Josef Ochs

Franz Josef Ochs , called Seppl Ochs (born March 31, 1905 in Schmitten (Hochtaunus) ; † November 12, 1987 ) was a German detective and SS-Obersturmführer who was involved in the deportation of Sinti and Roma during the Nazi era . In the post-war period he worked from 1951 to 1965 in the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) as head of the executive department of the BKA's security group and as head of department and deputy head of the news collection department.

Life

Josef Ochs was born the son of a wood wool manufacturer in the climatic health resort Schmitten in the Taunus. After graduating from high school in 1925, he studied law and economics at the universities of Frankfurt am Main , Munich and Erlangen . In 1933 he received his doctorate as Dr. jur. , then he worked in his father's factory until the summer of 1934, before he worked as a fiduciary co-owner of a shoe trading company until September 1936.

time of the nationalsocialism

Detective officer and SS-Obersturmführer

At the beginning of October 1936 he began his professional career with the Frankfurt criminal police and passed his inspector's examination in July 1938 with "good". In September 1938 he married the daughter of a pharmacist, who was 13 years his junior. The marriage resulted in two children born in 1939 and 1943. At the end of 1938 he was transferred to Düsseldorf and on January 15, 1939, he was appointed detective for life.

The SA Ochs had already joined on 1 May 1933, the NSDAP ( member number 5927971), he was taken on May 1, 1937, the SS (SS no. 290982) in February 1938. Already on July 2, 1938 he was appointed SS-Obersturmführer.

According to his own information, Ochs claims to have worked between October and December 1939 in Thorn ( Gdansk-West Prussia ) annexed by the German Reich , “for the purpose of setting up a criminal investigation agency”. The suspicion of the criminologist Dieter Schenk that instead of this information he actually belonged to an SS task force and participated in their murders, could not be proven.

Reichskriminalpolizeiamt (RKPA) and police control center Düsseldorf

From the end of 1939 to July 1941, Ochs was a clerk responsible for admissions to concentration camps in Section VA 2b (“ Asocial , Prostitute , Gypsy ”) of the Reich Criminal Police Office (RKPA) headed by Eduart Richrath . As part of the preventive fight against crime, the local criminal police and police control centers issued a precautionary detention order for placement in concentration camps, which had to be confirmed by Section VA 2b within a week.

He was the representative of the RKPA at the maid deportation in 1940 at the collection camp in Cologne ; here selected it in cooperation with the Racial Hygiene Research Center Rhenish " Gypsy " for transport to the German-occupied Poland . Even after that he was busy with "Gypsy questions". For example, Ochs wrote in a letter dated August 9, 1940 to the Magdeburg Criminal Police Office for the “ Reich Central Office for Combating the Gypsies ” that the father in question, Robert R., was not of Aryan descent, contrary to his assertion , that one had to be from a “Gypsy mongrel [... ] with a predominantly gypsy blood portion ”. Based on this assessment, R. was released from the Wehrmacht and later, on March 1, 1943, deported with his wife and six children to the gypsy camp Auschwitz . For the historian Andrej Stephan, this letter shows as an example "that Ochs had his own competencies and that he did not have to see himself as constantly receiving orders and executing them". In an official assessment of September 15, 1940 written by the criminal director and SS-Sturmbannführer Friedrich Riese , his own initiative was emphasized:

“He was employed in the areas of preventive crime prevention and gypsy affairs as well as planning the colonial security police operation. (...) Based on technical and general knowledge, he has a remarkably confident and independent judgment. New or fundamentally significant processes are recognized and appropriately evaluated on their own initiative. "

Even after his transfer to the Dusseldorf police control center in June 1941, Ochs worked in the course of the “preventive fight against crime”, for example by asking the board of directors of the Hamburg-Fuhlsbüttel police prison in a letter dated July 22, 1943, that Johann A., who was born in 1919, after his completion Prison sentence "to be transferred to the Düsseldorf police prison, as I intend to order preventive police measures against him".

