Hans Lipschis

Hans Lipschis , born as Antanas Lipsys , (born November 7, 1919 in Kretinga , Lithuania ; † June 16, 2016 in Aalen ) worked as a member of the Waffen SS from 1941 to 1944 in Auschwitz . In 2013 the Simon Wiesenthal Center put him on its list of the 10 most wanted Nazi war criminals . On May 6, 2013, he was arrested by the Baden-Württemberg police in Aalen. He has been accused of complicity in murder in 9,000 cases. In December 2013 he was discharged from the Hohenasperg correctional hospital because he was diagnosed with dementia .

Life

Hans Lipschis was born as the son of the farmer Johas Lipsys and his wife Marija. He has three sisters. The family cultivated four hectares of land in Kretinga , which was on the border with Memelland . The family had Lithuanian citizenship. When Lithuania was assigned to the Soviet Union as a sphere of interest in the German-Soviet Border and Friendship Treaty , soldiers of the Red Army occupied Lithuania in June 1940 . A little later, German and Soviet diplomats began to negotiate a population exchange. According to the criteria of the German-Soviet agreement, the Lipsys were entitled to resettlement as ethnic Germans . Like around 50,000 Lithuanian Germans , the Lipsys settled home to the Reich in the spring of 1941 , as the Nazi propaganda formula read. The Lipsys family were taken to a resettlement camp in the Flatow district in Pomerania . The Lipsys family adopted the name Lipschis, with the father using the first name Johann and the son Hans . The formerly independent farmer Johann Lipschis now had to work for a Prussian aristocratic family. The family is initially under arrest in the resettlement camp. The camp residents were only allowed to leave the camp for work. The Nazi authorities checked whether there were spies and sympathizers of communism among the former Soviet citizens . Hans Lipschis was one of 468 young Lithuanian German men from the resettlement camps who volunteered for the Waffen SS. According to the SS personnel file, Lipschis was working as a baker at the time and lived with his father Johann in the Schneidemühl resettlement camp in Pomerania. He joined the Waffen SS as a marksman on October 23, 1941. Hans Lipschis was transferred to Auschwitz with 22 other Lithuanian Germans. He came to the newly established 6th Company of the SS-Totenkopf-Sturmbann Auschwitz.

On August 16, 1941, he applied for his "admission to the German association of states". In the application, he referred to his German ancestry on both his mother's and father's side. He also listed his membership in the cultural association of the Germans of Lithuania . He was promoted to Sturmmann in the Waffen SS on February 1, 1943 . On February 27, 1943, Lipschis received his naturalization certificate from the district president in Poznan . On February 1, 1944, he was promoted to Rottenführer . On January 1, 1945, Hans Lipschis was still on the Auschwitz concentration camp personnel list. Files document a hospital stay in Altötting in February / March 1945.

After the end of the war, Lipschis was a British prisoner of war in Heide from May to August 1945 . Using documents from the archive of the International Tracing Service (ITS) in Bad Arolsen , it is possible to reconstruct how Lipschis' life went up to 1951. His file with 23 sheets has been preserved in the ITS archive. He was released after four months as a prisoner of war and then worked for a farmer in Westphalia . For his work he received 50 Reichsmarks a month, free board and lodging. On June 1, 1946, Lipschis reported to the Schwarzenbek DP camp near Hamburg . After arriving at the DP camp, he was registered as a Lithuanian citizen Antanas Lipsys, his index card from the DP Registration Act has been preserved.

On November 13, 1946, he filled out the extensive questionnaire for DP . He answered the questionnaire in Lithuanian. Under question 5b: "Please fill in below what work you did, where and as what ... for each specified year (from the beginning of September 1939 to the end of May 1945)" Lipsys concealed his service as a security guard in the Auschwitz concentration camp. According to the questionnaire, Antanas Lipsys was first a Wehrmacht soldier as a cook and later a soldier in the Waffen-SS. During the last seven months of the war he had been in the hospital throughout. From October 1944 in a military hospital in Breslau and from March 1945 in one in Hamburg. On the questionnaire, he noted his membership in the Waffen SS from October 1941. With the date November 10, 1947, the file card contained the note that Lipschis was wanted by the authorities of the Soviet Union ( For prosecution by Russian ). The index card was also equal Free of prosecution , that is free from law , registered.

