Hans-Walter Zech-Nenntwich

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Joachim Hans-Walter Zech-Nenntwich (actually Hans-Walter Nenntwich ; born June 10, 1916 in Thorn , † after 1979), alias Hermann Böttcher or Dr. Sven Joachim Nansen , was a German war criminal , agent and entrepreneur. During the time of National Socialism he belonged to the SS , changed sides in 1943 and worked as an agent for the British secret service. In 1964 he was sentenced to four years in prison for aiding and abetting murder during World War II . The court described him as a "seedy personality with an adventurous past". Only one day after the verdict he was able to escape from prison with the help of accomplices, but after a few months he surrendered to the German judiciary.

resume

Youth and times of National Socialism

Member of the SS

Hans-Walter Nenntwich was the only son of a mining intern who died in 1925 of a head injury from the First World War . Nenntwich attended school through high school and entered the police force in 1934. After completing military service and Reich Labor Service , he volunteered for service in the SS death's head associations . Via the SS standards Brandenburg and Ostmark , he came to the cavalry of the SS Heimwehr Danzig . In 1940 he completed a leadership course at the SS Junker School in Bad Tölz and was promoted to SS Obersturmführer .

In the summer of 1941, Nenntwich was a member of the 2nd SS Cavalry Regiment under the command of Franz Magill near Pinsk , where his unit was involved in a massacre of around 5,200 Jewish people. He himself later stated about his “rehabilitation” that in 1943 he had finally refused to secure a transport of Jewish children and that he had also provided the Polish resistance with weapons captured by the Red Army out of conviction, and had therefore been arrested and sentenced to death. According to another version, he is said to have been brought to trial in Krakow not because of this, but for desertion and rape . Nenntwich managed to escape from Gestapo detention in Warsaw with false papers and to travel to England via Sweden under the name of Hermann Böttcher .

In England

Sefton Delmer (1958)
The building with the studios of the radio station in Milton Bryan (2009)
Paris House

After his arrival in England, Nenntwich had his first conversations with Jona von Ustinov , called Klop , the father of the actor Peter Ustinov , who worked for MI5 and often received defectors from Germany. In 1944 he was assigned to the special department MB ( Milton Bryan ) of the journalist Sefton Delmer , who produced British radio propaganda for the population in the German Empire with German emigrants . The transmitters were instruments of British " black propaganda " and belonged to the Psychological Warfare Division .

Nenntwich reported to the British that he and the SS officer Hermann Fegelein , Eva Braun's brother-in-law , had founded a resistance group within the SS and therefore had to flee. He stated that there was a "League of Democratic Officers" within the SS who were repelled by the bestial treatment of the Jews, and he himself condemned the bad treatment of the Polish population.

Delmer named Nenntwich Dr. Sven Joachim Nansen and assigned him tasks at the " Resistance transmitter Hagedorn ", which was aimed specifically at members of the SS. Nenntwich decided, according to his own later statements, to memorize the names of those “honorable German friends” who - in his opinion different from himself - were prepared to work “against their fatherland” and not only against the Nazi regime .

In his 1962 book Black Boomerang , Delmer wrote: “'Dr. Nansen '- his real name was Zech-Nenntwich - was a bright-eyed, bouncy, rosy cheeked young cavalry man who even in Austin Reed's gray flannel slacks looked as if he were wearing riding breeches. " ("' Dr. Nansen '- His real name was Zech-Nenntwich - was a bright, cheerful young cavalryman with rosy cheeks who looked as if he were wearing breeches even in the gray flannel trousers from Austin Reed . ”Delmer had none for him It played a role whether Zech-Nenntwich's story about a resistance group within the SS was true, as it had fulfilled its function at the radio station satisfactorily. Zech-Nenntwich's preferred topic of conversation was the "legend", according to Delmer, of the patriotic German soldier who was betrayed by the Führer .

Since Delmer Dr. Nansen remained suspicious of Nansen , but also in order not to unsettle the Jewish employees, he was housed separately from the other Germans in the Paris House of the Duke of Bedford , a few kilometers away , and kept under surveillance. There he lived with an old friend of Delmer, the German diplomat Wolfgang Gans Edler zu Putlitz (code name: Mr. Potts ), who was supposed to keep him company. Zech-Nenntwich's involvement in war crimes in 1941 was not known at the time.