Ochs came into conflict with his superiors when, in autumn 1941, he refused to withdraw from the Catholic Church that had been suggested to him. Instead, in his written statement of October 24, 1941, he described such a request as "economic chivalry" and " Abolition of his indispensable position as a criminal investigation officer “asked, because he wanted to fight with the armed forces at the front. He was denied this. After the war, Ochs assessed a transfer to Magdeburg in August 1943 , which lasted a few weeks , as a result of this dispute. In fact, after his brother-in-law had died in the war, with the consent of his Düsseldorf superior, he had taken part-time leave for a pharmacy internship from February 1, 1944 to March 1945, in order to keep the prospect of continuing his deceased brother-in-law's pharmacy open to be able to.

post war period

internment

After May 8, 1945, Ochs was imprisoned in the Neuengamme internment camp , which existed from June 1945 to August 13, 1948. Otto Hellwig , fellow prisoner in Neuengamme and former commander of the leadership school of the security police and SD in Berlin-Charlottenburg, where Ochs had also attended a course, made a written affidavit in his favor. Ochs and other SS members of the RKPA had not actively participated in their admission to the SS, the rank adjustment to the SS was "carried out automatically according to orders without questioning". This “ clean bill of health ” was later used by other former SS men from the RKPA and a copy was circulated among those affected, for example by the later BKA President Paul Dickopf . The active participation of this group of people in their admission to the SS is well documented today. The claim that when Dickopf, Ochs and others entered the SS. a. If it was a matter of a purely formal “grade adjustment” without doing anything on his own, it is a “post-war legend by Dickopf, Holle & Co.” Ochs continued to be very successful in organizing exonerating “Persil notes” from respected personalities, including two from 1946 and 1948 dated “Declarations of Honor” by the North Rhine-Westphalian Prime Minister Karl Arnold .

In a trial before a British military tribunal in 1947, he was acquitted of the charge of " murdering ' foreign workers '' shortly before the end of the war ".

In the "security group" of the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA)

After he had been unemployed until July 1949, he worked for a year in the security department of Rheinische Röhrenwerke AG Düsseldorf before he was employed by the Düsseldorf criminal police in December 1950. In May 1951, Ochs moved to the Criminal Police Office of the British Zone and thus directly to the Federal Criminal Police Office that was created from it. In the founding phase of the "security group" of the BKA, which was responsible for police state security and personal protection for members of the federal government, he led the executive department and, after a letter bomb attack in 1952, the responsible special commission on Chancellor Konrad Adenauer .

The historian Patrick Wagner , head of the BKA-Historie project, emphasizes that in this case Ochs used the perpetrators of a right-wing Zionist terrorist group from Israel to name it in an internal report by "Zurich, Paris, Amsterdam and Munich" as the "headquarters of Judaism in Europe ”and - since the perpetrator could not be found - recommended to his superiors to set up“ internment camps ”for people from their environment, since only the“ path of reprisals ”remains.

Deputy Head of Department and "Gypsy Expert" at the BKA

After that, Ochs headed a department in the news gathering department and was finally deputy head of this department in 1954. In this function, from 1954 onwards, as the “Gypsy expert” of the BKA, he was responsible for its ultimately unsuccessful attempts to “institutionalize a special police control of the Sinti and Roma under the auspices of the BKA”. As a representative of the BKA, Ochs had at meetings of a "sub-commission" set up by the BKA President Hanns Jess of the working group of the heads of the state criminal investigation offices with the Federal Criminal Police Office, which, in cooperation with the state criminal investigation offices, provided guidelines on the "possibilities of a Intensification of the fight against criminal rural drivers "should develop extensive control measures against the Sinti and Roma now called" rural drivers "instead of the" Gypsies "referred to under National Socialism.

In the preamble of the draft, which was drawn up under the BKA representative Ochs, it was stated that this group of people had to assume a “nomadic way of life, work shyness and high crime”, and that cross-border control and total coverage was required . Although, according to the minutes of the conference, "hardly any fundamental concerns" were expressed about these guidelines, their adoption ultimately failed due to the special interests of the Bavarian State Criminal Police Office , which did not want its own data collections and procedures to be regulated in favor of centralized recording by the BKA (see Gypsy headquarters ).

