Helmut Kunz

Helmut Kunz, 1940. The number "84" on the collar tab identifies him as a member of the 84th SS Standard .

Helmut Kunz (born September 26, 1910 in Ettlingen , † September 23, 1976 in Freudenstadt ) was a dentist , NSDAP and SS member. In 1945 he was involved in the murder of the Goebbels children .

Life

Kunz was born the son of bookseller and businessman Gustav Kunz. He laid in 1928 graduated from high school in Offenburg , and studied at the Ruprecht-Karls University Heidelberg first three semesters Jura and then dentistry at the University of Jena and the University of Leipzig .

Career in National Socialism

On April 20, 1934, Kunz joined the Schutzstaffel (SS) (No. 284.787). In March 1936 he opened a dental practice in Lucka . On May 1, 1937, he became a member of the National Socialist German Workers' Party ( NSDAP membership number : 5.104.232). In July 1937 he married his wife Ursula, with whom he had three children. On June 9, 1939 doctorate he with the dissertation Studies on dental caries in schoolchildren taking into account their feedings Dr. med. dent. and in 1939 had also joined the National Socialist Medical Association. In January 1940 he was called up as a medical officer in the Wehrmacht , in August 1940 he joined the Waffen SS and was assigned to the Pioneer Battalion of the 3rd SS Totenkopf Division as SS-Untersturmführer , which was under the SS-Gruppenführer and Lieutenant General of Arms in the Dachau concentration camp -SS Theodor Eicke was set up.

In September 1941 Kunz was seriously wounded by shrapnel on the Eastern Front . After staying in the hospital, he was assigned to a replacement battalion in December 1941 and in February of the following year transferred to the SS medical office in Berlin, headed by the Reichsarzt SS Ernst-Robert Grawitz . From October 1943 he worked here in the office of Hugo Blaschke , the chief dentist of the SS. His two daughters, aged one and four, were killed in an Allied air raid on Lucka in January 1945.

Murder of the six Goebbels children

→ Main article : Magda Goebbels: Murder of the children

On April 23, 1945, SS-Sturmbannführer Kunz was ordered to work as a dentist in the bunker under the Reich Chancellery after his superior Blaschke, who had previously looked after Hitler and those close to him, had left Berlin. Here Kunz treated, among others, Magda Goebbels , the wife of the Reich Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels .

According to Kunz 'later testimony, Magda Goebbels asked him at the end of April to help kill her six four to twelve year old children Helga, Hilde, Holde, Hedda, Heide and Helmut. He refused, but was put under so much pressure by Magda Goebbels that he finally agreed to sedate the children with morphine injections so that their mother could give them cyanide capsules (hydrogen cyanide ). On the evening of May 1, 1945 - the day after Adolf Hitler's suicide - he injected the children with morphine, but Magda Goebbels was not able to kill her children. Kunz then had to fetch Hitler's second personal physician, Ludwig Stumpfegger , who entered the nursery with Magda Goebbels. When she left the children's room, Magda Goebbels said it was "all over". Then at around 9 p.m. Joseph and Magda Goebbels killed each other with hydrogen cyanide. During the interrogation by the Soviets on May 7, 1945, Kunz stated that Magda Goebbels had poisoned the children and that he had merely been a witness to the crime. On May 19, 1945, he corrected his statement to the effect that Stumpfegger had participated in the killing of the children. (Ludwig Stumpfegger took his own life with a hydrogen cyanide poison capsule on May 2, 1945 together with Martin Bormann and could therefore no longer be interrogated in this regard). Kunz repeated this second version at his later trial in the Federal Republic. He did not deny having injected the children with morphine as a preparatory measure.

Captivity and Trial

Helmut Kunz ( Russian Кунц ), capture photo in Soviet captivity in 1945

Kunz was on May 2, 1945 by soldiers of the Red Army together with SS-Obersturmbannführer Werner Haase (who had been ordered to the Führerbunker on April 29, 1945 to assist Ludwig Stumpfegger in the poisoning of Hitler's dog Blondi ) and two nurses Erna Flegel and Liselotte Chervinska arrested and spent the next seven years as a remand prisoner in the Soviet Union . On February 13, 1952, a Moscow military court sentenced him to 25 years in a camp, partly because of his involvement in the murder of the Goebbels children. He was thus one of 48 dentists who were verifiably tried as war criminals after 1945 . On October 4, 1955, Kunz was released in the course of the repatriation of the last German prisoners of war negotiated by Federal Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and returned to the Federal Republic of Germany on October 20. Kunz explained his imprisonment with his NSDAP membership and the fact that he had treated high-ranking members of the Nazi regime. He was therefore initially not pursued any further and moved to his family in Karlsruhe . In February 1956 he accepted a position as an unpaid volunteer at the University Dental Clinic in Münster . At the beginning of 1957, Kunz established himself as a dentist in Freudenstadt.

On February 6, 1957, the Münster public prosecutor's office initiated an investigation against Kunz (file number 6 Js 1041/56) after he had been accused by the former SS Rottenführer Harri Mengershausen of killing the Goebbels children. In January 1959, she brought charges of complicity in manslaughter on six counts. Three weeks later, the first criminal division of the Münster Regional Court closed the case. Considering the uncertain evidence (all direct witnesses to the crime were dead or missing) and the prison were serving already in the Soviet Union approved it Kunz according to § 6 of the impunity law of 17 July 1954 under orders to and executed this: "impunity are basically all those attain, who were guilty in dependent situations ”. The Hamm Higher Regional Court confirmed this decision three months later. Both the presiding judge of the criminal chamber at the regional court, Gerhard Rose (membership number 4,413.181), and the president of the senate at the OLG Hamm, Gerhard Ahlich (membership number 4,079,094), were members of the NSDAP and joined the party on the same day like Kunz.

Further life

In March 1957 Kunz divorced his first wife and obtained custody of the remaining child - the son Michael. In 1958 he married a second time. He lived with his new wife Annemarie in Freudenstadt until his death, where he still worked as a dentist in 1975.

literature

• Alexander Heit, Jens Westemeier, Dominik Gross , Mathias Schmidt: 'It's all over now.' The dentist Helmut Kunz and the killing of Reich Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels' children at the end of the Third Reich. In: British Dental Journal 227 (2019), p. 997-1000. doi : 10.1038 / s41415-019-0992-1

Individual evidence

1. ^ Charles W. Sydnor, Soldiers of Death: the 3rd SS Division "Totenkopf" 1933–1945, Schöningh, 2020, p. 38 ff. ISBN 3-506-79084-6
2. ^ ^{A b} Dominik Groß, Mathias Schmidt, Alexander Heit, Helmut Kunz and the murder of the Goebbels children , Zahnärztliche Mitteilungen, Issue 8/2020, pp. 72–74, April 16, 2020. Accessed April 22, 2020.
3. ↑ ^{a b} State Archives North Rhine-Westphalia, Q225 PPOM No. 316, Volume 1.
4. ^ Christiane Rinnen, Jens Westemeier, Dominik Gross, Nazi dentists on trial. On the political complicity of a long-neglected group, Endeavor 44 (2020), in press.
5. ↑ Georg Bönisch: Do not be afraid. In: Der Spiegel, 41/2009, pp. 58–60. Retrieved April 23, 2020.
6. ^ Federal Association of German Dentists (1975), 7; Freudenstadt City Archives, p. 2.2: Obituary, September 28, 1976.