Hans Gmelin

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Hans Gmelin (born October 17, 1911 in Tübingen ; † July 23, 1991 there ) was a German lawyer . During the Nazi era, Gmelin was Legation Councilor at the German Legation in Slovakia from 1941 to 1945 and, after the end of the war, Mayor of Tübingen from 1954 to 1974 .

Life

The son of a district court director was a member of the right-wing, paramilitary Young Germany Bund from 1923 to 1931 . In 1931 Gmelin switched to the youth organization of the anti-republican steel helmet . According to his own, later statements, Gmelin had “turned to national and patriotic ideas early on due to family tradition and upbringing”. Gmelin studied law at the University of Tübingen and joined the Normannia Association there in 1930 .

After the National Socialist "seizure of power"

After the National Socialist " seizure of power " Gmelin joined the SA in October 1933 ; After the ban on membership was lifted , he became a member of the NSDAP in 1937 . Three years earlier he had acted as an auxiliary speaker for the Tübingen NSDAP district leadership. In the SA Gmelin - at first SA Obersturmführer - was promoted several times, most recently in 1943 to SA Standartenführer . In 1933 and 1934, he worked in the Tübingen SA as a military sports and shooting consultant; In 1936 he was named “Leader of the Victory Storm in the Reichs luggage march”. From 1933 to 1934 Gmelin was a member of the NS student union ; then he switched to the Nazi legal guardian association . After the assessor exam in 1937, Gmelin initially worked in the Stuttgart judicial administration, from 1938 as an assistant in the Reich Ministry of Justice . In 1939 he moved to Freiburg im Breisgau as a district judge; During this time he was on leave for three months in order to take over management tasks in the SA standard there.

During the so-called Sudeten crisis  - the conflict between Czechoslovakia and the German Reich over the Sudetenland  - Gmelin was from September 19 to October 15, 1938 leader of the company " Hanns Ludin " in the Sudeten German Freikorps . The majority of refugees Sudeten Germans formed volunteer corps was supervised by the SA and provoked the border incidents: Czech customs posts, patrols and military facilities were attacked; 150 people were killed. Gmelin took part in the occupation of the Sudetenland.

Legation Council in Slovakia

In January 1941 Gmelin moved to the German Embassy in Bratislava in Slovakia. The First Slovak Republic was a formally independent state, but in fact heavily dependent on the German Empire. The German authorized representative in Slovakia was Hanns Ludin , whom Gmelin knew from the Stuttgart SA. Gmelin became Ludin's adjutant and was responsible for organization and human resources, the protocol department and also worked as a "Volkstumsreferent" and as an advisor for student issues. Initially Secretary of the Legation , Gmelin was appointed Legation Councilor in 1942 . In August 1942 Gmelin was involved in negotiations to recruit foreign "volunteers" for the Waffen SS in Slovakia. According to Ludin, the advertisements "put considerable moral pressure on everyone". Gmelin also kept in touch with Franz Karmasin , who as the “leader” of the Carpathian Germans was reluctant to place himself in the Slovak state.

After the founding of Slovakia in March 1939 - supported by German advisers - the disenfranchisement and expropriation of Jews was initiated through anti-Jewish laws and ordinances. In September 1941, Slovakia adopted the National Socialist definition of who was Jewish. The Slovak measures included expropriations, curfews, mandatory identification with yellow armbands with a Star of David and assembly bans. In 1944 Gmelin moved into an " aryanized " house in Pressburg.

In his position as counselor Gmelin was on the " final solution involved" in Slovakia, by the approximately 59,000 Slovak Jews from March to November 1942 in the death camps of Auschwitz , Treblinka and Sobibor deported and were mostly killed there. In doing so, he worked closely with the embassy 's "Jewish advisor", Dieter Wisliceny . Gmelin's Paraphe can be found on a telex from the Pressburg embassy to the Foreign Office on June 26, 1942, which reads:

“The execution of the evacuation of the Jews from Slovakia has reached a dead point at the moment. Due to ecclesiastical influences and the corruption of individual officials, around 35,000 Jews have received special authorization, which means that they do not need to be evacuated. The evacuation of Jews is very unpopular in large parts of the Slovak people. "