Public prosecutor's investigation against Ochs

In the year before Ochs' retirement in 1965, public prosecutor investigations began against him after the Berlin Document Center had sent the Frankfurt Public Prosecutor's Office documents on April 30, 1964, which indicated that Ochs was working in the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA). In fact, the Reich Criminal Police Office, Ochs' office, had belonged to the RSHA as Office V. However, the public prosecutor's office was unable to identify a corresponding activity by Ochs in the RSHA and decided that "further routine inquiries at the central office in Ludwigsburg should be refrained from". The subject of the investigation was “admissions to concentration camps under the heading of 'extermination through work'”.

They contented themselves with interrogations of the lawyer Ochs. In his first interrogation on October 18, 1966, he testified that he had neither had anything to do with admission to concentration camps nor participated in the “ extermination through work ”. In a final interrogation prior to the termination of the proceedings in 1970, he asserted that " special treatments " were "completely unknown" to him - on the contrary, he could have assumed that the "prisoners who were detained under the preventive decree were treated legally".

Ochs' admission that he had no knowledge at the time that the term "special treatment" in the SS cover language stands for the murder of racially undesirable people, considers his biographer Andrej Stephan to be an implausible protective claim, since Ochs, based on reports from the concentration camps, Those who reached him knew "that the measures he personally decreed would lead to death".

literature

• Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945 . Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2003, p. 442.
• Andrej Stephan: "The term special treatment ... was unknown to me at the time". Dr. Josef Ochs (1905–1987), a “gypsy expert” with gaps in memory . In: Imanuel Baumann / Herbert Reinke / Andrej Stephan / Patrick Wagner : Shadows of the Past. The BKA and its founding generation in the early Federal Republic . Edited by the Federal Criminal Police Office, Criminalistic Institute. Luchterhand, Cologne 2011, ISBN 978-3-472-08067-1 ( police + research , special volume), pp. 313–322 ( download as PDF file).
• Dieter Schenk : Blind in the right eye. The brown roots of the BKA . Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 2001, ISBN 3-462-03034-5 .
• Federal Criminal Police Office (ed.): National Socialism and the history of the BKA: Searching for clues on one's own behalf; Results, discussions, reactions; Documentation of the colloquium on the research report on the history of the BKA on April 6, 2011 . Cologne: Luchterhand 2011, ISBN 978-3-472-08068-8 . In it: Two letters from WW Ochs, p. 163ff; P. 175ff
• Reinhard Scholzen : To protect politicians. The early years of the backup group . In: Polizei & Wissenschaft 1, 2014, pp. 2–9.