In September 1947, Antanas Lipsys married a pregnant friend from his hometown of Kretinga. A daughter was born in February 1948. The family lived in a camp for displaced persons in Geesthacht until at least July 1951 . No later data can be found in the file in the ITS archive. According to research by Welt am Sonntag , a son was born in 1953. On October 18, 1956, the Lipsys family emigrated to the United States. She took a passenger ship from Bremerhaven to New York City .

He lived undisturbed in Chicago until 1982 and became a US citizen. There he worked in the Harmony guitar factory . In 1983 he was supposed to be deported to Germany due to new investigations by the US judiciary and finally left the country voluntarily. Since he gave false information on immigration, Lipschis was expatriated. He was the first suspected Nazi war criminal to voluntarily leave the USA and come to Germany. He lived in Aalen until his arrest. His wife came to Germany with them. The two children stayed in the United States. Antanas Lipsys became Hans Lipschis again.

In 1982 Auschwitz survivor Miso Vogel , a Jew from Slovakia , was contacted by an investigator from the Office for Special Investigation (OSI), a special unit of the US Department of Justice. Vogel was in Auschwitz concentration camp from May 1942 to October 1944. The officer got his name from another Auschwitz survivor. At that time he identified Antanas Lipsys as an Auschwitz guard for the OSI, but he could no longer give his name. Vogel only remembered that the person depicted was a “disgusting SS man” who had constantly appropriated property from prisoners.

In a video from 1989, which can be found on the website of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum , Vogel reported a child shooting by an SS man Hans Lipsky. According to his testimony in 1989, Lipsky worked on the railroad tracks where the prisoner transports arrived. According to Vogel, Lipsky shot, among other things, a small child in the hands of a helping prisoner. In the files of the OSI, however, there is no evidence of the murder of a child in Vogel's testimony. Vogel died in November 2000.

Role in Auschwitz

It is unclear what functions Lipschis had in Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp . There are no known photos from his time as an SS guard. It is unclear whether he, as a security guard who performed his duty at the ramp , possibly even made decisions about the life and death of prisoners.

It is clear that Lipschis was one of around 7,000 SS men in the concentration camp. At least he was on the guard from October 1941 to September 1943. During Lipschis' time as a guard, twelve transport trains with prisoners reached the concentration camp. 10,510 people were murdered immediately upon arrival. At the beginning of September 1943 he was assigned to the catering department of the central administration, Section IV a 1. There he was employed as a cook or supervisor in the SS team kitchen.

Lipschis admitted in a personal conversation with editors of Welt am Sonntag that he had been to Auschwitz. However, he was only a cook and cooked for the teams, not for the prisoners. At the end of the war he was on the Eastern Front . Thus, he did not experience or see the killing in Auschwitz. He only heard about it.

Investigation and arrest from 2013

The Simon Wiesenthal Center put Lipschis on a list of the ten most wanted Nazi criminals for the first time in 2013 . In Germany, the central office of the state justice administrations for the investigation of National Socialist crimes in Ludwigsburg has been investigating the then 93-year-old for some time .

Reporters from Welt am Sonntag were able to locate Lipschis in Aalen, Baden-Württemberg, before he was arrested . Among them was the photographer Martin Lengemann , who took the only known portrait photo of the former Waffen-SS man Lipschis, which subsequently went around the world.

The Stuttgart public prosecutor's office investigated Hans Lipschis on charges of complicity in murder through insidious and gruesome homicide in more than 9,000 cases. He was arrested on May 6, 2013. Lipschis was in custody in the Hohenasperg correctional hospital , as the Stuttgart public prosecutor assumed that there was a risk of escape. Since he was 93 years old at the time and a high sentence could be expected if convicted, he must expect that he will never be released. In addition, according to the prosecutor, Lipschis have contacts abroad, such as the USA and another non-European country. In the indictment, he is accused of supporting murders in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp from autumn 1941 until the camp was closed in early 1945. Lipschis did not provide any information about the allegations to the public prosecutor.

