Hans von Dohnanyi

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Hans von Dohnanyi (German special postage stamp, 2002)

Hans von Dohnanyi [ doˈnaːni ] (baptismal name Johann von Dohnányi [ ˈdohnaːɲi ], born January 1, 1902 in Vienna , † April 9, 1945 in Sachsenhausen concentration camp ) was a German lawyer . As a resistance fighter against National Socialism , he was executed shortly before the end of the war.

Life

Hans von Dohnanyi is one of several prominent members of the Dohnányi family . He was born the son of the Hungarian composer Ernst von Dohnányi and his wife, the pianist Elisabeth Kunwald . After his parents separated, he grew up in Berlin . He attended the Grunewald Grammar School there with Dietrich and Klaus Bonhoeffer . From 1920 to 1924 he studied in Berlin jurisprudence . In 1925 he received his doctorate as Dr. jur. on the topic of the international lease agreement and the claim of Czechoslovakia to the lease area in the port of Hamburg over the port of the Vltava .

After the first state examination in 1924 (“ fully satisfactory ”), he married Christine Bonhoeffer in 1925 , the sister of his school friends Dietrich and Klaus Bonhoeffer and daughter of Karl Bonhoeffer . With the marriage he clarified the pronunciation and spelling of his family name by shifting the word stress to the "a" (in Hungarian on the first syllable) and removing the acute accent (which indicates vowel length in Hungarian). He and his wife had three children, Bärbel (1926–2016), Klaus (* 1928) and Christoph (* 1929). She gave up her job for her three children, born so quickly one after the other, and given the busy father. Klaus von Dohnanyi was first mayor of Hamburg from 1981 to 1988, Christoph became a successful conductor.

In 1928, Hans von Dohnanyi passed the second state examination in law (“good”). After a brief spell at Hamburg Senate in 1929 began his career at the Ministry of Justice, several Ministers of Justice with the service name as personal assistant district attorney and since 1934 as a Councilor . He was sponsored by Minister Franz Gürtner . Gürtner and Dohnanyi were friends. In 1932 he was adjutant to the President of the Reich Court, Erwin Bumke, and in this function he processed the lawsuit brought by the State of Prussia against the Reich, which Prussia had brought after the Prussian strike.

After the " Röhm Putsch ", von Dohnanyi sought contact with circles of the resistance - probably triggered by the scheduled murder of alleged conspirators on the orders of the government without a trial or judgment. He kept records of the regime's crimes for himself in order to have evidence for a constitutional trial after an overthrow.

But in the preliminary phase of the formulation of the Nuremberg Laws , von Dohnanyi, in his capacity as advisor to the Nazi Reich Justice Minister Franz Gürtner , took part in the 37th meeting of the Criminal Law Commission , along with Roland Freisler and Fritz Grau , "to be described as the first significant brainstorming session, which prepared the conception of the Nuremberg Laws as well as its implementation provisions in essential aspects ”. At the meeting he criticized the fact that the draft law worked out there “does not achieve the overriding goal of 'racial legislation' - namely the guarantee of fundamental 'racial protection'."

However, when his increasingly critical stance on Nazi racial policy became known in 1938, the Minister transferred him to the Reich Court as Reich Judge .

Shortly before the start of the Second World War , Hans Oster asked him to take on the Foreign / Defense Office of the Wehrmacht High Command , headed by Wilhelm Canaris , which soon became a center of resistance against Adolf Hitler .

At the end of November 1941 he was released by the Reich Court. In 1942, Dohnanyi enabled the Berlin lawyers Fritz Arnold and Julius Fliess, who were persecuted as Jews, to flee to Switzerland with their family members as agents of the Abwehr Office in disguise. A total of 14 people were able to leave the country unhindered due to the falsification of the so-called Operation U-7 initiated by Dohnanyi . During a secret visit to Switzerland , Dohnanyi had prepared the reception of the refugees.

In March 1943 von Dohnanyi participated in Henning von Tresckow's assassination attempt and attempted coup against Hitler. But the bomb smuggled into Hitler's plane in Smolensk failed.

