Karl-Friedrich Höcker

Karl-Friedrich Gottlieb bumps (* 11. December 1911 in Enger Hausen , now part of Prussian Oldendorf , † 30th January 2000 in Lübbecke ) was a German obersturmführer , among other things, in the extermination camps Lublin-Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau worked . The photo album assigned to him from his time in Auschwitz , which was made public in the USA in 2006, became known.

Life

Höcker was the youngest of six children of a construction worker who died in the First World War in 1915 . He grew up in difficult economic circumstances, his mother ran a small farm. He completed his primary school in 1926 in Preussisch-Oldendorf. After completing his commercial training, Höcker worked as an accountant in a hardware store until 1930. After two and a half years of unemployment, he was initially employed as a cashier at the office in Preussisch-Oldendorf and then at the Sparkasse Lübbecke. He joined the SS in October 1933 (SS no. 182.961) and in May 1937, the year of his marriage, the NSDAP ( membership number 4,444,757). Since November 16, 1939 he was a member of the 9th SS Infantry Regiment in Danzig. From 1940 hump was in Neuengamme used, where he served as adjutant of the camp commandant Martin Weiss was first used in the office. In 1942, Weiss also headed the Arbeitsdorf concentration camp , and Höcker was his adjutant there from spring 1942. Before Höcker moved to the Majdanek concentration camp in May 1943 , again as adjutant to camp commandant Weiß, he completed the SS Junker School in Braunschweig and completed military training. In May 1944, Höcker was finally transferred to the Auschwitz main camp . There he was adjutant to the newly appointed camp commandant Richard Baer .

After the evacuation from Auschwitz in January 1945, Baer became the commandant of the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp in Nordhausen ; Höcker followed him as adjutant. In April 1945 the camp was evacuated; Höcker fled and was picked up by British troops near Rendsburg . Due to the false papers he had with him, which identified him as a Wehrmacht soldier, he was released after only 18 months in a British POW camp at the end of 1946 and returned to his wife and two children in Lübbecke, where he again worked as a banker. Höcker wanted to be denazified by self-reporting to the Bielefeld public prosecutor in 1952 . Because he belonged to a criminal organization , the SS, he was sentenced to nine months' imprisonment, but did not have to serve due to the 1954 Impunity Act .

In the course of the investigation by the Central Office of the State Judicial Administrations , he was arrested again at the beginning of the 1960s and charged in 1963 in the 1st Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial. During the trial, he asserted that he had no knowledge of the mass extermination of the approximately 400,000 Hungarian Jews during his service in Auschwitz. He assumed "that prisoners in Auschwitz were basically not killed". In the pronouncement of the verdict on August 19 and 20, 1965, he was sentenced to seven years in prison for community aiding and abetting in community murder in at least 3 cases of at least 1,000 people each . After his release in 1970 he worked again in his old bank in Lübbecke until he retired.

On May 3, 1989, Höcker was sentenced to four years imprisonment by the Bielefeld district court for his involvement in the gassing of mainly Jewish prisoners in the Majdanek concentration camp. Between May 1943 and May 1944, Höcker had procured at least 3,610 kg of Zyklon B from the Hamburg company Tesch & Stabenow .

In 2000, Höcker died at the age of 88.

Auschwitz album

In December 2006, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum acquired an anonymous former Lieutenant Colonel of the US Army, a photo album found in 1946 with 116 photos showing Höcker during his time in Auschwitz. Most of the collection, now known as the Höcker album , shows members of the camp staff during target practice, at the handover of the SS hospital in Birkenau and during leisure activities in the Solahütte in the Soła Valley , around 30 km from Auschwitz. Pictured include Baer, Rudolf Höß , Josef Kramer , Franz Hößler and Otto Moll . The Höcker album also contains the only known recordings of Josef Mengele from his time as a camp doctor there.

literature

• Karin Orth : The concentration camp SS. Social structural analyzes and biographical studies. Wallstein, Göttingen 2000. ISBN 3-89244-380-7 (paperback edition: Munich 2004, ISBN 3-423-34085-1 ).
• Sybille Steinbacher : Auschwitz. History and post-history. Beck , Munich 2004. ISBN 3-406-50833-2 .
• Nice days in Auschwitz . In: Der Spiegel . No. 39 , 2007, p. 60 ( online - September 24, 2007 ).
• Ernst Klee : Auschwitz. Perpetrators, accomplices, victims and what became of them. A dictionary of persons . S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2013, ISBN 978-3-10-039333-3 .
• Christophe Busch: From a German life - Karl-Friedrich Gottlieb Höcker, the adjutant of Lublin and Auschwitz. In: ders., Stefan Hördler, Robert Jan van Pelt (Ed.): Das Höcker-Album. Auschwitz through the lens of the SS. Philipp von Zabern Verlag, Darmstadt 2016, ISBN 978-3-8053-4958-1 .
• Christophe Busch, Stefan Hördler, Robert Jan van Pelt (eds.): The Höcker album. Auschwitz through the lens of the SS . Translation from the Dutch Verena Kiefer, Birgit Lamerz-Beckschäfer, Oliver Loew. Philipp von Zabern, Darmstadt 2016, ISBN 978-3-8053-4958-1 .

Web links

• Auschwitz through the lens of the SS: Photos of Nazi leadership at the camp (US Holocaust Memorial Museum)
• Neil A. Lewis: In the Shadow of Horror, SS Guardians Frolic (New York Times, Sep 19, 2007)
• Auschwitz, the pictures of the perpetrators Höcker's photo album (welt.de)
• Biography of Höcker (website about the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, 1963–1965)
• Photo and short biography of Höcker (website about the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, 1963–1965)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ quoted from: Der Spiegel, 39/2007, September 24, 2007, p. 61.
2. ↑ http://www.fritz-bauer-institut.de/auschwitz-process/pdf/auschwitz-process.pdf
3. ↑ Archived copy ( memento of the original from December 26, 2011 on WebCite ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
4. ↑ Ernst Klee: Das Personenlexikon zum Third Reich: Who was what before and after 1945 . Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2005. ISBN 3-596-16048-0 .
5. ↑ The only known photos from the Auschwitz camp before liberation in 1945 until 2006 were the 193 photos from the so-called Auschwitz album . In contrast to Höcker's photos, the album recordings, presumably made by the SS photographer Ernst Hofmann in collaboration with Bernhard Walter , in May / June 1944 document the processes inside the extermination camp. The Auschwitz album was discovered by Lilly Jacob in 1945 during her imprisonment in Dora-Mittelbau and handed over to the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem in 1980 . See Israel Gutman, Belah Guṭerman, Lili Meier: The Auschwitz Album: The Story of a Transport . Yad Vashem, Jerusalem 2002, ISBN 965-308-149-7 , pp. 93/94.
6. ↑ Mengele, second from the left  ( page can no longer be accessed , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.