Hanns Ludin

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Hanns Elard Ludin

Hanns Elard Ludin (* 10. June 1905 in Freiburg ; † 9. December 1947 in Bratislava ), a German SA -Obergruppenführer was in the era of National Socialism from 1941 as a representative of the German Empire in the Slovak State also among many other measures involved in the persecution of Jews in Slovakia . He was executed as a convicted war criminal .

Life

Ludin was the only son of the Freiburg high school professor Friedrich Ludin and his wife Johanna, a painter. Raised loyal to the emperor, religiously and nationally in his parents' home, he joined the Reichswehr in 1924 after graduating from the Berthold-Gymnasium in Freiburg . On December 1, 1927, he was promoted to lieutenant . On March 10, 1930, he was arrested together with Lieutenant Richard Scheringer and First Lieutenant Hans Friedrich Wendt , all from the 5th Artillery Regiment in Ulm , for "attempting to form National Socialist cells within the Reichswehr". In Ulm Reichswehr process , all three were on October 7, 1930 per 18 months imprisonment sentenced. Ludin was taken to the fortress detention center in Rastatt . In June 1931 he was pardoned. He then joined the NSDAP and became a member of the SA, while his friend Scheringer professed communism after his release from imprisonment , but did not join the communist party until autumn 1945.

In July 1931 Ludin took over the leadership of the SA -Gausturm Baden of the SA-Gruppe Südwest; As SA leader, he worked as editor, political leader and speaker during the "fighting time" until the seizure of power in 1933. From July 1932 until the end of the war, Ludin also held a mandate as a member of the Reichstag . On March 21, 1933, Ludin was appointed leader of the entire SA Group Southwest, Stuttgart, after he had previously been acting police chief in Karlsruhe for about two weeks. Ludin was arrested during the so-called Röhm Putsch in 1934, in which Adolf Hitler had almost the entire SA leadership eliminated. Only a few higher SA leaders survived, including Ludin, who was personally pardoned by Hitler. In 1937 he was promoted to SA Obergruppenführer. From 1939 to 1940 he served in the Wehrmacht and took part in the Second World War in France . From January 1941 to April 1945 he worked as a representative of Germany with the title " Envoy I. Class and Minister Plenipotentiary" in the only formally independent Slovakia . He resided with his family in the Aryanized Bratislava villa of the Slovak Jewish manufacturer Stein. Ludin's adjutant and legation councilor in Preßburg was Hans Gmelin from 1941 to 1945 , whom he knew from his time in the SA in Stuttgart in 1933.

As the top representative of the German Reich, Ludin played a key role in the deportation of Slovak Jews as part of the Holocaust . He was jointly responsible for the deaths of over 60,000 Slovaks. In April 1945, Ludin and his family fled from Pressburg to the west before the approaching Soviet troops . At the end of the war he was arrested by the US troops in the Austrian monastery of Kremsmünster and was taken to the American internment camp in Natternberg . Here he met Ernst von Salomon , who later described the encounters with Ludin in his book The Questionnaire and to whom Ludin confessed to his responsibility for the crimes committed in his sphere of influence. That is why he refused the opportunity to flee when it presented itself.

In 1946 Ludin was extradited by the USA as a war criminal to Czechoslovakia and sentenced to death by the Bratislava Court in 1947. The fifth of 27 charges related to his involvement in the deportation of Jews. He was hanged in Bratislava on December 9, 1947 . His last words referred to his family and Germany ("Es lebe Deutschland").

family

Hanns Ludin was married to Erla von Jordan (1905–1997), together they had four daughters and two sons: Erika (1933–1997), Barbara (* 1935), Ellen (* 1937), Tilman (1939–1999), Malte (* 1942) and Andrea (* 1943). Erla Ludin and her six children came in 1945 from Bratislava to the Schlösslehof estate in Ostrach , Upper Swabia , which had been the property of the Ludins since 1942 and where the family lived until the end of 1952, before they moved to Tübingen with the help of Hans Gmelin . Son Malte Ludin is a director in Berlin. In 2005 he released a documentary about his family; the film entitled “2 or 3 things I know about him” contains interviews with his mother and three sisters about the deeds of Hanns Ludin. His sister Erika married the lawyer Heinrich Senfft and died in 1997. Their daughter, the author and journalist Alexandra Senfft , also dealt critically with the family history of Hanns Ludin and published a book on this. As Ludin's granddaughter, Senfft writes about the life of so-called perpetrator children using her mother's example and describes different ways of dealing with things within the family.

Movies

  • Karl Gass : The Lieutenant von Ulm , DEFA-Studio for Documentary Films 1978
  • Christian Geissler : The wife of a leader , NDR 1979
  • Malte Ludin : 2 or 3 things I know about him , documentation, 85 min., Production: SvarcFilm 2004 (see also lit.)

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Matic, Igor Philip, Ludin, Hanns Elard, in: Biographisches Lexikon zum Third Reich. Published by Hermann Weiß, Frankfurt am Main 2002, p. 308f.
  2. ↑ Eva Menasse : Suicide on installments . Review, in: Süddeutsche Zeitung , June 25, 2007, p. 14.
  3. ↑ Alexandra Senfft: Silence hurts. A German family story. Claassen, Hamburg 2007, ISBN 978-3-546-00400-8 .
  4. ↑ on this article see also the review by Guntram Brummer: Badische Biographien Neue Zusammenarbeit. Peculiarities, advantages and mistakes of a national historical compilation. In: Writings of the Association for the History of Lake Constance and its Surroundings. 112th year 1994, pp. 131–146, here p. 139 ( bodenseebibliotheken.eu )
personal data
SURNAME Ludin, Hanns
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Ludin, Hanns Elard (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German officer of the Reichswehr and politician (NSDAP), MdR
DATE OF BIRTH June 10, 1905
PLACE OF BIRTH Freiburg in Breisgau
DATE OF DEATH December 9, 1947
Place of death Bratislava