Hans Steinbrenner (SS member)

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Johannes 'Hans' Steinbrenner (born October 16, 1905 in Frankfurt am Main ; † June 12, 1964 ) was a German concentration camp guard. He was best known for his participation in numerous prisoner murders in the early phase of the Dachau concentration camp near Munich.

Live and act

Early career (1905 to 1933)

Steinbrenner was the son of an arms manufacturer. As a child he moved with his parents from Frankfurt to Munich around 1916, where his father ran an arms business. In Munich, Steinbrenner attended two private schools until the end of World War I , and then a business school for a short time. He left both regular school and business school without a degree. He then worked for a while as an apprentice in his father's arms business and then for two years as a volunteer in the Thuringian gun factory in Suhl. At the end of the 1920s, Steinbrenner returned to Munich, where he tried to catch up on the secondary school leaving certificate, but he did not succeed. Instead, he went back to work in his father's business. After his death, Steinbrenner tried to continue his father's arms business, but went bankrupt in 1932.

Activity in the Dachau concentration camp in 1933

In the course of the transfer of power to the National Socialists , Steinbrenner joined the NSDAP and the SS in February 1933 (SS no. 56.175). As a member of the SS, he was initially employed as an auxiliary policeman in Munich.

At the end of March 1933, Steinbrenner was one of the first ten SS members to be sent to the Dachau concentration camp, which had been set up by the Bavarian State Police shortly before , to prepare for the takeover of the camp by the SS there as an advance command. This took place on April 11, 1933, when sixty other SS men moved into Dachau. The first camp commandant of Dachau, Hilmar Wäckerle , gave Steinbrenner - who was particularly familiar with the area and trained due to his early presence in the camp - at that time to head the 2nd prisoner company.

In Dachau, Steinbrenner attracted attention because of his active involvement in attacks on the prisoners: For example, he routinely took part in the "welcoming ceremony" for newcomers, in which several of the new prisoners arriving at the camp were taken aside and severely by several guards - mostly with ox peaks were mistreated. During his supervision in the regular camp and in the detention building, he regularly committed acts of violence against the prisoners entrusted to him. After Theodor Eicke took over as commandant of Dachau, Steinbrenner was even officially entrusted with the execution of the punishment in the camp. He is also associated with several murders of Dachau concentration camp prisoners , with at least two killings considered to be proven:

  • 1) Case of Wilhelm Aron : Steinbrenner brought in the Jewish trainee Wilhelm Aron from Bamberg, who was badly mistreated by the guards with ox peaks when he was admitted to Dachau on April 24, 1933, so that he had significant wounds in the back and pelvic area in the following period repeatedly from the infirmary to hit his open wounds again with an ox pizzle, so that the man's condition deteriorated considerably over time and he finally died on May 19, 1933 of a fat embolism.
  • 2) Case of Karl Lehrburger: On May 25, 1933, Steinbrenner shot and killed Karl Lehrburger, a merchant from Nuremberg, in his cell in the Dachau detention center. Criminal proceedings initiated against him were suspended in June, as the public prosecutor's office came to the conclusion that Steinbrenner's claim that he had acted in self-defense could not be refuted.

Furthermore, Steinbrenner is identified in the research as one of the main responsible for the murder of the four Jewish prisoners Rudolf Benario and Ernst Goldmann as well as Artur and Erwin Kahn: They were taken by him on April 12, 1933 from their prison barracks and taken to the guards' firing range Wald outside the camp and shot there by SS men "on the run" (see " Post obligation "). Due to contradicting statements by the camp staff - other prisoners were only ear witnesses of the crime or only saw the men being led out of the camp by Steinbrenner without witnessing the execution themselves - it could not be clarified whether he had participated in the shootings or who "only" led four men to murder by other SS members. He was briefly charged with this act in 1947, but was not convicted because the proceedings were suspended. After the reopening of the proceedings against Steinbrenner, the prosecution removed the matter from the charges against Steinbrenner, as no legally clear evidence was available.

