Gerhard Bohne

This article deals with an SS man; for the religious educator with this name, see Gerhard Bohne (religious educator) .

Gerhard Bohne (born July 1, 1902 in Braunschweig ; † July 8, 1981 ) was SS-Hauptsturmführer during the Nazi era , head of the professional group of lawyers in the Association of National Socialist German Lawyers and, as head of the office department, the legal organizer of the National Socialist euthanasia -Mordings ( Action T4 ) commissioned central office .

Life

Vocational training and political activity

Bean's father was a Reichsbahn official . After attending the Schiller-Gymnasium in Cologne , he passed the final examination on January 12, 1921. In April 1921 Bohne began studying law, and on November 11, 1924 he passed the legal traineeship with "sufficient". As a trainee lawyer , he worked at the Cologne District Court, the Berlin Higher Regional Court and with a lawyer in the same city. On December 21, 1928 he received his doctorate in law; on January 8, 1930 he passed the Grand State Examination. From March 28, 1930 he was admitted to the bar at the Berlin District and Regional Court.

While still at school, Bohne joined the Deutschvölkischer Schutz- und Trutzbund on April 27, 1920 . On February 5, 1921 he was awarded the Trutzbund badge of honor. As a student, Bohne was a member of the “Volksbund der Schaffenden estates”. On August 1, 1930, Bohne joined the NSDAP ( membership number 289.268) and the SA at the same time . As a lawyer, Bohne defended SA members in court. He reported several times to the Oberführer of the SA-Gausturm Berlin-Brandenburg about the behavior of judges and public prosecutors. He called a public prosecutor "extremely republican" and recommended that he be "put on hold for the Third Reich ".

time of the nationalsocialism

After the takeover of the NSDAP bean became a Deputy Director appointed I (civil rights and related areas) of the legal-political department of the Gau Greater Berlin of the Nazi party on April 5 1,933th On April 27, 1933 he was entrusted with the management of the professional group of lawyers of the "Association of National Socialist German Jurists". He later worked as a speaker for the National Socialist Lawyers' Association.

On June 7, 1933, Bohne was sentenced to nine months' imprisonment and a fine of 5,000 RM for continued, deliberate foreign currency offenses . Bohne defended himself in court that he was not aware of the foreign exchange regulations, and that he was overburdened with work and his health was in poor health. In the appeal hearing on January 10, 1934, Bean's sentence was reduced. The fine remained unchanged and the prison sentence was waived. Bean's defense attorney had previously tried to suppress the proceedings , and the then Reich Minister for Nutrition , Richard Walther Darré , was one of the witnesses of repute .

On February 7, 1935, Bohne was appointed examining magistrate for the "Honorary Council of the German Reich Farmers Council ". He ended his SA membership on October 14, 1935, and on October 14, 1937, he joined the SS (membership no. 274.114).

Co-organizer of "Aktion T4"

The Fuhrer's chancellery commissioned by Adolf Hitler to carry out the euthanasia program, which became known in the post-war period as "Aktion T4", and the Reich Ministry of the Interior itself were not to appear. At the suggestion of Herbert Linden , the ministerial director responsible for health care in the Ministry of the Interior, a sham organization called the “Reichsarbeitsgemeinschaft Heil- und Pflegeeanstalten (RAG)” was created at the T4 central office at the end of 1939 .

Bohne, who had meanwhile been promoted to SS-Obersturmführer , was appointed head of this front company as a senior government councilor . Bohne had been involved in the preparation of "Aktion T4" since September 1939. On 17 October 1939 he was one of a commission under the leadership of Viktor Brack , the castle Grafeneck to grafeneck repurposed. Further members of the commission were Werner Heyde , Reinhold Vorberg and Kurt Franz . At the end of 1939, Bohne and Hans Hefelmann were involved in negotiations with the Lord Mayor of Brandenburg to set up the killing facility there . In February 1940, Bohne took part in a conference in which other doctors such as Friedrich Mennecke were won over as T4 experts for the murders. From February 26 to March 4, 1940, Bohne supported a medical commission that selected patients in the Bedburg-Hau asylum . Bohne accompanied the transport of the patients selected for murder to the Grafeneck killing center.

Bohne created the organizational framework for the registration of the victims, the transport to the killing centers and the notarization of their death, including the administration of the estate, and provided formal legal protection by a Nazi special registry office in order to hide the high death rates from the community registrars . For the transport of certain of the evaluators to kill patients, a private bill companies with the designation has been Charitable ambulance GmbH founded for which bean the social contract made and entered in the commercial register prompted. Another bogus company was founded for external contact between the T4 staff and was given the name "Non-profit Foundation for Institutional Care" and existed only on letterheads.