Delmer was of the opinion that it must later have been extremely bitter for Zech-Nenntwich to find out that his old comrades from the SS had gained good positions in the police and security services in West Germany after the war. "It is never pleasant for an opportunist to find he has backed the wrong side after all" ("For an opportunist, it is never pleasant to find out that he ultimately supported the wrong side."), Wrote Delmer, who took note of his remarks the ironic words "Poor Nansen" decided.

After the war

Entrepreneur and Agent

When the war ended Nenntwich returned to Germany, where he served as First Counselor Class liaison between the state government of North Rhine-Westphalia and the British military government was, and a pass-point directed; he continued to work for the British secret service and collected material on German post-war politicians. On New Year's Eve 1949 he asked Chancellor Konrad Adenauer for an interview, who received him in January 1950 for a two-hour interview. Sefton Delmer: “He told the old Chancellor everything he knew about the people who had worked with me, especially those who, like some of the Social Democrats, took an active part in political life in Germany after the war and are now in opposition to Adenauer were standing. ”In this conversation he told Adenauer, as he had done to the British secret service before, about the alleged formation of a neo-Nazi cell in the Federal Republic of which Gerhard Schröder was a member of the senior government . Then Zech-Nenntwich had to leave his post in NRW. Schröder attacked him publicly in a newspaper under a pseudonym , which is why he in turn had to say goodbye as a senior government councilor.

In February 1952 Nenntwich, who had now added Zech to his name after his stepfather, founded the “H.-W. Zech & Co ”and tried to sell“ ignition clocks ”abroad, which, however, were not worth the money, which is why the venture failed. Only a few months later he was sentenced to three months in prison by an Allied court in Bielefeld for attempted bribery. He had offered a security guard 2,000 marks in order to be able to view the files of the British Army Procurement Office in Herford undisturbed . Zech-Nenntwich, who represented a tire company at the time, wanted to find out about offers from the competition in order to be able to undercut them. In the same year he was sentenced to five weeks in prison by the Geldern lay judge after a rent dispute for coercion, trespassing and bodily harm.

In the following years, Hans-Walter Zech-Nenntwich was busy. He is said to have considered joining the People's Police as an officer and to have held talks on this matter with members of the KPD ; the CIA , which had him under surveillance, even suspected that he had spoken to Walter Ulbricht and Erich Mielke personally. He traveled around as an “overseas representative”, told of a doctorate in Oxford, introduced himself to the Federal Press Office as Freiherr Zech von Nenntwich , sat in an office in the Bonn press house and maintained excellent relationships with the post-war elites . He had personal phone calls with his close friend, State Secretary Hans Globke , and continued to claim that he was aware of discrediting secrets from Gerhard Schröder, who is now the Federal Minister of the Interior . One day, according to his own statement, he was shot at in front of the building of the French embassy, Ernich Castle in Remagen . 1954 Zech Nenntwich, which now as an employee of a German secret service (code name: Dental ) called and various messaging services and media supplied information for a fee, arrested because he should have planned secret documents of the Federal Court to sell.

Hans-Walter Zech-Nenntwich, according to Spiegel an “adventurer with a bald head” and “idol with Basedow eyes”, had numerous love affairs. In 1952 he was divorced from his wife after leaving the family with the nanny; according to the CIA, this was his second divorce. In later years he promised marriage to a German-American millionaire widow who was 24 years his senior, in order to successfully flatter her company - a cylinder grinding plant in Andernach - and shares, which is why she later sued him.

process

In the spring of 1964, Hans-Walter Nenntwich had to answer to the court in Braunschweig together with four other defendants in the so-called " SS-Reiter Trial " in Braunschweig for participating in the massacre of around 5200 Jewish people in Poland in the summer of 1941 ; At the same time, the first Auschwitz trial was running in Frankfurt am Main . The investigation was started after his former superior Franz Magill had reported this hitherto unknown crime as a witness in the trial against SS leader Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski .

