Josef Hartinger

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Josef Michael Hartinger (born September 14, 1893 in Pertolzhofen ; † 1984 ) was a German administrative lawyer and politician ( CSU ).

Career

Hartinger was an attorney for the Bavarian state authorities in the last years of the Weimar Republic , when the National Socialist German Workers' Party came to power. He was commissioned to investigate unnatural deaths in the Dachau concentration camp near Munich . Together with the coroner Moritz Flamm , he discovered the strategy of the SS to carry out express executions in the camp and to falsify suicides . At great risk to his own safety, Hartinger brought charges against the camp administration, which were eventually suppressed.

After the Reichstag Fire Ordinance , the National Socialists began to arrest political opponents ( KPD and SPD members) and interned them in concentration camps. One of the first was the Dachau concentration camp, where the prisoners were guarded by 70 Bavarian police officers. The Bavarian Police President Heinrich Himmler gradually released the police from this task and replaced them with the SS. On April 12, 1933, one day after the arrival of the SS, the public prosecutor received a report on four deaths among the prisoners. Since every non-natural death had to be investigated in public custody, Hartinger and Flamm were sent to Dachau.

The camp commandant Hilmar Wäckerle led them to a place where the four prisoners were shot trying to escape into the forest, and later to a shed in which three of their bodies were lying on the floor. Hartinger criticized the guards for the unworthy treatment of the bodies before he and Flamm identified and examined them. They quickly established that all of the dead prisoners ( Rudolf Benario , Ernst Goldmann, Arthur Kahn) were Jews and had been shot at the base of the skull. Erwin Kahn initially survived the shots, but died four days later in hospital under SS guard. Without questioning the guards' allegations on these issues, investigators returned over several days to carefully document the evidence. Flamm performed autopsies on the four prisoners. Hartinger and Flamm found many inconsistencies between the injuries to the corpses and the reports from the camp guards.

Occasionally they had to investigate new deaths, such as the case of Sebastian Nefzger, who allegedly committed suicide. The autopsy showed a badly injured back and signs of internal bleeding. He had allegedly tried to hang himself by the strap of his own prosthetic leg and when that failed he cut his wrists so deep that they penetrated the bone. The autopsy of Alfred Strauss , who was also shot while trying to escape, revealed that he had died of a bullet in the neck following severe physical attacks. His back was covered with cuts and his buttocks were bandaged to hide a deep cut.

Hartinger and Flamm uncovered clear evidence of murder for several months and drafted an indictment against the camp commandant Hilmar Wäckerle and the chancellery secretary Josef Mutzbauer . In May 1933 Hartinger presented the case to his superior, the Bavarian public prosecutor Karl Wintersberger . Wintersberger, who initially supported the investigation, was reluctant to submit the resulting indictment to the Ministry of Justice, which was increasingly under the influence of the SS. In June 1933 Hartinger reduced the size of the dossier to the four clearest cases, and Wintersberger signed it after informing SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler. The murders in Dachau suddenly stopped temporarily, Wäckerle was moved to Stuttgart and replaced by Theodor Eicke . The indictment and related evidence reached the office of the Bavarian Minister of Justice, Hans Frank , but was intercepted by Gauleiter Adolf Wagner and locked in a desk that was only discovered by the US Army after the end of World War II .

Both Hartinger and Wintersberger were transferred to the province. Wintersberger was appointed President of the Senate at the Bamberg Higher Regional Court in 1934, Hartinger returned to Munich I after a brief transfer, and from 1936 as President of the Regional Court in the city of Amberg .

Flamm was no longer employed as a coroner and is believed to have survived two murder attempts before dying suspiciously in the Egelfing-Haar psychiatric hospital the following year. Flamm's thoroughly collected and documented evidence in Hartinger's indictment helped convict leading Nazis at the Nuremberg Trials in 1947 . Wintersberger's complicit behavior is documented in his own evidence for the trial against the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office.

