Horst Hempel

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Horst Hempel (born February 3, 1910 in Königsberg ; † June 6, 1990 in Düsseldorf ) was a German SS sergeant and report clerk at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp .

Life

Hempel was the son of a master blacksmith . After attending primary school, he did an apprenticeship as a watchmaker from 1924 to 1928 and then worked as a journeyman in a Königsberg workshop. In 1933 he became a member of the Schutzstaffel (SS). In April 1937 he got a job as workshop manager of a watch shop in Düsseldorf. In the same year he joined the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP).

After completing military training at the SS Totenkopfverband in Berlin-Lichterfelde, he was classified as not fit for use in the war. At the beginning of 1940, he was transferred to the guard battalion of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. In April 1941 Hempel was able to transfer to the command headquarters of Sachsenhausen. In autumn 1941 he was appointed report writer in the office of the protective custody camp management department. He kept this position until the end of the war. He was also a block leader . Hempel was involved in the mass murder of over 10,000 Soviet prisoners of war. In February 1945 he took part in the large camp selection. Because of his participation in the selection of the victims he was called "The Angel of Death" by the prisoners.

At the end of the war he was first taken prisoner by the Americans , but was extradited to the Soviet occupation forces in June 1946. On October 31, 1947, the Soviet military court sentenced him to life imprisonment with forced labor. He served part of his sentence in the Vorkuta prison camp .

At the beginning of 1956 Hempel returned to Germany as a non-amnesty war criminal. He lived in Düsseldorf, where he worked as a master watchmaker. From mid-September 1960 he stood before the Düsseldorf Regional Court together with August Höhn and Otto Böhm . On October 15, 1960 he was sentenced to 5 years imprisonment by the Düsseldorf Regional Court for aiding and abetting murder, which, however, was considered served due to the imprisonment in the Soviet Union.

literature

  • Günter Morsch (Ed.): The concentration camp SS 1936–1945: Work-sharing perpetrators in Sachsenhausen concentration camp . Metropol Verlag, Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-86331-403-3
  • Stephanie Bohra: crime scene Sachsenhausen: prosecution of concentration camp crimes in the Federal Republic of Germany . Metropol Verlag, Berlin 2019, ISBN 978-3863314606

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c d Günter Morsch: The Concentration Camp SS 1936-1945: Division of labor in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp . Berlin 2018, pp. 259–262.
  2. ^ A b c d Stephanie Bohra: Tatort Sachsenhausen: Prosecution of concentration camp crimes in the Federal Republic of Germany . Berlin, 2019, pp. 596–597.
personal data
SURNAME Hempel, Horst
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German SS-Unterscharführer
DATE OF BIRTH February 3, 1910
PLACE OF BIRTH Koenigsberg
DATE OF DEATH June 6, 1990
Place of death Dusseldorf