The public prosecutor's office accused Zech-Nenntwich of having "shot eight women and young men with a pistol on the runway between Bialystok and Baranowicze for no justified reason and of having personally shot at least one Jew in the murder of around a hundred Jews in the Prypiat swamps , for which reason he did was handed a carbine ”. Zech-Nenntwich was charged with murder in at least nine cases; the prosecution demanded life sentences . He was the only defendant in the trial to be charged with murder ; his co-defendants were only charged with complicity in murder. All of the accused pleaded an imperative to order .

Zech-Nenntwich denied the acts and complained that the allegations were "highly unjust", after all, he himself was imprisoned during the Nazi era. One witness commented on his testimony: "If Zech-Nenntwich opens his mouth, then he is lying, and if he closes him, then he has lied."

On April 20, 1964, the court sentenced Zech-Nenntwich, whom it described as a "seedy personality with an adventurous past," to four years in prison for aiding and abetting murder in two cases . The court itself, which had also heard Nenntwich's Duz friend Hans Globke as a witness, described the judgment as "acquittal for lack of evidence, as he can not be thinner". After the verdict was announced, the convicted person went on appeal immediately and, since the verdict was not yet final, remained in custody at the Rennelberg detention center .

Escape and return

The Rennelberg remand prison in Braunschweig, from which Zech-Nenntwich escaped with the help of accomplices on the evening of April 21, 1964.

Probably the next day, on the evening of April 21, Zech-Nenntwich escaped from the detention center with the help of numerous accomplices , some of whom are still unknown to this day . A friend from the time of the Reich Labor Service , now an overseer in the Rennelberg remand prison in Braunschweig, opened the doors for the prisoner against payment of 5,000 marks and further promises. Other accomplices, including his girlfriend at the time, ensured the continuation of the flight by private plane from Klausheide airfield to Switzerland . At the wheel sat Hans Altendeitering, a former Stuka pilot in Hans-Ulrich Rudel's squadron . Once in Switzerland, Zech-Nenntwich is said to have withdrawn money from a bank. His escape was only discovered around 7:30 a.m. the next morning.

On May 27, 1964, there was a debate in the German Bundestag about the "Zech-Nenntwich case". The SPD opposition member Heinrich Ritzel asked who was the owner of the getaway plane and who had flown it to Switzerland and back. State Secretary in the Federal Ministry of Justice Arthur Bülow replied:

“The private plane used for the escape belongs to the manufacturer Meerswolke from Nordhorn. It was freely available to the professional pilot Altendeitering from Nordhorn. Altendeitering flew Zech-Nenntwich to Switzerland on April 23, 1964 without notifying the owner and returned by plane on the same day shortly after 12 noon. "

- German Bundestag - 4th electoral term - 127th session. Bonn, Wednesday, May 27, 1964, p. 6155

An additional question came from the member of the SPD, Holger Börner :

"Mr. State Secretary, do the special circumstances of the preparation for this escape and the very well-coordinated cooperation, especially with regard to air transport, leave the Federal Government open to the assumption that an illegal organization was involved in the preparation of this company?"

- German Bundestag - 4th electoral term - 127th session. Bonn, Wednesday, May 27, 1964, p. 6155f.

The State Secretary's reply was that there has not yet been any reasonable suspicion in this regard.

A week after his escape, Hans-Walter Zech-Nenntwich was tracked down by two journalists from Stern magazine in the Egyptian capital, Cairo ; At that time there was no extradition agreement between Egypt and the Federal Republic of Germany . Until then, the German police suspected him to be in South America . A postcard from his 25-year-old travel companion had provided the journalists with evidence of his whereabouts. While they were still on the run, Zech-Nenntwich got engaged to another 27-year-old friend who looked after his house in Remagen and whom he later married. According to reports of New Germany , he is said to have traveled from Cairo to Addis Ababa and from there to Pretoria , where he was supposed to have been seen in the “German Club”, as the newspaper stated , citing the Simon Wiesenthal Center .

In the summer, however, Zech-Nenntwich returned voluntarily to the Federal Republic and presented himself to the Lower Saxony Ministry of Justice on August 7, 1964, accompanied by the two Stern reporters , because he was innocent. The public prosecutor Heinrich Kintzi is said to have greeted him with the words: “Nice to have you back.” Previously, Zech-Nenntwich had stayed undisturbed for a week in his villa “Haus Einsiedel” in Remagen, although it had been confiscated by the public prosecutor was.