In December 2013, however, Lipschis was released from custody after a psychiatrist diagnosed the onset of dementia . The psychiatrist found that Lipschi's ability to concentrate and short-term memory was clearly impaired and that he could no longer adequately follow criminal proceedings of this magnitude, complexity and duration. The District Court of Ellwangen announced that Lipschis probably could not follow such a large trial in his condition and was accordingly unable to stand trial. According to the magazine Der Spiegel, around ten people had applied to be admitted as joint plaintiffs before Lipschis was released . These included former Auschwitz prisoners. On February 27, 2014, the Ellwangen Regional Court refused to open the main proceedings because Hans Lipschis was no longer able to defend himself adequately. Stuttgart public prosecutor and co-plaintiffs ultimately accepted this. Compensation was awarded to Lipschis for pre-trial detention from May 6 to December 6, 2013. In 2015 the Simon Wiesenthal Center removed him from its list.

Legal background

The Ludwigsburg central office had already checked Lipschis when he returned to Germany in the 1980s. The deputy head flew to the USA in 1983 to find out more. He didn't even make copies of the files. Preliminary investigations were not started. According to an employee of the central office, the legal understanding at the time led to the assumption that it would not be enough for a procedure. Der Spiegel sees Lipschi's arrest as a sign that a “new point of view is gaining ground among lawyers.” Accordingly, it is no longer necessary for perpetrators of Nazi crimes to be proven. This has been legal practice for many years. Instead, whoever was involved is now complicit. This negates the argument of offenders that they did not kill anyone themselves, but only followed orders and feared for their own life if they did not obey. Decades after the end of the war, according to Der Spiegel, it is often almost impossible for the judiciary to prove a specific act. This is also the case in the "Lipschis case".

This legal opinion was represented in the proceedings against the former concentration camp supervisor John Demjanjuk by the competent criminal chamber of the Munich Regional Court, whose judgment did not become final because the accused had previously died. An employee of the Central Office writes that this legal conception is "not new": "The interpretation on which the Demjanjuk judgment is based ... is in line with the older case law on pure extermination camps. This interpretation is also in line with the current case law of the BGH ”.

Lipschis was one of 30 former members of concentration camp guards for whom preliminary investigations into aiding and abetting murder by the Ludwigsburg central office were completed in 2013 and files were handed over to the responsible public prosecutor's offices. The oldest of the accused was 97 years old when the preliminary investigation was concluded. The magazine Der Spiegel asked the question why former concentration camp - henchmen , gears would now pulled a killing machine to account, although their superior commander of which came mostly unpunished. Frits Rüter , head of the Amsterdam research project Justice and Nazi Crimes, called the arrest of Lipschis scandalous.

By means of modern, digital analyzes of SS documents, the Stuttgart public prosecutor wanted to prove the specific activity of Lipschis within the operational structures of the SS and to prove with a 3-D survey of the crime scene that he could see everything from where he was deployed. so knew what he was doing.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g h i} Felix Bohr: Zahnrad in der Mordmaschine , Der Spiegel , 2013 No. 40, pp. 42–44.
2. ↑ Community leaflets  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Die Apis, Evangelical Community Association, Aalen district, accessed on September 21, 2018.  
3. ↑ Die Welt : Lipschi's Long Way from Lithuania to Auschwitz , April 28, 2013 (accessed December 21, 2013).
4. ↑ ^{a b c d e} Die Welt: Die Legende vom Koch , April 28, 2013 (accessed on December 21, 2013).
5. ↑ ^{a b} The World : He Was a Murderer , May 28, 2013 (accessed December 21, 2013).
6. ↑ Because of dementia: concentration camp guard Lipschis does not have to go to court , SWR television
7. ↑ Detlef Burhoff: Decisions StPO NS proceedings, negotiating ability, requirements1 Ks 9 Js 94162/12 accessed on September 21, 2018.
8. ^ Der Spiegel: Former concentration camp guard Hans Lisschis arrested after 68 years , May 7, 2013 (accessed on December 21, 2013).
9. ↑ Sabine Dobel: Nazi henchman dies in Altenheim Stern from March 17, 2012, accessed on September 21, 2018.
10. ^ Zis online : Paradigm shift in criminal prosecution of personnel in German extermination camps? , zis-online 3/2013 (accessed on December 21, 2013).
11. ↑ Chasing Death Camp Guards With New Tools New York Times, May 5, 2014, accessed September 21, 2018.
12. ↑ "We can't help but investigate" . In: Legal Tribune ONLINE, April 22, 2014, accessed September 21, 2018.