The surviving judgments about Steinbrenner's work in Dachau are entirely devastating. Among the camp inmates, he was known as "Ivan the Terrible" and - a variation of his real name - "Murderer" because of his brutality and unscrupulousness as well as the conspicuous zeal with which he apparently incessantly participated in the abuse of the prisoners in the camp . The particular emphasis with which he reenacted the Jewish prisoners from Dachau earned him the nickname "Juden-Brenner". Because of his attacks on captured communists, he was once again notorious in relevant circles as the “Dachau workers murderer”.

The author, a former camp inmate, also referred specifically to Steinbrenner in a paper published anonymously in 1936 about the National Socialist concentration camps:

“The worst of all [guards] was Hans Steinbrenner. [...] But he didn't miss anything else either. There was hardly any mistreatment in which he did not wield the ox pizzle, hardly any punitive action without him, mostly he was the instigator. Steinbrenner was more feared than Wäckerle, the first camp commandant. "

In the Dachau Chronicle by Julius Zerfass , published in Switzerland in the same year , the latter discusses in detail the impressions of the Dachau prisoner Firner about Steinbrenner, whose description he gives:

“There he stood at the station in his green drill suit, gaunt as a greyhound, the cigarette in the corner of his mouth, his face one hundred percent mean. He resembled Dall'Armi; was, like this, degenerate, between the classes, just right as a throne step for the leader of these declassed. "

The communist member of the Reichstag, Hans Beimler , who had managed to flee Dachau in 1933 and went abroad, described Steinbrenner in his recording “Im Mörderlager Dachau” as a vicious sadist and murderer.

These various descriptions of Steinbrenner's “proficiency” as a concentration camp guard, which were made abroad, made him one of the most well-known human traffickers abroad who worked in concentration camps in the 1930s. The Sopade reports on Germany in 1936 also referred explicitly to Steinbrenner, whom they characterized as the notorious “prisoner murderer”.

Further career

From July to November 1933 Steinbrenner was deployed as a guard in front of the Feldherrnhalle and in front of the headquarters of the Bavarian Political Police in Munich. He then returned to Dachau as a trainer, clerk, accounting officer and company sergeant (Spieß) for the Upper Bavaria SS guard. In July 1934 Steinbrenner married Else Bretschneider from England, with whom he had four children. The family initially lived in the Dachau settlement near the camp. The marriage ended in divorce after the war. Steinbrenner's wife and children moved to London. In 1937 Steinbrenner switched to the SS-Totenkopfstandarte at the Buchenwald concentration camp in order to finally enter the medical school of the Waffen-SS as a spit .

During the Second World War Steinbrenner belonged to various medical units of the Waffen-SS . On June 21, 1941 he reached the rank of SS-Untersturmführer of the Waffen-SS.

Convictions and death

In April or May 1945 Steinbrenner was arrested by the US Army as the head of the administration of an SS hospital in Bohemia and then interned as an SS member in the Moosburg camp. In an initial interrogation by the Special Services Branch on November 8, 1945, Steinbrenner said he had no clue about Dachau. In 1946 he was - in the meantime ironically transferred to the Dachau concentration camp used as an internment camp - but exposed as a former member of the SS guards by the state committee for the politically persecuted in Bavaria.

In 1947, in the course of denazification , Steinbrenner was classified as the main victim in a ruling chamber before the ruling chamber of the Dachau internment camp . Subsequently, his case was handed over to the public prosecutor's office at the Regional Court Munich II , which first brought charges against him on September 24, 1948 for the shooting of Benario, Goldmann and the Kahns in 1933. However, the proceedings were soon afterwards set again for the time being after little by little a sheer unmanageable mass of further allegations had accumulated. As a result, the public prosecutor therefore returned to the preliminary investigation phase and interrogated more than 700 witnesses about Steinbrenner's activities in Dachau from 1948 to 1951.

