Fritz Gebhardt from Hahn

Fritz Gebhardt von Hahn (born May 18, 1911 in Shanghai ; † January 31, 2003 in Aschaffenburg ) was a German diplomat during the Nazi era .

Life

The son of the German consul Bernhard von Hahn (1880-1935) and Edith Gebhardt attended grammar school in Rotterdam from 1921 and studied law and economics in Munich , Leipzig and Giessen from 1929 to 1933 . After the assessor examination, he became Ernst Wilhelm Bohles' personal advisor in the NSDAP foreign organization from 1937 onwards, with the rank of head of the yard. He joined the NSDAP on April 1, 1933 and had been a member of the Navy SA since autumn 1933 .

On March 25, 1937, he was hired as an attaché in the Foreign Office and had a training position at the German consulate in Geneva . From February 1940 during the Second World War he was alternately a soldier in the military service and continued to work in the Foreign Office. As Franz Rademacher's deputy , he summarized the reports of the Einsatzkommandos distributed by Reinhard Heydrich on the murder of the Jews, initialed by State Secretary Ernst von Weizsäcker and Undersecretary Ernst Woermann . From February 1943 he headed “Section III / Jewish question, racial policy”. He asked the envoy Otto Bene to the Reich Commissioner for the Occupied Dutch Territories for a list of foreign Jews who were still in the Netherlands. In a brief drafted for Undersecretary Martin Luther , the German ambassador to Finland, Wipert von Blücher, was informed of the need to “ solve the Jewish question ”. Hahn forwarded the letter from the German ambassador to Sofia Adolf Beckerle to Adolf Eichmann and drafted a letter from Luther to the representative of the Reich for Greece Günther Altenburg to initiate anti-Jewish measures. In a private-service letter on March 4, 1943 to the Foreign Office State Secretary Ernst Wilhelm Bohle , he complained about the lack of “understanding of the need for a final European solution to the Jewish question as soon as possible” among his own professional officials abroad.

Second career

After the end of the war, as a war wounded man, he was able to go into hiding in a military hospital for two years and then from autumn 1947 worked in various functions in the private sector and at the Hanover Chamber of Commerce . Nothing is known about its denazification . From 1950 he was employed in a forerunner authority of what would later become the Federal Office for Commercial Economics and in 1957 became a member of the government in the Federal Ministry of Economics . From there he moved to the Federal Office for Defense Technology and Procurement of the Ministry of Defense and was a senior councilor in Koblenz when he was arrested in January 1964 for participating in the murder of Macedonian and Greek Jews.

process

The trial of his involvement in the deportation of the Thracian and Macedonian Jews from what was then Bulgaria against him and Adolf Beckerle was opened before the Frankfurt jury in November 1967. Hahn was also accused of having arranged the deportation of 20,000 Greek Jews from Salonika . During the trial, Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger was heard , and the defense wanted to prove with his testimony that the Federal Foreign Office employees involved in advocating the deportations could not have known the target of mass extermination . The process uncovered the identity of another lawyer from the Foreign Office, Herbert Müller-Roschach , who at the end of January 1942 after the Wannsee Conference worked out the details of the selection process for Jews in the Eastern Territories together with legal colleagues as part of the final solution . While the trial against Beckerle was dropped on June 27, 1968, because he was unable to stand trial due to illness, Hahn's trial continued and ended on August 18, 1968 with a guilty verdict and a sentence of eight years in prison for accessory to murder. The civil rights of honor and thus the right to the civil servant pension were granted to him again on February 16, 1971 by the Federal Court of Justice . After his release from prison, he lived as a pensioner in Aschaffenburg for almost thirty years.

