Klaus Hornig

Nikolaus Ernst Hornig (called Klaus Hornig * 11. December 1907 in Schweidnitz ; † 12. December 1997 in Munich ) was a German police officer and lawyer , who as a member of the Police Battalion 306 , the shooting of Soviet prisoners of war in Zamość denied 1,941th He served various prison terms for allegedly degrading military strength and was imprisoned in the Buchenwald concentration camp at the end of the war . During the 1960s and 1970s, Hornig made himself available as an expert witness in investigative and judicial proceedings against former members of the regulatory police and testified in particular on the issue of the order emergency .

Life

Hornig came from a Catholic family. His father was a dentist and was politically oriented towards the Center Party . The son joined the Catholic youth movement and studied law and political science at the Universities of Breslau and Königsberg from 1928 to 1930 . Here he joined the student associations KDStV Winfridia (Breslau) Münster and AV Tuisconia Königsberg (today Landshut) in the Cartell Association of Catholic German student associations . In 1930, however, he had to break off his studies because his family had lost their financial base due to the effects of the global economic crisis . In 1930 he entered the Brandenburg-Havel Police School of the Prussian Police as an officer candidate .

time of the nationalsocialism

In October 1934 Hornig was appointed police lieutenant and in autumn 1935 transferred to the newly established Wehrmacht . He came as chief paymaster , that is, as a military official with the rank of an officer, first to the 87 Infantry Regiment in Mainz , then to the 118 Infantry Regiment in Kaiserslautern . On May 1, 1937, he became a member of the NSDAP (membership number 5.417.343). When he was transferred to the 2nd Mountain Division in Munich in 1938 and to Innsbruck in 1939 , he was able to continue his law studies at the universities of both cities and graduated with the first state examination at the University of Innsbruck .

Hornig took part in the attack on Poland with the 2nd Mountain Division from September 1, 1939 . In the spring of 1940 he successfully returned to the police force and in May 1940 was appointed lieutenant in the police force. Now, in addition to his work at the Police Battalion 93 in Kassel , he was able to pursue his legal career with a doctorate as Dr. jur. graduate from the University of Marburg . According to the historian Stefan Klemp , he was involved in the occupation of Luxembourg in the autumn of 1940 as commander of the 124th Police Battalion .

Refusal to participate in shooting operations

In June 1941 Hornig was assigned to the Police Training Battalion 1 in Fürstenfeldbruck for the first advanced training course for first lieutenants of the Schutzpolizei , but he refused to join the SS , which he did not join at any later point in time, as this contradicted his Catholic profession . Hornig attracted attention at the time with critical statements about the Lebensborn and the nearby Dachau concentration camp , which were denounced and accused of damaging the reputation of the SS after he refused to give orders .

In mid-October 1941 Hornig received the order to march to Lublin in the Generalgouvernement of Poland to deploy with the Police Battalion 306 , which was part of the units of the Ordnungspolizei, which participated in the " ' War of Extermination ' against Jews , Polish partisans and civilians in the Generalgouvernement occupied by the German Reich ". As part of these “special tasks”, the battalion was subordinate to the SS and Police Leader Odilo Globocnik in the Lublin district and the Higher SS and Police Leader Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger in Krakow . In September 1941, SS-Obergruppenführer Kurt Daluege , chief of the Ordnungspolizei, expressly ordered his Ordnungspolizei to be involved in the murder of Soviet prisoners of war in the Government General. When Hornig arrived at the battalion, it had carried out an "Operation Chicken Farm" at the end of September 1941, in which between five and six thousand Soviet prisoners of war separated from the main camp (Stalag) near Kalilow were shot in a forest near Biała Podlaska .

Hornig himself received the order at the end of October 1941, as platoon leader of the 2nd company of the battalion, to shoot 780 prisoner-of-war soldiers of the Red Army in a wooded area near Zamość , who were viewed as political officers or Jews and previously by the security police and the SD from the Stalag 325 "To be shot". Hornig reported to his battalion commander Ernst Dreier that he had to refuse this order because it contradicted international law and the execution of a criminal order was expressly forbidden in Section 47 of the current military penal code. He also requested a disciplinary investigation against himself in order to refrain from such liquidation actions . Hornig referred to this provision of the Military Criminal Code:

“If a criminal law is violated by the execution of an order in official matters, then the commanding superior is solely responsible. However, the participant's subordinate will be punished [...] if he knew that the command of the superior concerned an act which was intended to be a general or a military crime or misdemeanor. "

His superior's reaction to the insubordination was initially to dissuade. Hornig will certainly acquire the necessary rigor for deployment in the East and will soon learn to carry out such orders. With regard to the specific imminent action, he could discuss the modalities of the execution of the execution order with SS-Untersturmführer Meiert, the leader of a police cavalcade of the battalion. In Zamość, Hornig Meiert instructed accordingly, who was then ready to carry out the executions with his train alone. Hornig also assembled his own platoon, explained to his subordinate police officers why he refused to take part in such shootings and, citing Section 47 of the Military Criminal Code, pointed out to them that every subordinate had the right to issue an order recognized as criminal deny.