On September 5, 1951, Steinbrenner was charged with murder. The main trial against him and his former subordinate Johann Unterhuber before the jury court at the Munich Regional Court opened on March 6, 1952. The public prosecutor's office limited itself to the murders of Lehrburger and Aron committed in 1933, which they believed could be proven without difficulty, as well as to various prisoner abuse. Other acts, in particular the murders of Benario and comrades, were deliberately excluded because, despite the great burden of circumstantial evidence, there was a lack of legally sufficient evidence for this act, for which there was no direct witness. The murder of Lehrburger was clear in so far as files of the Munich public prosecutor's office had been found which contained an interrogation of Steinbrenner by the public prosecutor's office investigating Lehrburger's death, in which the latter had expressly admitted that he had shot Lehrburger. Steinbrenner's allegation at the time that he had been threatened by Lehrburger with a bread knife, which the investigating authority had accepted at the time, was no longer believed, u. a. because he had fired only one shot (rather unusual for self-defense situations) and this fatal shot was fired into the forehead of the victim from a distance of only 10 to 20 cm.

On March 10, 1952, the jury court sentenced Steinbrenner to life imprisonment for the murders of Lehrburger and Aron and for nine cases of proven serious bodily harm in office. His co-defendant Unterhuber received six years. Steinbrenner served his imprisonment in the Landsberg prison until at least 1962 . During his detention, Steinbrenner prepared a manuscript entitled “Behind the Scenes of Dachau” with records of his activities in Dachau, which is now in the archive of the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial .

After his release from prison, Steinbrenner committed suicide by hanging in June 1964 .

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Drobisch / Wieland: System of Concentration Camps , 1993, p. 98.
  2. ↑ Drobisch / Wieland: System of Concentration Camps , 1993, p. 98; Jörg Döring / Markus Joch: Alfred Andersch revisited. Biographical studies in the context of the Sebald debate , Berlin 2011, p. 117.
  3. ↑ Drobisch / Wieland: Concentration Camp , p. 52 u. 129; Richardi: School of Violence , 1995, p. 89f .; Stanislav Zámečník: That was Dachau , 2007, p. 28.
  4. ↑ On the nickname "Mordbrenner", cf. Richardi: Violence, p. 11; Hugo Burkhard: Tanz Mal Jude !, 1967, p. 23; on the nickname "Ivan the Terrible", cf. SOPADE: Germany reports of the Social Democratic Party of Germany , year 1936, p. 1008; Jörg Döring / Markus Joch: Alfred Andersch revisited. Biographical studies under the sign of the Sebald Debate , Berlin 2011, p. 109; on the nickname "Worker Murderer of Dachau", cf. Ingolstadt City Archives: Ingolstadt under National Socialism: A Study. Documentation on contemporary history , Ingolstadt 1995, p. 305.
  5. ↑ Anonymous: Concentration Camp. An appeal to the world's conscience , Karlsbad 1936, p. 69.
  6. ^ Julius Zerfass: Dachau. Eine Chronik , 1936, p. 65.
  7. ↑ Germany report by Sopade , Vol. 3, p. 1008.
  8. ^ Jörg Döring / Markus Joch: Alfred Andersch revisited. Biographical studies in the context of the Sebald debate , Berlin 2011, pp. 117f.
  9. ^ Jörg Döring / Markus Joch: Alfred Andersch revisited. Biographical studies under the sign of the Sebald Debate , Berlin 2011, pp. 118–120.
  10. ↑ Richardi: School of Violence , 1995, p. 285.
  11. ↑ Christopher Dillon: Dachau and the SS: A Schooling in Violence , 2015, p. 129.
personal data
SURNAME Steinbrenner, Hans
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Steinbrenner, Johannes
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German SS overseer in Dachau concentration camp
DATE OF BIRTH October 16, 1905
PLACE OF BIRTH Frankfurt am Main
DATE OF DEATH June 12, 1964