Heinrich Tunnat

Heinrich "Heinz" Karl Tunnat (* 2. January 1913 in Trier , † 8. February 1999 in Offenbach ) was a German untersturmführer of Einsatzkommandos 9 of Einsatzgruppe B .

Under Alfred Filbert he was involved in the murder of around 40,000 Jews in Lithuania, Belarus and the Soviet Union and, as SS-Hauptsturmführer under Herbert Kappler, was involved in the massacre in the Ardeatine Caves in Rome in March 1944 . In 1961 he was sentenced to four years imprisonment for some of the mass executions he committed (11,000 court-proven) in Berlin , but he was able to evade his legal and moral responsibility, including for the massacre in Rome, until his death.

Life

Heinrich Tunnat was born in Trier as the son of the Prussian Reichsbahn official (Ober-Lokomotivführer) Fritz Karl Tunnat and Anna Margarethe Tunnat, née Metzger. His father had previously retired from military service as a Guard Cuirassier - Sergeant in Berlin after ten years of service and switched to the Reichsbahn . His grandfather Johann Heinrich Tunnat was a senior teacher, his maternal grandfather Karl Metzger was also a Reichsbahn official.

His twin sister Dorothea Tunnat was born together with Heinrich Tunnat. After 1945, the latter assumed the moral guilt of her twin brother, which he had charged with his mass executions of Jews during the Holocaust . Dorothea worked as a deaconess for over 40 years, until her death. a. at the station mission . She preferred to take care of the homeless, alcoholics and marginalized groups such as Sinti and Roma .

From policeman to SS-Hauptsturmführer

After leaving school, Tunnat became a police officer in the Hanover district. His father had been transferred to Göttingen . Tunnat was enthusiastic about Adolf Hitler and the NSDAP at an early age , while his father and an older brother were opposed to National Socialism . After the Nazis came to power in 1933, he quickly made a career within the police apparatus that was infiltrated by the Nazi regime. First he was promoted to the Hanover police department and later to the police commissioner in Berlin-Mitte. From 1935 he was a member of the SS . In 1936 he moved from the Berlin criminal police to the Gestapo , and thus to Heinrich Himmler .

In the spring of 1941 he was assigned from the Gestapo service to Bruno Linienbach. From this assigned to Einsatzgruppe B, Heinrich Tunnat was deployed in Einsatzkommando 9 from May 1941 under the leadership of SS-Obersturmführer Alfred Filbert . As SS-Untersturmführer Tunnat independently led a platoon which, as his trial before the Berlin jury court in 1961 showed, in Grodno , Lida , Molodeczno , Newel , Surash , Wilejka , Wilna and Vitebsk , at the shooting of at least 11,000 people, mostly Jewish Women, children and men, actively and directly participated. Heinrich Tunnat was sentenced to four years in prison in June 1961 as a proven mass murderer for these gruesome, judicially proven acts .

At the end of 1942, Tunnat was ordered back to Berlin from the Eastern Front. In connection with the ongoing disciplinary proceedings against Alfred Filbert , he was questioned as a witness. At the same time as Herbert Kappler , Tunnat, who was now nicknamed Heinz , was assigned to the Rome Security Police in September 1943 . Here he was initially involved in planning the deportation of around 10,000 Italian Jews to the extermination camps in Eastern Europe. Tunnat also played a leading role in the arrest of around 1,200 Jews on October 16, 1943, and their subsequent deportation to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp .

When on March 23, 1944, a bomb set off by Italian resistance fighters in Rome on Via Rasella killed 33 German soldiers and injured 67, the Wehrmacht , Kappler and SD wanted to make an example. For every German killed, ten innocent Italians were to be shot. Kappler finally asked the Italian prison director Caruso to give him a list of "suitable" death row inmates within 24 hours.

Tunnat was personally assigned by Kappler to collect the death row inmates from the prisons in Rome. The prisoners were taken by truck under Tunnat's command to the sandstone caves on the outskirts of Rome, on the Via Appia. In groups of five each, the death row inmates were dragged into the cave, where, on Kappler's orders, his officers personally, along with Heinrich Tunnat, Carl-Theodor Schütz , Erich Priebke , and SS-Untersturmführer Ruepp, Brandt and Reinhardt, had to execute the prisoners with a shot in the neck to prove their loyalty to the SS and the Führer. Only Hauptsturmführer Wetjen initially refused to carry out personal executions, but was finally “persuaded” by Tunnat and other “comrades” to participate in the joint mass murder.

Tunnat brought himself to safety in southern Germany from the advancing allies . In April 1945 he left Munich for Göttingen, where he found refuge with his family.

Life after 1945

After the end of the war in 1945, Tunnat successfully managed to hide his murderous past and slip back into the role of an honest man. He moved to the British occupation zone , was denazified and began a second “career” in Oldenburg in 1947, this time as a bourgeois honest man. He quickly rose to become deputy head of the Oldenburg Chamber of Crafts , before Jewish investigators around Simon Wiesenthal tracked him down in 1959. A few months after his exposure, Tunnat was arrested and taken into custody in Hanover before he was transferred to West Berlin for the trial.

Only the Eastern European mass murders were negotiated in the process. Two strange actions by Tunnat came up during the testimony, for example when he was supposed to shoot Jewish children and women for the first time alongside Jewish men and refused to give the order. Only when he was given older, hardened SS men instead of the very young recruits, whom he did not want to face the horrific shootings out of concern for their innocent souls, did he implement the execution order. The process did not result in any disciplinary action.