- Hans Gmelin : Telex from the German legation in Pressburg to the Foreign Office on June 26, 1942

Slovakia paid 500 Reichsmarks for each "evacuated" Jew. In this connection, Gmelin asserted costs to the Slovak Foreign Ministry “which for the time being cannot be covered by the initially low workload of the Jews, since the retraining will only take effect after some time and since only some of the Jews who have been deported and who are still to be deported are able to work Gmelin's abbreviated name can also be found on documents relating to the arrival of Adolf Eichmann or meetings with railway workers, as well as on correspondence with the Reich Security Main Office on the deportation of Jews. In addition, Gmelin took part in meetings with Ludin, at which two notes from the Vatican to the Slovak government were discussed. These notes mentioned the extermination of the Jews.

During the Slovak National Uprising in September 1944, Gmelin was the mission's liaison to SS-Obergruppenführer Gottlob Berger , who was also from Württemberg . Berger initially directed the suppression of the uprising. Gmelin was awarded the Iron Cross for his efforts in combating partisans .

Internment and denazification

At the end of the war , Gmelin was captured on May 7, 1945 . He spent the next 44 months in American and French internment camps . In 1948 he was a witness in the Wilhelmstrasse trial in Nuremberg . In court, Gmelin testified, among other things, about the note from the Vatican to Slovakia about the extermination of the Jews: The Berlin Foreign Office had announced that the allegations were not true. Gmelin also stated in Nuremberg that after the Slovak national uprising, at the request of the population, he intervened with the Einsatzgruppenführer Josef Witiska , in some cases successfully.

In Gmelin's denazification process , this information was confirmed by an employee of the Slovak Presidential Office: Gmelin had achieved the release of 200 prisoners. Gmelin himself testified that he was no longer promoted from 1944 onwards because of his interventions. He gave the following information about his political socialization :

“When I got to an age at which my political judgment and my political convictions had been formed, political life in Germany had already drawn into the pull of the extreme parties, and for a young person there was practically only the choice between extreme right and extreme left. "

- Hans Gmelin : Information in the denazification process

Gmelin was classified as a "fellow traveler". It was only at an advanced age that Gmelin publicly described himself as a member of the “generation of perpetrators”.

Lord Mayor of Tübingen

Grave in the Tübingen city cemetery

On October 24, 1954, Gmelin was elected Lord Mayor of Tübingen with 54.8% of the vote as a non-party member. At a candidate presentation in the run-up to the election, Gmelin - in contradiction to his last rank as SA standard leader - described himself as the "leader of an SA student storm and an SA sports team".

The Tübingen theology professor Gerhard Ebeling commented on the election decision in a letter to the editor of the Schwäbisches Tagblatt with the words: "The majority of the Tübingen citizens voted for a candidate whose previous role as a National Socialist functionary was well known." Citizenship "has produced the evidence that concerns in this regard are at least not decisive, if not for a considerable part of the voters such a past is a recommendation."

Gmelin's tenure was shaped by the growth of the city and its university: Also due to the incorporation in the early 1970s, the city's population grew from 46,000 to 71,000 during his tenure; the number of students rose from around 5,000 to just under 16,000. The annual budget of the city of Tübingen - initially in the amount of 18.3 million DM - exceeded the sum of 100 million DM for the first time in 1971. Gmelin "is considered the real promoter of the general contracts" that the state of Baden-Württemberg concluded in 1962 with its university towns and cities which provided the city of Tübingen with DM 52 million in additional funds to finance infrastructure measures during Gmelin's tenure. Gmelin's relationship with the University of Tübingen is described as “determined by restraint rather than cordiality”.

