Justus Danckwerts

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Justus Rudolf Friedrich Danckwerts (born June 4, 1887 in Pless , Upper Silesia , † May 27, 1969 in Hanover ) was a German lawyer , administrative officer and politician .

Origin and career up to 1945

Danckwerts, son of the secret building officer and professor at the Technical University of Hanover, Justus Danckwerts , last attended the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gymnasium in Hanover , which he graduated from high school at Easter 1905 . He then studied law in Marburg and Göttingen . In Marburg he was a member of the Corps Teutonia . In 1910 he passed the first state examination in law and entered the Prussian judicial service, as a trainee lawyer at the local courts in Celle and Stade and at the Hanover regional court . In 1911 he was at the University of Heidelberg to the Dr. iur. PhD . In 1913 he passed the second state examination in law and became an assessor in Harburg . He took part in the First World War as a soldier from 1914 , was transferred to the Polish civil administration ( Generalgouvernement Warsaw ) in 1915 and initially worked as a consultant at the police headquarters in Lodz . Afterwards he acted as acting mayor of the occupied Pabianitz . In January 1918 he was appointed deputy district chief of Lowitsch-Sochachev .

Danckwerts returned to Hanover for a short time after the end of the war , where he served with the magistrate. From 1919 he worked as a government assessor and probationary lawyer for the government in Allenstein , worked in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior from 1920 to 1923 and was appointed to the government council in 1921 . From 1923 to 1930 he was Deputy Governor of Stade as senior government councilor , and then deputy district president in another district. From 1933 to 1940 he again worked in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior, first as a ministerial advisor, then from 1938 as a ministerial director. Danckwerts had been a liaison officer to the army since 1937 and in 1940 became head of the military administration in the Balkans. In 1943/44 he was transferred to Angers and Belgrade .

Involvement in the Holocaust

As head of Department V "Administration" of the War Administration Department at the Quartermaster General , Eduard Wagner , and political advisor to Hans Georg Schmidt von Altenstadt , Danckwerts was involved in the Holocaust . On August 25, 1941, he took part in a meeting at the headquarters of the Quartermaster General, which was devoted to the preparations for the establishment of the Reichskommissariat Ukraine by civil, military and police agencies planned for September 1, 1941 . At this meeting, the Higher SS and Police Leader Russia South Friedrich Jeckeln , who was not present , announced that he would carry out a mass murder of thousands of Jews:

“ Major Wagner explained [...]. At Kamenetz-Podolsk the Hungarians pushed about 11,000 Jews across the border. The negotiations so far had not yet succeeded in bringing these Jews back. The Higher SS and Police Leader (SS-Obergruppenführer Jeckeln), however, hoped to have liquidated these Jews by September 1, 1941. [...] "

Despite the clarity of this announcement, the participants in the meeting remained unmoved and the project was not discussed further.

The historian Dieter Pohl called this an appointment to commit genocide, because shortly after the meeting the Kamenez-Podolsk massacre began , in which 23,600 Jews were shot.

Post war career

At the end of the war he was taken prisoner by the Americans and was questioned during the Nuremberg Trials . He was released from Allied internment in 1947. In the Wilhelmstrasse trial he said on 26./27. August 1948 as a discharge witness for Wilhelm Stuckart , participant of the Wannsee Conference .

Danckwerts was Ministerialrat in the Lower Saxony State Chancellery from 1948 and as such a participant in the constitutional convention on Herrenchiemsee . After his retirement in 1954 he worked as a representative for simplifying and making the state administration cheaper. In addition, since 1950 he was a member of the board of directors of Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk (NWDR).

Danckwerts served from 1951 to 1954 as State Secretary and Plenipotentiary of Lower Saxony at the federal level. He received the Lower Saxony State Medal on June 3, 1959 .

Fonts

  • The specification purchase: [Paragraph] 375 HGB. Borna-Leipzig: R. Noske 1910, also dissertation, University of Heidelberg
  • Legal protection in administration. Berlin: Industrieverlag Spaeth & Linde [1937] (Foundations, structure and economic order of the national-socialist state 26)

literature

  • Danckwerts, Justus, Dr. jur. In: Alfons Labisch / Florian Tennstedt : The way to the "Law on the Unification of the Health System" of July 3, 1934. Development lines and moments of the state and municipal health system in Germany , Part 2, Academy for Public Health in Düsseldorf 1985, ISSN 0172 -2131, p. 397.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ruth Simolick: directory of high school graduates. In: 75 years of Kaiser Wilhelms Gymnasium Hannover. 1875-1950. Hanover 1950, pp. 100–115, here p. 104.
  2. ↑ Quoted from the Hamburg Institute for Social Research (ed.): Verbrechen der Wehrmacht. Dimensions of the War of Extermination 1941–1944. Exhibition catalog , Hamburger Edition, 1st edition, Hamburg 2002, p. 132, ISBN 3-930908-74-3 .
  3. ^ Klaus-Michael Mallmann : The qualitative leap in the destruction process. The Kamenets-Podolsk massacre in late August 1941 ; in: Jahrbuch für Antisemitismusforschung , Vol. 10 (2001), pp. 239–264, here p. 249.
  4. ↑ “ Basically, the gentlemen agreed to commit genocide here. “Dieter Pohl: The rule of the armed forces. German military occupation and local population in the Soviet Union 1941–1944 , Oldenbourg, Munich 2008, p. 258, ISBN 3-486-58065-5 .
personal data
SURNAME Danckwerts, Justus
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Danckwerts, Justus Rudolf Friedrich (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German lawyer, administrative officer and politician
DATE OF BIRTH June 4, 1887
PLACE OF BIRTH Pless , Upper Silesia
DATE OF DEATH May 27, 1969
Place of death Hanover