Henry Ormond

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Henry Ormond (born May 27, 1901 in Kassel as Hans Ludwig Jacobsohn, after adoption in 1920 Hans Ludwig Oettinger; † May 8, 1973 in Frankfurt am Main) was a German lawyer of Jewish origin. In 1946/47, as a British press officer, he was one of the founding fathers of the news magazine Der Spiegel . He later represented victims of Nazi Germany as a lawyer before German courts .

biography

Born as Hans Ludwig Jacobsohn, he attended school in Mannheim and studied law in Heidelberg and Berlin . After the assessor exam in 1926, he entered the judiciary and was a judge at the Mannheim District Court .

In May 1933, the National Socialists put Ormond into retirement on the basis of the " Law to Restore the Professional Civil Service " because of his Jewish descent. He hired himself as a legal advisor at a Frankfurt coal wholesaler, where he was also dismissed in 1938 as a "non-Aryan".

On November 12, 1938, the Gestapo arrested him as part of the November pogroms and deported him to the Dachau concentration camp . In mid-March 1939 he was released from Germany with frostbite on both hands.

emigration

Ormond came to Great Britain via Switzerland in the summer of 1939. Until he was interned in Canada as an " enemy alien " in 1940, Ormond worked as a domestic worker in an English rectory. Released after 14 months from internment, he enlisted in Canada as a volunteer in the British Army in July 1941 and did pioneer, guard and office service in England, and from August 1944 in France. In July 1943 he took the name Henry Lewis Ormond.

At the end of the war he returned to Germany as a British occupation officer. In the Information Service Division, Ormond initially worked in Hanover with the rank of sergeant major as a press officer and, together with John Seymour Chaloner , Harry Bohrer and Rudolf Augstein, was one of the founders of the magazine Die Woche , which was converted into Der Spiegel magazine after six issues in 1947 .

Lawyer for Nazi victims

In April 1950 Ormond settled as a lawyer in Frankfurt am Main and concentrated his work on compensation and restitution proceedings for Nazi victims and on the prosecution of Nazi perpetrators. He represented Norbert Wollheim in the first test case for forced laborers against IG Farben iL, in which he sued for reimbursement of withheld wages and damages. After almost two years of negotiations, the Wollheim court ruled and sentenced IG Farben to pay DM 10,000 in 1953. The appeal proceedings before the Frankfurt Higher Regional Court ended in 1958 with a settlement between IG Farben on the one hand and Wollheim and the Jewish Claims Conference on the other; a total of DM 30 million was paid to former IG Farben slave laborers in the Auschwitz-Monowitz concentration camp .

Ormond represented Nazi victims and their relatives as joint plaintiffs in numerous criminal trials. He appeared for 15 joint plaintiffs in the first Auschwitz trial from 1963 to 1965 . On June 8, 1964, when the trial had been going on for six months, Ormond applied for a site visit to Auschwitz. Against the concerns of the Justice Ministries in Wiesbaden and Bonn - there were no diplomatic relations with Poland at the time - the inspection was carried out on December 14, 1964 after Poland had consented to the on-site visit. According to reports from observers, the inspection of the crime scene had a lasting effect on those involved in the trial as well as on the German public.

In addition to his work as legal counsel for Nazi victims, he worked in aid organizations for Israel.

Ormond died of a heart attack in 1973 while making a plea in the courtroom.

Publications

  • Interim balance in the Auschwitz trial. In: grandstand . Vol. 3, 1964, pp. 1183-1190.
  • Review of the Auschwitz Trial In: Tribune . Vol. 4, 1965, pp. 1723-1728.
  • Plea in the Auschwitz Trial by Henry Ormond on May 24, 1965. Munich 1965.
  • Replica of the lawyer Henry Ormond in the Auschwitz trial. In: Frankfurter Hefte . Vol. 20, 1965, pp. 827-837.
  • Auschwitz exhibition Hanover from November 17, 1965 to December 14, 1965. Address at the opening ceremony of the Auschwitz exhibition on Wednesday, November 17, 1965. Hanover 1965.
  • From the ideology of inhumanity to the lie of the lack of orders. In: Henry Ormond, Gerd-Klaus Kaltenbrunner: Rassenmystik, Murderpraxis, Neonazismus. Munich 1967, pp. 1–37.
  • Nazi crime and German law. In: The Wiener Library bulletin. Vol. 21, 1967, No. 1, pp. 16-21.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Application of the Wollheim trial.
  2. ↑ Matthias Arning: stirring charges. ( Memento from February 20, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) In: Frankfurter Rundschau , March 30, 2004; Sybille Steinbacher : Auschwitz. History and post-history. Munich 2004, p. 116.
  3. ↑ Date: May 14, 1973. In: Der Spiegel No. 20, May 14, 1973, p. 3.
personal data
SURNAME Ormond, Henry
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Oettinger, Hans Ludwig
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German lawyer
DATE OF BIRTH May 27, 1901
PLACE OF BIRTH kassel
DATE OF DEATH May 8, 1973
Place of death Frankfurt am Main