For today's terms, Gmlin's actions also seem inglorious when he reported a 15-year-old drawing apprentice in the Tübingen city administration for suspected homosexuality in the early 1960s. “On my behalf, the Municipal Personnel Office handed over a letter to the Landes-Kriminal-Hauptstelle Tübingen on September 27, 1961, which was written by Helmut Kress, an apprentice draftsman at the City Planning Office, and addressed to Helmut S. According to the content of the letter, a criminal act according to Section 175 of the Criminal Code could have been intended. ”The occasion was a letter that Kress kept in the drawer of his desk in the planning office. Kress described the content as "a crush on a young man whom I had seen several times about one of my sisters". Nothing sexual was noted in the letter. In violation of the confidentiality of the letter , the letter was passed on to the mayor, who, without speaking to the youth and his parents, called on the criminal police. The 15-year-old was carried away from his place of work in handcuffs and sentenced on February 2, 1962 to two weeks of youth arrest in accordance with Section 175 of the Criminal Code and Section 3 of the Youth Act, which he was sentenced to in windowless solitary confinement in the former penitentiary in Oberndorf am Neckar had to sit down. His apprenticeship in the Tübingen planning office was supposedly ended on April 13, 1962 "by mutual agreement". All of this is documented in Helmut Kress' personnel file, which was only discovered in the Tübingen city archive in 2016; the court record, however, has disappeared. Hans Gmelin's daughter Herta Däubler-Gmelin , who later became Federal Minister of Justice, has meanwhile expressed her regrets to Helmut Kress.

Since 1961 Gmelin was an honorary senator of the university. His special concern was the German-French friendship , in 1966 he became an honorary citizen of the Tübingen twin town Aix-en-Provence . Gmelin remained in office until January 3, 1975; in the mayoral election of 1962, he was the only candidate to receive 98.6% of the vote with a 52% turnout.

In 1974 Gmelin was awarded the Great Federal Cross of Merit.

In 1975 he was made an honorary citizen of the city of Tübingen . In 2017, the VVN / BdA -Kreisvereinigung Tübingen-Mössiingen asked the local council to remove Gmelin from the list of honorary citizens at short notice because of his Nazi past. The application was supported by the Tübinger Linke (TÜL) / Die Linke community council group and the SPD community council group. Gmelin's Nazi past had long been known. Immediately after his election as Lord Mayor, the publisher Hans-Georg Siebeck ( Mohr Siebeck Verlag ) wrote in a letter to the editor: “Mr Gmelin can hardly say that his work in Slovakia did not give him insight into things that are decent for everyone today Filling Germans with shudder and shame. ”Since September 2011, the city administration has had the essay“ From Nazi diplomat to post-war mayor: Hans Gmelin and the past that does not pass ”by Jens Rüggeberg. In 2017, the historian Niklas Krawinkel wrote a dissertation on Gmelin with a grant from the city of Tübingen and presented the results to the Tübingen municipal council in July 2017 and published parts of his research results separately. Krawinkel found out that after the Second World War, Gmelin received a so-called clean bill of health thanks to his connections to the then Interior Minister of Württemberg-Hohenzollern .

On March 5, 2018, at the request of all parliamentary groups, the Tübingen municipal council unanimously rejected Hans Gmelin's honorary citizenship, which legally expires with death as a political symbol. In the municipal council bill for the withdrawal it says, among other things: "After 1945 and especially during his tenure as mayor of Tübingen, Gmelin supported other victims of National Socialism, including convicted war criminals , in their social reintegration."

From 1961 to 1975 Hans Gmelin was President of the Württemberg State Sports Federation .

family

Gmelin was married to Helge Gmelin, née Jordan. The marriage had four children, including the SPD politician Herta Däubler-Gmelin .

