Hans-Günther Seraphim

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Hans-Günther Seraphim (born December 21, 1903 in Königsberg ; died February 13, 1992 in Göttingen ) was a German historian and librarian . He was one of the most frequently heard experts in trials for Nazi crimes in the Federal Republic of Germany . In doing so, he advocated the theory that the courts considered plausible up until the 1970s that the decisive factor in assessing the need for orders of Nazi criminals (criminal act on the orders of a superior) was not whether this compulsory situation existed objectively, but of the perpetrator was felt - so it was subjectively. With the help of this construction, many perpetrators were acquitted.

family

Hans-Günther Seraphim's father was the lawyer Richard Seraphim, his brothers were Helmut and Erhard Seraphim. Hans-Günther Seraphim's uncle was the German-Baltic historian and journalist Ernst Seraphim , editor-in-chief of several German newspapers in the Baltic States. His aunt was Sophie Seraphim geb. Wegener (1871–1945), daughter of a manor owner in Livonia. Hans-Günther's cousin Hans-Jürgen Seraphim (1899–1962) was an economist and during the Third Reich was temporarily director of the Eastern European Institute in Breslau. The cousin Peter-Heinz Seraphim (1902–1979) was also an economist, originally focusing on Eastern European economies. In 1938 he published a large work on Eastern European Judaism and subsequently became one of the National Socialist "Jewish experts" who advocated scientific anti-Semitism .

Life

From 1910 Hans-Günther Seraphim attended the Collegium Fridericianum and passed his Abitur there in 1923 . He then served until August 15, 1924 as an officer candidate in the Reichswehr with the 1st Prussian Pioneer Battalion. He then studied history, German, library science and Russian at the Albertus University of Königsberg and, from the summer semester of 1925, at the Georg-August University of Göttingen . In May 1928 he received his doctorate on Joachim Hinrich von Bülow and his library under Alfred Hessel . In 1931 he passed the state examination.

From December 1, 1931 to September 30, 1932, Seraphim worked as an assistant at the Königsberg University Library . From October 1, 1932 to May 20, 1935, he completed his preparatory service at the Göttingen University Library and at the Berlin State Library . In October 1934 he passed his final exam. On September 30, 1935, he resigned from the civil service because he did not want to change his name, which was supposedly Jewish and thus represented a racist burden. He worked at the World War II library in Stuttgart until May 30, 1939 and then at the main naval library in Kiel until September 30, 1939 .

Kai Arne Linnemann is obviously mistaken for Hans-Günther Seraphim's cousin Peter-Heinz Seraphim when he writes that Hans-Günther Seraphim was on the advisory board of the North-East German Research Association (NOFG), which was active in East German research during the Nazi era .

On October 1, 1939, Seraphim was drafted as a reserve officer . He took part in the campaign in the west as a company commander and after illness became an adjutant in a supply unit. He took part in the German attack on the Soviet Union and was in the hospital for a long time from November 1941. He then became second general staff officer in the Armenian Legion . From 1943 he was company commander and later battalion leader in the 162nd Turkmen Division . In June 1944 he was wounded again. After his recovery he was a member of the staff of the Army High Command until the end of the war .

In June 1945 Seraphim was released from American captivity. In February 1946 he found work at the Göttingen University Library. Seraphim came to Nuremberg through the Göttingen international lawyer Herbert Kraus , who defended the main war criminal Hjalmar Schacht in the Nuremberg trial . He co-edited the official version of the trial and acted as a historical expert on the defense. Seraphim and Kraus also advised the defense in the Nuremberg Medical Trial.

When Kraus received a professorship at the Georg-August University in Göttingen , Seraphim followed him as an assistant at the Institute for International Law , where Kraus set up a contemporary history department for him. After the end of the Nuremberg trials, the University of Göttingen received some of the trial files, for which it had been compiling indices on the twelve US military trials in Nuremberg from 1949 onwards. Seraphim wrote essays on the problems of the Nuremberg Trials and reports on the motives of the assassins from July 20, 1944 . He supervised Göttingen contemporary history dissertations, which were based on the Nuremberg sources at the Institute for International Law . In 1951 he was given a teaching position on contemporary history topics, which he held until the summer semester of 1968, and read about the prehistory of the Second World War , the persecution of the Jews, the Russian campaign and the methodology of contemporary history, which was also included in the events of the history seminar. In 1956 he published the parts of Alfred Rosenberg's political diary that were accessible to him , according to Ernst Piper's later opinion, “not without sympathy for the author”.