On March 1, 1940, Bohne was appointed to the Ministry of the Interior in the Department of Health Care there. The command to "T4" remained, however. At the exact time of his departure from "Aktion T4" and the background, statements by those involved were in some cases contradicting itself. Bohne was probably still active in "Aktion T4" until he was handed over his duties in June 1940. Bohne himself stated in post-war statements that he had resigned because Viktor Brack had not done anything to remedy the grievances he had complained of in the Grafeneck killing center. Hans Hefelmann, on the other hand, claims to have replaced Bohn, because he also called for people suffering from dementia to be included in the murders.

At the beginning of 1942, Bohne wrote a memorandum in which he accused the staff of “Aktion T4” of pushing groceries , the abuse of motor vehicles and “alcoholic and sexual debauchery”. Bohne also forwarded the memorandum to the chief of the Reich Security Main Office , Reinhard Heydrich . Bean's allegations were checked and turned out to be partly exaggerated and partly false. With a “secret” judgment of August 10, 1943, he was expelled from the party by the 1st Chamber of the Supreme Party Court of the NSDAP . In December 1943, he was discharged from the SS as punishments due to the breach of confidentiality. Bohne disregarded the position of Reichsleiter Philipp Bouhler and gathered material behind his back in a “ruthless and unrestrained manner”.

Law enforcement attempts

Drafted into the Wehrmacht in January 1943 , Bohne saw the end of the war in Italy , where he was taken prisoner by the Americans. Released at the end of 1946, he returned to Cologne. In Düsseldorf he worked as a legal assistant in a law firm.

When the Federal Republic of Germany was founded in 1949, Bohne took the " rat lines " to Argentina , where he claims to have worked in an industrial company and later as a self-employed legal advisor. He was the author of Der Weg , the newspaper of the German National Socialists in the Peron era. In 1955 he returned to Germany and was admitted to the bar in Cologne in July 1956 and in Düsseldorf in December 1956.

On September 10, 1959, Bohne was taken into custody. On May 22, 1962, the Attorney General at the Higher Regional Court in Frankfurt am Main , Fritz Bauer , brought charges against Bohne for having "insidiously, cruelly and deliberately killed at least 15,000 people". His defense counsel was the former head of law at the NSDAP Reichsleitung and legal adviser of the SA, Wolfgang Zarnack . On March 15, 1963, he was given exemption from prison for health reasons , which he used in July 1963 to leave for Buenos Aires via Denmark and Zurich , where he went into hiding under the false name of Kurt Alfred Rüdinger . On February 27, 1964, he was arrested by the Argentine federal police and, after two years of trying to prevent his extradition, handed over to the German police on November 11, 1966. In spite of this, the trial at the Limburg Regional Court was never concluded , as Bohne was declared unfit for trial in an expert report by the Institute for Forensic and Social Medicine dated November 22, 1967. A new report from December 1967 confirmed that the company still had a limited ability to negotiate. However, when Bohne failed to appear in court on the 158th day of the trial, September 30, 1968, an expert assessed Bohne as having a heart attack as the trial proceeded. The proceedings were therefore provisionally discontinued on October 11, 1968 and finally terminated on July 22, 1969.

literature

• Ernst Klee : "Euthanasia" in the Nazi state. 11th edition. Fischer-Taschenbuch, Frankfurt am Main 2004, ISBN 3-596-24326-2 .
• Ernst Klee: What they did - what they became. Doctors, lawyers and others involved in the murder of the sick or Jews. 12th edition. Fischer TB, Frankfurt am Main 2004, ISBN 3-596-24364-5 .
• Ernst Klee: Gerhard Bohne. Entry in ders .: The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. Actual. Output. Fischer TB, Frankfurt 2005, ISBN 3-596-16048-0 , p. 62.
• Thomas Vormbaum (Ed.): "Euthanasia" in court. The indictment of the public prosecutor at the Higher Regional Court Frankfurt / M. against Dr. Werner Heyde et al. From May 22, 1962. Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-8305-1047-0 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Gerhard Bohne in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ quoted from: Thomas Vormbaum, p. 10.
2. ↑ Thomas Vormbaum, p. 220ff.
3. ↑ Thomas Vormbaum, p. 11.
4. ↑ Quoted from: Thomas Vormbaum, p. 11.
5. ↑ Thomas Vormbaum, p. XXIV.