In January 1965, Zech-Nenntwich was tried again for his escape in Braunschweig. Besides him, the prison guard, his two friends, and another man who organized the trip to the airport were also charged. The overseer justified his escape assistance: “From a soldier's point of view, I thought Zech-Nenntwich was innocent. As an old soldier at the front, I couldn't understand the prison sentence. ”In addition, as far as he knew,“ high Bonn officials ”were involved in the escape. He is therefore not aware of any guilt. Zech-Nenntwich, on the other hand, claimed that the warden had brought the idea to him: "I have nothing to do with it." He was eventually sentenced to another one year and ten months, the law enforcement officer two years and six Months in prison; the other three defendants received suspended sentences.

After both the trials and the escape caused a sensation both nationally and internationally, there are no reports about Zech-Nenntwich's release from prison and his life afterwards. Only New Germany reported in 1979 that Zech-Nenntwich lived as an “honorable citizen” in Remagen and maintained “close contacts” with the city authorities and the police.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Fritz Bauer : Justice and Nazi Crimes: Collection of German criminal judgments for Nazi homicidal crimes 1945–1966, Volume 20 . University Press Amsterdam, 1979, pp. 31 .
  2. ↑ Martin Cüppers : Trailblazers of the Shoah: the Waffen-SS, the command staff Reichsführer SS and the extermination of the Jews 1939-1945 . Scientific Book Society, 2004, ISBN 978-3-89678-758-3 , pp. 319 .
  3. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k women in the swamps. Der Spiegel, January 22, 1964, accessed January 19, 2014 .
  4. ^ Hugh Trevor-Roper: The Wartime Journals . Ed .: Richard Davenport-Hines. IB Tauris, 2012, ISBN 978-1-84885-990-6 , pp. 268 .
  5. ^ Adrian Weale: The SS. A New Story. Hachette Digital, 2010, accessed January 19, 2014 .
  6. ↑ a b Sefton Delmer: Black Boomerang. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on February 18, 2014 ; Retrieved January 20, 2014 .
  7. ↑ We called him Nansen. Der Spiegel, May 6, 1964, accessed on January 21, 2014 .
  8. ^ A b Kai Hermann: The career of an SS officer. Zeit Online, May 1, 1964, accessed January 19, 2014 .
  9. ^ Zech-Nenntwich, Hans. CIA, May 29, 1953, accessed January 19, 2014 .
  10. ↑ a b c d Angels and idols. Der Spiegel, May 6, 1964, accessed on January 19, 2014 .
  11. ^ Fritz Bauer : Justice and Nazi Crimes: Collection of German criminal judgments for Nazi homicidal crimes 1945–1966, Volume 20 . University Press Amsterdam, 1979, pp. 76 .
  12. ↑ a b c Old comrades. Der Spiegel, January 27, 1965, accessed on January 19, 2014 .
  13. ↑ a b "Plenary minutes of the German Bundestag - 4th electoral period - 127th session. Bonn, Wednesday, May 27, 1964", p. 6156 f.
  14. ↑ Hans-Walter Zech-Nenntwich. Der Spiegel, May 13, 1964, accessed on January 19, 2014 .
  15. ^ New Germany , June 2, 1964
  16. ^ New Germany , July 4, 1964
  17. ↑ "Nice to have you here ..." Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung: Union in Germany, September 3, 1964, accessed on January 20, 2014 .
  18. ↑ All hats pulled. Der Spiegel, November 18, 1964, accessed April 20, 2014 .
  19. ^ New Germany , January 20, 1965
  20. ^ New Germany , January 21, 1965
  21. ^ New Germany , January 23, 1965.
  22. ^ New Germany , June 26, 1979
personal data
SURNAME Zech-Nenntwich, Hans-Walter
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Zech-Nenntwich, Joachim Hans-Walter (full name); Nenntwich, Hans-Walter (maiden name); Böttcher, Hermann (pseudonym); Nansen, Sven-Joachim (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German war criminal, agent and entrepreneur
DATE OF BIRTH June 10, 1916
PLACE OF BIRTH Thorn
DATE OF DEATH after 1979