literature

• Maria Keipert (Red.): Biographical Handbook of the German Foreign Service 1871–1945. Published by the Foreign Office, Historical Service. Volume 2: Gerhard Keiper, Martin Kröger: G – K. Schöningh, Paderborn u. a. 2005, ISBN 3-506-71841-X .
• Christopher R. Browning : The "Final Solution" and the Foreign Office. Section D III of the Germany Department 1940–1943. Knowledge Buchges., Darmstadt 2010, ISBN 978-3-534-22870-6 (publications by the Ludwigsburg Research Center of the University of Stuttgart; 16).
• Christopher R. Browning: The final solution and the German Foreign Office. A study of referat D III of Department Germany 1940–43. Holmes & Meier, New York NY u. a. 1978, ISBN 0-8419-0403-0 .
• Eckart Conze, Norbert Frei, Peter Hayes and Moshe Zimmermann: The Office and the Past. German diplomats in the Third Reich and in the Federal Republic. Karl Blessing Verlag, Munich 2010, ISBN 978-3-89667-430-2 .
• Hans-Jürgen Döscher : The Foreign Office in the Third Reich. Diplomacy in the shadow of the final solution. Siedler Verlag, Berlin 1987, ISBN 3-88680-256-6
• Sebastian Weitkamp: Brown diplomats. Horst Wagner and Eberhard von Thadden as functionaries of the “Final Solution”. Dietz, Bonn 2008, ISBN 978-3-8012-4178-0 .

Individual evidence

1. ^ Bernhard von Hahn, see Maria Keipert (Red.): Biographisches Handbuch des Deutschen Auswärtigen Dienst 1871–1945. Published by the Foreign Office, Historical Service. Volume 2: Gerhard Keiper, Martin Kröger: G – K. Schöningh, Paderborn u. a. 2005, ISBN 3-506-71841-X . P. 172 f.
2. ↑ the grandfather Kommerzienrat Ludwig Gebhardt was a wholesaler and member of the Pegnese Order of Flowers (list of members )
3. ^ Christopher R. Browning: The final solution and the German Foreign Office. A study of referat D III of Department Germany 1940–43. Holmes & Meier, New York 1978; The Last Phase of D III: January – March 1943 , pp. 147–177
4. ↑ Eckart Conze, Norbert Frei, Peter Hayes and Moshe Zimmermann: The office and the past. German diplomats in the Third Reich and in the Federal Republic . Karl Blessing Verlag, Munich 2010, p. 187.
5. ↑ Christopher R. Browning: Unleashing the "Final Solution". National Socialist Jewish Policy 1939–1942. Propylaea, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-549-07187-6 , p. 574 f.
6. ↑ Eckart Conze, Norbert Frei, Peter Hayes and Moshe Zimmermann: The office and the past. German diplomats in the Third Reich and in the Federal Republic . Karl Blessing Verlag, Munich 2010, p. 240.
7. ↑ Eckart Conze, Norbert Frei, Peter Hayes and Moshe Zimmermann: The office and the past. German diplomats in the Third Reich and in the Federal Republic. Karl Blessing Verlag, Munich 2010, p. 268.
8. ↑ Eckart Conze, Norbert Frei, Peter Hayes and Moshe Zimmermann: The office and the past. German diplomats in the Third Reich and in the Federal Republic. Karl Blessing Verlag, Munich 2010, p. 283.
9. ^ Christopher R. Browning: The final solution and the German Foreign Office. A study of referat D III of Department Germany 1940–43. Holmes & Meier, New York 1978, p. 162.
10. ↑ Hans-Jürgen Döscher, The Foreign Office in the Third Reich. Diplomacy in the shadow of the final solution. Berlin 1987, p. 215
11. ^ Christopher R. Browning: The final solution and the German Foreign Office. A study of referat D III of Department Germany 1940–43. Holmes & Meier, New York 1978; Appendex I , pp. 201-204.
12. ↑ Eckart Conze, Norbert Frei, Peter Hayes and Moshe Zimmermann: The office and the past. German diplomats in the Third Reich and in the Federal Republic. Karl Blessing Verlag, Munich 2010, p. 665 ff.
13. ↑ DIPLOMACY: From memory . In: Der Spiegel . No. 30 1968 ( online - 22 July 1968 ).
14. ↑ The trial against Beckerle failed: suspension due to the defendant's inability to stand trial. (PDF) (No longer available online.) Frankfurter Rundschau , June 29, 1968, formerly in the original ; Retrieved April 26, 2010 .  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.    
15. ^ No precise answer: Kiesinger's interrogation in the Frankfurt murder trial. Richter reprimands the radio. (PDF) (No longer available online.) Frankfurter Rundschau , July 5, 1968, p. 1f , formerly in the original ; Retrieved April 26, 2010 .  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.    
16. ↑ ral: Hahn has to go to prison: guilty of murder of 20,000 Jews. Frankfurter Rundschau , August 19, 1968, accessed April 26, 2010 .