On April 5, 1943, Dohnanyi was arrested (on charges of alleged foreign exchange offenses, including money transactions with Jauch & Hübener ). Army judge Karl Sack deliberately delayed the proceedings against him. In 1944 Dohnanyi was sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp . After the attack on Hitler on July 20, 1944 and the attempted coup had failed, Dohnanyi's secret records were found on September 22, 1944, and Canaris' secret diary on April 5, 1945 in a safe in the Zossen Wehrmacht bunker. This worsened the evidence against Dohnanyi (and also against Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ludwig Gehre , Hans Oster, Wilhelm Canaris and Karl Sack ). Hitler ordered Ernst Kaltenbrunner , who explained the situation to him, to have the accused executed . This commissioned the department head in the Reich Security Main Office Walter Huppenkothen with this. Huppenkothen traveled to Sachsenhausen and acted there as the prosecutor of a special court convened for April 6, 1945, presided over by an SS judge and to which other SS people belonged - including the commandant of the concentration camp. There was no clerk or defense attorney for Dohnanyi. In the express trial, Dohnanyi, lying sick on a stretcher, was sentenced to death ; on April 9th ​​he was hanged .

Legal processing

After the end of the Nazi regime in the Federal Republic of Germany, the prosecutor in Sachsenhausen and Flossenbürg, Walter Huppenkothen , was charged (alongside the chairman of the Flossenbürg District Court, Otto Thorbeck ) for aiding and abetting murder . After the Federal Court of Justice had initially overturned two acquittals by the jury court in 1952 , it changed its mind in the third appeal in 1956. He overturned Thorbeck's and Huppenkothen's conviction and acquitted them of the charge of complicity in murder by participating in the trial court proceedings, because the trial court had been properly established and judged according to the law applicable at the time; one could not accuse the accused of having bent this right .

The reasons given by the Federal Court of Justice for this conviction caused a particular lack of understanding. Accordingly, the reason for the conviction was not the participation in the execution, but the fact that Huppenkothen had failed to confirm the verdict by the supreme court lord before the killing of Wilhelm Canaris, Ludwig Gehre, Hans Oster and Karl Sack, in this case Ernst Kaltenbrunner to catch up. With Kaltenbrunner's signature, Huppenkothen's actions would have been lawful in the opinion of the BGH in 1956. Huppenkothen was also acquitted of the accusation of unlawful killing of Dohnanyis because, in case of doubt , it could not be established for the accused that the judge had confirmed this "judgment".

In 1995, the Federal Court of Justice distanced itself for the first time from its case law from 1956, in a judgment on judicial activity in the former GDR . The verdict against Dohnanyi and others was overturned by the law that came into force on September 1, 1998, to repeal unjust judgments in the criminal justice system .

Günter Hirsch , President of the Federal Court of Justice from 2000 to 2008, said in 2002 on the occasion of a ceremony marking the 100th birthday of Hans von Dohnanyi: “For this judgment” (from 1956) “of the Federal Court of Justice, in which a judge was also involved In the Third Reich was an assessor of a special court and later a senior war judge, one has to be ashamed. ”He also stated:“ The perpetrators were ultimately acquitted of this judicial murder by a judgment of the Federal Court of Justice in 1956 , with a reason that not a single one of them Judges who had passed 50,000 death sentences during the Nazi regime were brought to justice. "

souvenir

On October 26, 2003, the State of Israel honored Hans von Dohnanyi as “ Righteous Among the Nations ” because he saved the Arnold and Fliess families at his own risk. His name was carved on the Yad Vashem memorial .

In Leipzig, Dohnanyistraße was named after him in his honor, as were in Leverkusen, Karlsruhe and Oranienburg.

