenced to prison terms of ten and eight months on probation . Proceedings against another employee were discontinued. The also accused head of Department 4 of Main Department II in the State Secretariat for State Security, Helmut T., died before the end of the proceedings.

literature

  • Susanne Muhle: Order: kidnapping - kidnapping of West Berliners and German citizens by the Ministry for State Security of the GDR. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2015, ISBN 978-3-525-35116-1 . (Also dissertation at the University of Münster 2015.)

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c d e Roland Schißau: Criminal proceedings because of MfS injustice. The criminal trials of German courts against former employees of the Ministry for State Security of the GDR , BWV Verlag, 2010, ISBN 978-3-8305-1140-3 , p. 162 ff. On Google Books
  2. ↑ a b Karl Wilhelm Fricke, Mirko Buschmann: Humaner penal execution and political abuse: on the history of the penal institutions in Bautzen 1904 to 2000, Saxon State Ministry of Justice, 1999, p. 152 [1]
  3. ↑ Constantin Goschler , Michael Wala: “No new Gestapo”. The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and the Nazi past . Rowohlt, Reinbek 2015, p. 73 ISBN 978-3498024383
  4. ↑ GDR justice and Nazi crimes : Online summary of the procedure No. 1100 ( Memento of the original from December 8, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www1.jur.uva.nl archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed October 28, 2015
  5. ↑ Procedure 1100 in GDR Justice and Nazi Crimes , Volume |||, pp. 623–637.
  6. ↑ a b c d Detlef Sprickmann: Disconnected agent. A constitutional protector fights for his rights. The time of November 1st, 1968.
  7. ↑ Hans Josef Horchem: Spies are also retired . Mittler & Sohn, Herford u. a. 1993, ISBN 3-8132-0410-3 , 46ff.
  8. ↑ Treason proceedings before the Federal Court of Justice: Agent "turned around" with beatings and vodka , Hamburger Abendblatt , July 4, 1967
  9. ↑ Severely mistreated , Hamburger Abendblatt, July 6, 1967
  10. ^ A b Karl Wilhelm Fricke , Roger Engelmann : Concentrated Strikes - State Security Actions and Political Processes in the GDR 1953-1956. Ch. Links Verlag, Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-86153-147-X , pp. 136f. Clippings online on Google Books
  11. ↑ Susanne Muhle: Order: kidnapping. Kidnappings of West Berliners and German citizens by the Ministry for State Security of the GDR . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2015, ISBN 978-3-525-35116-1 , p. 59.
  12. ↑ Roland Schißau: Criminal proceedings because of MfS injustice - The criminal proceedings of German courts against former employees of the Ministry for State Security of the GDR, Berlin 2006, ISBN 978-3-8305-1140-3 , p. 159f.
  13. ^ GDR Justice and Nazi Crimes , Ed. CF Rüter, Amsterdam University Press 2003, Volume III, p. 623. Retrieved from the search for proceedings on December 12, 2015
  14. ↑ Hans Josef Horchem: Spies are also retired . Mittler & Sohn, Herford u. a. 1993, ISBN 3-8132-0410-3 , p. 52.
  15. ^ GDR Justice and Nazi Crimes , Ed. CF Rüter, Amsterdam University Press 2003, Volume III, p. 625. Retrieved from the search for proceedings on December 12, 2015.
  16. ^ Karl Wilhelm Fricke, Roger Engelmann: Concentrated Strikes - State Security Actions and Political Processes in the GDR 1953-1956. Ch. Links Verlag, Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-86153-147-X , p. 47f.
  17. ↑ Hans Josef Horchem: Spies are also retired . Mittler & Sohn, Herford u. a. 1993, ISBN 3-8132-0410-3 , p. 53.
  18. ↑ Hans Josef Horchem: Spies are also retired . Mittler & Sohn, Herford u. a. 1993, ISBN 3-8132-0410-3 , p. 56.
  19. ↑ Hans Josef Horchem: Spies are also retired . Mittler & Sohn, Herford u. a. 1993, ISBN 3-8132-0410-3 , p. 58.
  20. ↑ Roland Schißau: Criminal proceedings because of MfS injustice - The criminal proceedings of German courts against former employees of the Ministry for State Security of the GDR , Berlin 2006, ISBN 978-3-8305-1140-3 , p. 163f.
personal data
SURNAME Bauer, Friedrich Karl
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Bauer, Friedrich-Karl
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German Gestapo officer, employee of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, kidnapped and sentenced to the GDR
DATE OF BIRTH May 22, 1912
PLACE OF BIRTH Szczecin
DATE OF DEATH 1991