War 1939–45

The Brown Book published by the GDR stated that it listed all officials in the Federal Republic of Germany who were former Nazis and war criminals. In the 1968 edition, Josef Hartinger is listed as a former judge-martial of the "Höheren Kommando LX" (a communications department of the Wehrmacht). It is questionable whether such a position would have given him the opportunity to commit war crimes, but it contradicts the record of the Bavarian State Archives, according to which he worked as district court director in the city of Amberg from 1936 until the end of the war.

post war period

In 1946, Hartinger's missing files were discovered by the US Army in the Bavarian Ministry of Justice and used as evidence in the trials against high-ranking Nazis before the Nuremberg Tribunal in 1947. Flamm's carefully collected and documented evidence in Hartiger's indictment ensured he won convictions from high-ranking Nazis such as Oswald Pohl. Wintersberger's complicit behavior is documented in his own evidence on the Pohl trial .

Although the three SS men named in Hartinger's original indictment were either dead or missing, the indictment also mentioned "unknown persons" who may have acted on their behalf. One of their most brutal subjects, Hans Steinbrenner (SS member) was still alive. Based on Hartinger's original indictment, Steinbrenner's murder of Louis Schloss and (with new evidence from several former Dachau inmates) the murders of Wilhelm Aron and Karl Lehrburger.

On March 10, 1952, the nine members of the jury court at Munich II Regional Court pronounced the judgment against Steinbrenner in the following cases:

  • Murder at Schloss: not guilty, serious bodily harm: guilty (sentence 2 years)
  • Guilty of murder of Lehrburger, but under duress from his commanding officer (10 years imprisonment)
  • Murder of Aron: Guilty (life imprisonment)

In 1962, Steinbrenner wrote an 8-page confession letter from his cell in Landsberg Prison, which he sent to Hartinger via the prison authorities. He informed Hartinger that he himself would have been killed in 1933 had he not been personally acquainted with many powerful dignitaries. In May 1963 Steinbrenner was transferred from the prison in Landsberg am Lech to a nursing home in Berchtesgaden, where he later hanged himself.

In 1948 Hartinger was made after denazification process as part of the denazification returned to its position in Amberg. From 1954 to 1958 Hartinger worked for the newly founded Federal Prosecutor's Office at the Federal Court of Justice in Karlsruhe.

Josef Hartinger was State Secretary in the Bavarian State Ministry of Justice from December 9, 1958 until his retirement on December 5, 1966. It was only when he was over 90 that he spoke about the events surrounding the failed indictment against the Dachau camp administration.
Hartinger completed his memoir on February 4, 1984 and passed away six months later.

Honors

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ryback, Timothy W. Hitler's First Victims: The Quest for Justice , Vintage, 2015. p. 17th
  2. ^ Rudolf Benario and Ernst Goldmann murdered in Dachau . the messenger, German. Retrieved September 11, 2019.
  3. ↑ Timothy W. Ryback: Hitler's First Victims: The Quest for Justice. Vintage, 2015. pp. 183, 185, 186, 213, 253.
  4. ↑ United States Office of Chief of Counsel for the Prosecution of Axis Criminality: Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, Volume 3 ( en ). US Government Printing Office, Washington DC 1946.
  5. ^ A b Distel Barbara, Nikolaus Wachsmann, Sybille Steinbacher: State terror and moral courage in Die Linke im Visier: On the establishment of the concentration camps in 1933 . Wallstein Publishing House. 2014. Retrieved October 3, 2019.
  6. ↑ a b 1216-PS Concentration Camp Dachau: Special Orders (1933) . Harvard Law School Library Nuremberg Trials Project. Retrieved September 11, 2019.
  7. ^ Otfried Schmack, Gisela Ostberg, Gerhard Kurth: Braunbuch war and NAZI criminals in the Federal Republic and in West Berlin . State publisher of the German Democratic Republic. 1968. Retrieved October 1, 2019.
  8. ↑ a b Rolf Seubert, Jörg Döring, Markus Joch: My lumpy three-month imprisonment in Alfred Andersch Revisited . Walter de Gruyter GmbH. Pp. 97-104. 2011. Retrieved October 3, 2019.
  9. ↑ a b c Dr. Otto Gritschneder: There were also such public prosecutors: June 1933: Indictment against Dachau concentration camp commanders . Freiburger Rundbrief Section 8, 1984. Retrieved October 1, 2019.
personal data
SURNAME Hartinger, Josef
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hartinger, Josef Michael (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German administrative lawyer and politician (CSU)
DATE OF BIRTH September 14, 1893
PLACE OF BIRTH Pertolzhofen
DATE OF DEATH 1984