Documents

  • Winfried Meyer (ed.): Conspirators against Hitler: "God did not give me a tank around my heart." Letters from military prison and Gestapo detention 1943–1945. DVA, Munich 2015, ISBN 978-3-421-04711-3 .

literature

  • Elisabeth Chowaniec: The "Dohnanyi Case" 1943–1945. Resistance, military justice, SS arbitrariness (= series of the quarterly books for contemporary history . Volume 62). Oldenbourg, Munich 1991, ISBN 3-486-64562-5 .
  • Marikje Smid: Hans Dohnanyi - Christine Bonhoeffer - A marriage in the resistance against Hitler. Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2002, ISBN 3-57905382-5 .
  • Andrea Tam: The case of Hans von Dohnanyi. From sentencing to rehabilitation. In: Revue d'Allemagne et des pays de langue allemande. ISSN  0035-0974 , Vol. 37, No. 2, April-June 2005, pp. 197-215.
  • Jochen Thies : The Dohnanyis. A family biography. Propylaea, Berlin 2004, ISBN 3-549-07190-6 . Pp. 114-218.
  • Siegfried Mielke (Ed.) With the collaboration of Marion Goers, Stefan Heinz , Matthias Oden, Sebastian Bödecker: Unique - Lecturers, students and representatives of the German University of Politics (1920-1933) in the resistance against National Socialism. Lukas, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-86732-032-0 , pp. 314-319.
  • Friedrich Karl Kaul : History of the Reichsgericht. Volume 4: 1933-1945. East Berlin 1971, p. 266.
  • Fritz Stern and Elisabeth Sifton: No ordinary men, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Hans von Dohnanyi in the resistance against Hitler. CH Beck, Munich 2013, ISBN 978-3-406-65373-5 .

Web links

Commons : Hans von Dohnanyi  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Alexander Solloch: Klaus von Dohnanyi for the 85th ( Memento from October 24, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) In: NDR.de , June 19, 2013.
  2. ↑ Alexandra Przyrembel, “Rassenschande”: Reinheitsmythos und Destruction Legitimation in National Socialism , Göttingen, 2005, p. 138 , cf. also Wolf Gruner, German Reich 1933-1937 , Munich, 2008, p. 346 m. Note 4 , draft minutes of the meeting (BArch R22 / 852, p. 75).
  3. ↑ Alexandra Przyrembel, “Rassenschande”: Reinheitsmythos und Destruction Legitimation in National Socialism , Göttingen, 2005, p. 142 ; Kaveh Nassirin, Martin Heidegger and the legal philosophy of the Nazi era: detailed analysis of an unknown document (BArch R 61/30, sheet 171) , complete version of the FAZ article Worked against the genocide? v. July 11, 2018, academia.edu, 2018, pdf, p. 5 ( Memento of the original from November 18, 2018 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.academia.edu
  4. ^ Ferdinand Schlingensiepen: Dietrich Bonhoeffer. DTV, Munich 2010, ISBN 978-34-2334609-2 , p. 328.
  5. ^ Günter Brakelmann : Dietrich Bonhoeffer's activity in the conspiracy 1939–1945. In: ders., Traugott Jähnichen (Ed.): Dietrich Bonhoeffer - Stations and Motives on the Way to Political Resistance (= Zeitansage. Vol. 2). Lit, Münster 2005, ISBN 978-3825889456 , pp. 111–158, here p. 151 ( online ).
  6. ^ Judgment of the Federal Court of Justice against Otto Thorbeck and Walter Huppenkothen in 1952: BGH, February 12, 1952 - 1 StR 658/51.
  7. ↑ BGH, June 19, 1956 - 1 StR 50/56.
  8. ^ Ingo Müller : The decline of the criminal justice system in the Third Reich. In: Heribert Ostendorf , Uwe Danker (ed.): The Nazi criminal justice and its aftermath. Nomos, Baden-Baden 2003, ISBN 3-8329-0136-1 , p. 20.
  9. ^ Günter Hirsch: 100th birthday of Hans von Dohnanyi. Speech. In: Bundesgerichtshof.de , March 8, 2002.
  10. ^ Yad Vashem to Recognize Hans von Dohnanyi as a Righteous Among the Nations. Press release, Yad Vashem, October 20, 2003.
  11. ^ André Loh-Kliesch: Dohnanyistraße. Retrieved February 21, 2017 .
  12. ^ [1] Leverkusen street directory
personal data
SURNAME Dohnanyi, Hans von
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Dohnanyi, Johann von
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German lawyer and resistance fighter
DATE OF BIRTH January 1, 1902
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH April 9, 1945
Place of death Sachsenhausen concentration camp