Seraphim was called in as an expert in numerous Nazi war crimes trials - up to the Ulm Einsatzgruppen trial in 1958, in more than 50 such trials. In response to the issue of the need for orders , he pointed out that in his many years of research he had not come across any case that an SS member was accused of refusing to order a murder or even sentenced to death. But it came with individual proceedings, e.g. B. in the case of SS-Unterscharführer Albert Layer , a block leader in the Groß-Rosen concentration camp , to the conclusion that a subjective order emergency cannot be ruled out. According to this, only the full-time SS leaders and some of the subordinates in a concentration camp would have to be prosecuted. Seraphim's thesis of a subjective and objective lack of orders was refuted by the historian Wolfgang Scheffler in a series of trials and with the verdict in the Düsseldorf Einsatzgruppen trial in 1973 no longer legally accepted.

Fonts

literature

  • Ernst Bahr and Gerd Brausch (eds.): Old Prussian biography . Volume 4, delivery 3. Elwert, Marburg 1995, p. 1503 f.
  • Kai Arne Linnemann: The legacy of Eastern research. On the role of Göttingen in the history of the post-war period. Tectum, Marburg 2002, ISBN 3-8288-8397-4 .
  • Hubert Seliger: Political lawyers? The defenders of the Nuremberg trials . Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2016 ISBN 978-3-8487-2360-7 , pp. 552f.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d volume for the microfiche edition: With an introduction by Angelika Ebbinghaus to the history of the process and short biographies of those involved in the process . S. 139. Karsten Linne (ed.): The Nuremberg Medical Process 1946/47. Verbal transcripts, prosecution and defense material, sources on the environment. Published by Klaus Dörner on behalf of the Hamburg Foundation for Social History of the 20th Century . Introduction by Angelika Ebbinghaus . German edition, microfiche edition. Saur, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-598-32020-5 .
  2. ↑ On the family relationships Alan E. Steinweis : The pathologization of the Jews - The case of Peter-Heinz Seraphim. Main focus: »Research on Jews« - Between Science and Ideology. In the yearbook of the Simon Dubnow Institute. Vol. 5, V&R, Göttingen 2006, ISBN 3-525-36932-8 . P. 316 ff.
  3. ↑ Alan E. Steinweis : The pathologization of the Jews - The case of Peter-Heinz Seraphim. Main focus: »Research on Jews« - Between Science and Ideology. In the yearbook of the Simon Dubnow Institute. Vol. 5, V&R, Göttingen 2006, ISBN 3-525-36932-8 . Pp. 318-323 ff.
  4. ↑ Kai Arne Linnemann: Das Erbe der Ostforschung , 2002, p. 61, fn. 118.
  5. ^ Kai Arne Linnemann: Das Erbe der Ostforschung , 2002, p. 120.
  6. ↑ Kai Arne Linnemann: Das Erbe der Ostforschung , 2002, p. 146.
  7. ↑ Manfred Hagen : Göttingen as "Window to the East" after 1945 , in: Hartmut Boockmann (Ed.): History in Göttingen: a series of lectures . Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1987, p. 331.
  8. ^ Ernst Piper: Alfred Rosenberg. Hitler's chief ideologist. Blessing, Munich 2005, ISBN 978-3-89667-148-6 , p. 638; see also Ernst Piper: The thriller about the diaries of Hitler's chief ideologues , Der Tagesspiegel , June 15, 2013
  9. ^ Hermann Langbein: In the name of the German people. Interim review of the trials for National Socialist crimes. Europa Verlag, Vienna 1963, p. 60 f.
  10. ↑ Helge Grabitz, Klaus Bästlein a. Johannes Tuchel: Foreword . In: Same (ed.): The normality of crime. Balance sheet and perspectives of research on the national socialist violent crimes. Edition Hentrich, Berlin 1994, p. 17.
personal data
SURNAME Seraphim, Hans-Günther
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German historian and librarian
DATE OF BIRTH December 21, 1903
PLACE OF BIRTH Koenigsberg
DATE OF DEATH February 13, 1992
Place of death Goettingen