literature

  • Niklas Krawinkel: Burden as an opportunity. Hans Gmelin's political career under National Socialism and in the Federal Republic of Germany (= Studies on the History and Effects of the Holocaust , Volume 2). Wallstein, Göttingen 2020, ISBN 978-3-8353-3677-3 .
  • Hans-Joachim Lang : The right hand of the ambassador. The diplomatic career of post-war Mayor Hans Gmelin in Tübingen ended 60 years ago in the internment camp. In: Schwäbisches Tagblatt , April 28, 2005.
  • Paul Sting: Always fox and hare. Hans Gmelin shaped Tübingen's municipal history for 20 years. In: Tübinger Blätter , 62nd year (1975), ISSN  0930-3642 , pp. 51-53.
  • Tatjana Tönsmeyer : The Third Reich and Slovakia 1939-1945. Political everyday life between cooperation and obstinacy . Schöningh, Paderborn 2003, ISBN 3-506-77532-4 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ On the biography until 1945: Hans-Joachim Lang: The right hand of the ambassador. In: Schwäbisches Tagblatt , April 28, 2005; Tatjana Tönsmeyer: The Third Reich and Slovakia 1939-1945. Paderborn 2003, p. 351.
  2. ^ Information from Gmelins in the denazification process in 1948, quoted in Hans-Joachim Lang, The right hand of the ambassador.
  3. ↑ Hans-Joachim Lang: The right hand of the ambassador. In: Schwäbisches Tagblatt , April 28, 2005; Tatjana Tönsmeyer: The Third Reich and Slovakia 1939-1945. Paderborn 2003, pp. 90, 351.
  4. ↑ Martin Broszat : The Sudeten German Freikorps (PDF; 5.1 MB). In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 1/1961 (9), pp. 30–49; Hans-Joachim Lang: The right hand of the ambassador.
  5. ↑ Ludin's letter to Gottlob Berger dated December 11, 1943, quoted by Tatjana Tönsmeyer: The Third Reich and Slovakia 1939–1945. Paderborn 2003, p. 180. On Gmelin's role: ibid, p. 179.
  6. ↑ Hans-Joachim Lang: The right hand of the ambassador. In: Schwäbisches Tagblatt , April 28, 2005.
  7. ↑ a b Alexandra Senfft: Silence hurts. A German family story. Claassen, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-546-00400-8 , p. 113.
  8. ↑ Facsimile printed by Hans-Joachim Lang: The Ambassador's Right Hand.
  9. ↑ a b c Quoted from Hans-Joachim Lang: The right hand of the ambassador. In: Schwäbisches Tagblatt , April 28, 2005.
  10. ↑ Alexandra Senfft: Silence hurts. A German family story. Berlin 2007, p. 86.
  11. ↑ Hans-Joachim Lang: The right hand of the ambassador. In: Schwäbisches Tagblatt , April 28, 2005 (with reference to contemporary reports in the Schwäbisches Tagblatt).
  12. ↑ a b Paul Sting: Always Fuchs und Has'. Hans Gmelin shaped Tübingen's municipal history for 20 years. In: Tübinger Blätter 62 (1975), p. 52.
  13. ↑ a b Christiane Hoyer: Helmut Kress was once taken away from the Tübingen city planning office in handcuffs. In: Schwäbisches Tagblatt , February 9, 2017, accessed on August 13, 2020.
  14. ↑ Jan Feddersen: "I was afraid, nothing but fear". In: TAZ , April 28, 2017, accessed on August 13, 2020.
  15. ↑ Christine Keck: Verbotene Liebe. In: Stuttgarter Zeitung , February 21, 2017, accessed on August 13, 2020.
  16. ↑ Franz Schmider: Gay Justice Victims: This is how Paragraph 175 destroyed whole lives. In: Badische Zeitung , March 27, 2017, accessed on August 13, 2020.
  17. ↑ a b Gmelin's honorary citizenship revoked ( memento of March 6, 2018 in the Internet Archive ). In: SWR-Fernsehen , March 5, 2018.
  18. ↑ Accessed December 12, 2017 on the website of the VVN / BdA district association Tübingen-Mössiingen, accessed on August 13, 2020.
  19. ↑ Jens Rüggeberg: Shudder and shame. In: Schwäbisches Tagblatt , January 9, 2018, accessed on August 13, 2020.
  20. ↑ Niklas Krawinkel: Racism and Community Experience. Biographical insights into the Jewish and national politics in Slovakia 1941-1945. In: Jörg Osterloh, Katharina Rauschenberger (Hrsg.): The Holocaust. New studies on the course of events, reactions and processing (= 2017 yearbook on the history and effects of the Holocaust). Fritz Bauer Institute, Campus Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2017, ISBN 978-3-593-50799-6 , pp. 121-139.
  21. ↑ Tübingen ex-mayor was stripped of honorary citizenship. In: Heilbronner Voice , March 5, 2018, accessed on August 13, 2020.
  22. ^ Württembergischer Landessportbund, President. (No longer available online.) Formerly in the original ; accessed on August 13, 2020 .  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.wlsb.de
personal data
SURNAME Gmelin, Hans
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German lawyer, Legation Councilor and Lord Mayor of Tübingen
DATE OF BIRTH October 17, 1911
PLACE OF BIRTH Tübingen
DATE OF DEATH July 23, 1991
Place of death Tübingen