Remarks

1. ↑ Andrej Stephan: "The term special treatment ... was unknown to me at the time". Dr. Josef Ochs (1905–1987), a “gypsy expert” with gaps in memory . In: Imanuel Baumann / Herbert Reinke / Andrej Stephan / Patrick Wagner: Shadows of the Past. The BKA and its founding generation in the early Federal Republic . Edited by the Federal Criminal Police Office, Criminalistic Institute. Luchterhand, Cologne 2011 ( police + research , special volume), pp. 313–322. Unless otherwise stated, all data are taken from this short scientific biography. Quotations from it are noted separately.
2. ↑ Dieter Schenk: Blind in the right eye - the brown roots of the BKA . Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 2001, p. 207.
3. ↑ On Schenk's non-existent evidence and also his failed comparison with Adolf Eichmann see Andrej Stephan: "The term special treatment ... was unknown to me at the time". Dr. Josef Ochs (1905–1987) , p. 315 (missing document) and P. 321 (Eichmann).
4. ↑ Dieter Schenk: Blind in the right eye - the brown roots of the BKA . Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 2001, pp. 205f.
5. ↑ Karola Fings , Frank Sparing: "currently. Zigeunerlager" The persecution of the Düsseldorf Sinti and Roma under National Socialism. Cologne 1992, p. 66f.
6. ↑ Andrej Stephan: "The term special treatment ... was unknown to me at the time". Dr. Josef Ochs (1905–1987) , p. 315.
7. ↑ Andrej Stephan: "The term special treatment ... was unknown to me at the time". Dr. Josef Ochs (1905–1987) , p. 316.
8. ↑ Quoting from Dieter Schenk: Blind in the right eye - The brown roots of the BKA . Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 2001, p. 206.
9. ↑ Dieter Schenk: Blind in the right eye - the brown roots of the BKA . Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 2001, p. 207.
10. ↑ Andrej Stephan: "The term special treatment ... was unknown to me at the time". Dr. Josef Ochs (1905–1987) , p. 315.
11. ↑ Andrej Stephan: "The term special treatment ... was unknown to me at the time". Dr. Josef Ochs (1905–1987) , p. 316.
12. ↑ Andrej Stephan: "The term special treatment ... was unknown to me at the time". Dr. Josef Ochs (1905–1987) , p. 316.
13. ↑ Andrej Stephan: "The term special treatment ... was unknown to me at the time". Dr. Josef Ochs (1905–1987) , p. 316.
14. ↑ British internment camp www.kz-gedenkstaette-neuengamme.de ( Memento from January 2, 2015 in the Internet Archive )
15. ↑ Dieter Schenk: Blind in the right eye - the brown roots of the BKA . Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 2001, p. 58.
16. ↑ Andrej Stephan: "The term special treatment ... was unknown to me at the time". Dr. Josef Ochs (1905–1987) , p. 314.
17. ↑ ^{a b c} Dieter Schenk: Blind in the right eye - The brown roots of the BKA . Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 2001, p. 71.
18. ↑ Dieter Schenk: Blind in the right eye - the brown roots of the BKA . Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 2001, p. 70 f.
19. ↑ Andrej Stephan: "The term special treatment ... was unknown to me at the time". Dr. Josef Ochs (1905–1987) , p. 314.
20. ↑ Andrej Stephan: "The term special treatment ... was unknown to me at the time". Dr. Josef Ochs (1905–1987) , p. 317; see also Dieter Schenk: Blind in the right eye - the brown roots of the BKA . Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 2001, p. 208.
21. ↑ Andrej Stephan: "The term special treatment ... was unknown to me at the time". Dr. Josef Ochs (1905–1987) , p. 316.
22. ↑ See Reinhard Scholzen: For the protection of politicians. The early years of the backup group . In: Polizei & Wissenschaft 1, 2014, pp. 2–9, here p. 4.
23. ↑ BKA history project with publications by the research group headed by Wagner for download ( Memento of the original from September 19, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
24. ↑ Patrick Wagner: Coinings, adjustments, new beginnings. The Federal Criminal Police Office and the National Socialist past of its founding generation. Approach and results of the research project . Lecture from April 6, 2011, Federal Criminal Police Office Cologne ( Download No. 8, p. 3 ( Memento of the original from September 19, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link accordingly Instructions and then remove this notice. ); see also Jan Friedmann: lip service to the rule of law. The historian Patrick Wagner on the amazing careers of old Nazis in the Federal Criminal Police Office . In: Der Spiegel , No. 15, April 11, 2011. 
25. ↑ Andrej Stephan: "The term special treatment ... was unknown to me at the time". Dr. Josef Ochs (1905–1987) , p. 313 f.
26. ↑ Andrej Stephan: "Nobody says HWAO-Schnitzel". BKA criminal policy between permanent concepts, political reform and "language regulations" . In: Imanuel Baumann / Herbert Reinke / Andrej Stephan / Patrick Wagner: Shadows of the Past. The BKA and its founding generation in the early Federal Republic . Luchterhand, Cologne 2011, pp. 247-312, here pp. 258 f.
27. ↑ Andrej Stephan: "Nobody says HWAO-Schnitzel". BKA criminal policy between permanent concepts, political reform and "language regulations" , p. 260.
28. ↑ Andrej Stephan: "The term special treatment ... was unknown to me at the time". Dr. Josef Ochs (1905–1987) , p. 318.
29. ↑ Andrej Stephan: "The term special treatment ... was unknown to me at the time". Dr. Josef Ochs (1905–1987) , p. 319.
30. ↑ Andrej Stephan: "The term special treatment ... was unknown to me at the time". Dr. Josef Ochs (1905–1987) , p. 319 f.
31. ↑ Andrej Stephan: "The term special treatment ... was unknown to me at the time". Dr. Josef Ochs (1905–1987) , p. 321.