Another noticeable feature was the strange action taken by his train from Vilnius to Trakai . Here the SS henchmen under Tunnat found Karaites , Turkmen Jews. Instead of taking this Jewish minority, then around 350 people, to the Vilnius ghetto as ordered , he contacted Berlin directly through his superior to clarify how he should deal with these Karaites. Since Berlin did not answer quickly enough, he broke off the action at his own risk (renewed refusal to give orders) and withdrew to Vilnius with his train without having achieved anything. He left the Karaites in Trakai, which saved their lives. It was not until June 13, 1943, that Georg Leibbrandt , as head of Alfred Rosenberg's political department , made a final, legally binding decision that the Karaites were not Jews in the sense of the religious laws of the Nazi regime. Only this decision ensured their survival as a minority in the occupied Soviet and Eastern European territories.

After serving his prison sentence in the mid-1960s, Tunnat did not return to Oldenburg, but moved to Offenbach, where he resumed his bourgeois life. He married again in Offenbach and started a second family.

Unlike Erich Priebke, Tunnat was no longer held accountable before his death for his involvement in the massacre in the Ardeatine Caves of Rome or his other crimes in Italy. Ultimately, he was saved by the fact that the Italian authorities mistook him for Heinz Tunnat , a Bavarian SS-Obersturmführer, with whom Heinrich Tunnat was neither identical nor related or related by marriage. The ominous "Heinz" Heinrich Tunnat could not be found after 1945. Heinrich Tunnat died in Offenbach in 1999 and was buried anonymously there.

literature

AJR Information Vol XVII No. 8 (Association of Jewish Refugees)
Arūnas Bubnys, Vokiečių okupuota Lietuva (Vilnius: LGGRT)
Chronicle of the 20th Century, Spiegel-Verlag
Martin Cüppers : pioneer of the Shoah. The Waffen-SS, the Reichsführer-SS command staff and the extermination of the Jews 1939–1945
Wolfgang Curilla : The German order police and the Holocaust in the Baltic States
Christoph Dieckmann: The war and the murder of the Lithuanian Jews
Christoph Dieckmann, Saulius Sužiedlis: THE PERSECUTION AND MASS MURDER OF LITHUANIAN JEWS DURING SUMMER AND FALL OF 1941
Saul Friedländer : The Third Reich and the Jews
Wassili Grossmann, Ilja Ehrenburg (ed.): The Black Book - The Genocide of the Soviet Jews
Hamburger Abendblatt 143 of June 22, 1962
Hamburg Institute for Social Research (Ed.): Crimes of the Wehrmacht. Dimensions of the War of Extermination 1941–1944. Exhibition catalog, Hamburg edition
Justice and Nazi Crimes Volume XVIII, Ser. # 540
Reinhard Kaiser and Margarete Holzman (eds.) This child should live - The notes of Helene Holzman 1941–1944
Peter Klein (Ed.): The Einsatzgruppen in the occupied Soviet Union 1941/42. The activity and situation reports of the chief of the security police and the SD, Edition Hentrich, Berlin
Helmut Krausnick, Hans-Heinrich Wilhelm: The troop of the Weltanschauung war. The Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police and SD 1938–1942. German publishing company, Stuttgart
Klaus-Michael Mallmann , Andrej Angrick , Jürgen Matthäus , Martin Cüppers (eds.): The event reports USSR 1941. Documents of the task forces in the Soviet Union (publications of the research center Ludwigsburg, vol. 20). WBG, Darmstadt
Jürgen Matthaus: Beyond the border. The first mass shootings of Jews in Lithuania (June-August 1941)
Kurt Pätzold: The mass murder of the European Jews and the science of history
Richard Rhodes: The German Murderers. The SS Einsatzgruppen and the Holocaust, translated and edited by Jürgen Peter Krause, Bastei-Lübbe, Bergisch Gladbach
Joachim Staron: German war crimes and resistancea
Katrin Stoll: The production of truth. Criminal proceedings against former members of the Bialystok District Security Police. Dissertation at the University of Bielefeld 2011, Series Legal History / Department 1, Volume 22, De Gruyter, Berlin / Boston
Harald Welzer / Michaela Christ: perpetrators. How normal people become mass murderers. S. Fischer

Individual evidence

↑ Court decision: LG Berlin 620622 / BGH 630409 Tatland: Lithuania, Russia, Belarus Crime scene: Grodno, Lida, Molodeczno, Newel, Surash, Wilejka, Wilna, Vitebsk - crime time: 4107-4110 victims: Jews - nationality: Lithuanian, Soviet service: Task Force EK9 Subject of the proceedings: shooting of thousands of Jewish men, women and children by Einsatzkommando 9 on its march from East Prussia via Wilna and Wilejka to Vitebsk, where all the inhabitants of the ghetto there were murdered. Further shootings in off-route locations by sub-troops sent there.

personal data
SURNAME	Tunnat, Heinrich
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Tunnat, Heinrich Karl (full name); Tunnat, Heinz (nickname)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	German SS-Untersturmführer of the Einsatzkommando 9 of the Einsatzgruppe B
DATE OF BIRTH	January 2, 1913
PLACE OF BIRTH	trier
DATE OF DEATH	February 8, 1999
Place of death	Offenbach

[1] Court decision: LG Berlin 620622 / BGH 630409 Tatland: Lithuania, Russia, Belarus Crime scene: Grodno, Lida, Molodeczno, Newel, Surash, Wilejka, Wilna, Vitebsk - crime time: 4107-4110 victims: Jews - nationality: Lithuanian, Soviet service: Task Force EK9 Subject of the proceedings: shooting of thousands of Jewish men, women and children by Einsatzkommando 9 on its march from East Prussia via Wilna and Wilejka to Vitebsk, where all the inhabitants of the ghetto there were murdered. Further shootings in off-route locations by sub-troops sent there.