Hanns Jacobsen

Johannes "Hanns" Jacobsen (born April 29, 1905 in Oosterhout , Province of Noord-Brabant , Netherlands , † February 5, 1985 in Munich ) was a German lawyer and business lawyer.

Life

Jacobsen's dissertation

After graduating from high school, Jacobsen studied law at the Julius Maximilians University of Würzburg . He came from Speyer and was active in the Corps Rhenania Würzburg in 1926, as has always been the case with many Rhineland Palatinates . With a doctoral thesis supervised by Heinrich Schanz (1878–1946), he was promoted to Dr. iur. PhD. After the assessor examination he worked in the office of the Munich lawyer Otto Leibrecht .

Nazi era

In early 1934 Jacobsen joined the Reiter-SS in Munich . With the Schutzstaffel he had SS no. 156,339. The SS excluded him in 1939. Around 1935 Jacobsen became in-house counsel at the Bayerische Vereinsbank . According to a later testimony, at that time he had the reputation of having endeavored “to take advantage of the political circumstances”. In this position he came into contact with the brothers Hermann Fegelein and Waldemar Fegelein, with whom he was on hold. He also married in 1937. On July 13, 1937, Jacobsen applied for membership in the NSDAP. The admission process dragged on for six years. From 1940 (?) Jacobsen took part in World War II, in which he was seriously wounded and was awarded the Iron Cross. In July 1943 Jacobsen was reassigned to the SS with Heinrich Himmler at the intercession of the SS brigade leader Maximilian von Herff . Soon afterwards - six years after his application in 1937 - he was accepted into the NSDAP (membership number 9,563,663).

Postwar and Sachs

After the end of the war, Jacobsen succeeded in his denazification proceedings as part of his denazification in 1947, by misleading the tribunal through false information and his past through numerous exonerating certificates that he had obtained with the help of his wide-ranging relationships, To gloss over: In his denazification questionnaire he truthfully stated that after his first exclusion he had never belonged to the SS and had never been a member of the NSDAP. Leibrecht, who had actually been in the resistance, submitted an affidavit for his former employee, in which he testified that he had belonged to the resistance group "Freiheitsaktion Bayern" (FAB) and organized further matching testimonies. The Sachs biographer Rott later characterized this process as the procurement of "Persilscheine [n] of special cleaning power". Jacobsen benefited from the fact that by using his baptismal name "Johannes" instead of his previous nickname "Hanns" after the war, he was able to (for the time being) largely cover up his traces. At the time, he justified his original entry into the SS by saying that it had taken place at the request of opposition circles in order to collect information that could potentially be of use to them. At that time, he stylized his shady role in the Bavarian Vereinsbank as a sacrifice for emigrants, whereby he kept quiet about his work as an informant for the political police. After his denazification, Jacobsen was again admitted to the bar.

Around 1948 Jacobsen came into closer contact with the industrialist Willy Sachs , whom he knew from the SS and whom he subsequently represented as a lawyer in the denazification process. Jacobsen had struck Sachs for the cleverness, ruthlessness and efficiency with which he had acted in his own denazification process. At this point, a close relationship developed between the two men, which would last until Sachs death in 1958.

Jacobsen's career took a hit around 1949: At that time, after some of the false statements he had made during his trial chamber proceedings, through reports filed against him by former business partners, he had to face proceedings on suspicion of unjustified denazification undergo. So the unusual situation arose that he was simultaneously acting as a lawyer in Willy Sachs' denazification proceedings and had to deal with an ongoing proceeding against him. This ultimately turned out to be light for him: Although the American Berlin Document Center discovered Jacobsen's Nazi documents and found out from them that he had been re-admitted to the SS in 1943, this interested neither the American CIC nor the German Arbitration Chamber. Instead, "Johannes Jacobsen's building of lies", according to Rott, was "accepted" by the authorities against their better judgment and incorrectly recorded in the files that he had never been a member of the party and had no longer belonged to the SS after his exclusion. As Rott wrote, "Jacobsen's relationships are so tightly woven that all allegations roll off him."

After completing Sachs denazification, Jacobsen took a leading position in his company, Fichtel & Sachs AG. Sachs 'biographer Rott describes Jacobsen as the gray eminence behind the powerful industrialist during the 1950s: As Sachs' "Mephistophelian companion", he managed the company behind the scenes and handled his private as well as business and legal matters. He has become a "fateful figure" for Sachs.

In 1956 there was finally a falling out between Jacobsen and Sachs. Jacobsen and a certain Johann Pirzer blackmailed Sachs with their knowledge of an illegal abortion that he had induced his partner to have in the 1940s. Jacobsen was finally settled with 100,000 DM and a house worth 250,000 DM from Sachs. After the authorities became aware of this, there was a trial against Sachs and Pirzer. According to Sachs' biographer Rott, the approach of this trial was likely the event that drove Sachs to suicide. The process, which began and was settled after Sachs death, went smoothly for Pirzer and Jacobsen: Pirzer went unpunished because the last extortionate act he could prove was so far back that it was considered barred. Jacobsen was acquitted of the blackmail allegation because the court was unsure of the extent to which there had been an interaction between him and Pirzer.

In the 1960s Jacobsen headed the German Society for Wood Research in Stuttgart.

literature

• Wilfried Rott : Sachs: entrepreneurs, playboys, millionaires: a story of fathers and sons . Blessing 2005.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Kösener Corpslisten 1996, 134/555
2. ↑ Dissertation: The quality problem in labor court proceedings . CL Hirschfeld, Leipzig 1930.
3. ↑ p. 223.
4. ↑ Roshan Magub: Edgar Julius Jung, Right-Wing Enemy of the Nazis: A Political Biography , 2016, p. 224. Leibrecht testified in an affidavit in favor of Jacobsen: "Jacobsen [joined] the SS Reitersturm at the beginning of 1934 and only for the purpose of getting in contact with Nazi leaders who, as is well known, frequented a more social organization like the SS cavalry. The mentioned group of people [...] was a resistance group from which the FAB later developed ". He, Leibrecht, forwarded the information provided by Jacobsen abroad.
5. ^ Rott: Sachs, p. 223.
6. ^ Rott: Sachs , pp. 269 and 282.
7. ^ Rott: Sachs, p. 287.
8. ^ Albert Oeckl: Pocket book of public life , 1961, vol. 11, p. 492.