During the executions, Hornig had the police officers subordinate to him carry out cordon measures. As an eyewitness to the shootings, he himself complained loudly about " GPU methods" to force the prisoners of war to the pit with bayonet stabs and to shoot them at close range. SS-Obersturmführer Schubert from the SD branch in Zamość, who was called in to reinforce the situation, reprimanded Hornig for refraining from making such statements. But even in the following weeks Hornig repeatedly pointed out that it could not be the task of SS and SD leaders to brutally evict parts of the Polish population from their houses and apartments. "SS-Lümmel" would use such means, one should, as he put it several times, use "no GPU methods" when treating the population. Since Hornig also held the function of a court officer of the police battalion and as such tried to clear up looting and enrichment by members of the battalion, he was transferred to Frankfurt am Main in January 1942 "because of anti-SS and police attitudes" .

Imprisonment for "decomposition of military strength"

Hornig was suspended from duty and after three months, when the report from his superiors arrived from Lublin, he was accused of having undermined the military by informing the police officers under him of his refusal to shoot Soviet prisoners of war and expressly pointing this out had that they were also entitled to refuse under Section 47 of the Military Criminal Code, which he had used to incite his subordinates. On the other hand, he made statements hostile to the SS by equating police methods with Soviet GPU methods. Because of these allegations, he was imprisoned from May 1942, first in the Frankfurt police prison, then in the Düsseldorf police prison. The official indictment was not handed over to him until the fall of 1942. In it he was charged according to § 5 Paragraph 1 Number 2 of the Special War Criminal Law Ordinance (KSSVO) in conjunction with § 102 of the Military Criminal Code ,

“To have undertaken in November 1941 to undermine male discipline in the German Wehrmacht and to have aroused displeasure in relation to the service among his comrades and, through his other attitudes - expressed through speech and behavior - an attitude hostile to the SS and the police To have laid the day. "

Hornig was transferred to the Kassel police prison in September 1942. The hearing took place in May 1943 before the Kassel SS and Police Court. The prosecution called for five years in prison and a guilty verdict of two and a half years in prison. However, since the judgment had to be confirmed by Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler , Hornig was transferred back to the Frankfurt site under police supervision. After an interview with the head of the main office of the SS court in Munich, SS-Gruppenführer Franz Breithaupt , Hornig obtained the promise for a retrial, which, however, no longer came after he was denounced "for listening to foreign radio stations" (cf. ordinance on extraordinary radio measures ) was initially imprisoned in the Mainz police prison, then from July 1944 in the Buchenwald concentration camp . In a trial before the SS court in Buchenwald concentration camp, in which SS-Obersturmbannführer Werner Paulmann appeared as a prosecutor, he was sentenced to five years and seven months in prison for degrading military strength and military disobedience, and he was sentenced to remain in the concentration camp. US troops liberated him from the concentration camp on April 11, 1945.

post war period

After the liberation from Buchenwald, Hornig was held in various American internment camps to be questioned as a witness to mass shootings and other war crimes in the East. Finally, in September 1947, he was released from the Dachau internment camp . It was not until 1953 that he was awarded compensation for his further promotion as a lieutenant colonel in the police force, which was prevented under the Nazi regime, but to his disappointment he was immediately given temporary retirement and later retired in this rank. After his unsuccessful efforts to reinstate active police service, Hornig began studying economics at the University of Innsbruck and received his doctorate in 1957 as a political economist .

In the 1960s and 1970s, Hornig stood as a witness in various trials against former members of the Ordnungspolizei and SS, who were charged with war crimes in the occupied east. According to Gerd R. Ueberschär, Hornig has succeeded in making it clear with his statements on the "command emergency"

"That it was not true that a member of the police, within the framework of the special SS and police jurisdiction, ran the risk of being sentenced to death and executed as a result of refusal to give a criminal order, as was repeatedly alleged in the trials of perpetrators [.]"

The media coverage of jury trials in Austria for Nazi crimes in the occupied east, as the Austrian historian Sabine Loitfellner has researched, sometimes gave the impression in press reports that Hornig was sent to a concentration camp because of the refusal of the execution order, and not because of it the accusation of "undermining military strength". Loitfellner mentions, among other things, the trial against Egon Schönpflug from 1961, who as a member and part of the commando leader of Einsatzkommando 8 of Einsatzgruppe B because of his involvement in the shooting of Jews near Minsk and Mogilew was initially held by the Wels district court for nine years, then after the public prosecutor in Had appealed, was sentenced to twelve years imprisonment by the Linz Higher Regional Court, whereby an "order emergency" was denied. In addition, Hornig's erroneous statement in other trials that Adolf Eichmann had the idea of gassing Jews was spread by various media. According to the findings of the Dortmund Public Prosecutor and the Central Office of the State Judicial Administrations for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes in Ludwigsburg , former police officers accused of war crimes received advice and information from the police officer Willy Papenkort who was involved in the murder of Jews in Belarus through the so-called comrade assistance , Command emergency ”and to let the witness Hornig“ appear implausible ”.

Klaus Hornig, as historian Gerd R. Ueberschär sums up , was one of the few officers in the Ordnungspolizei who not only refused to carry out criminal orders, but also made his superiors and subordinates aware of their unlawful nature, his stance of refusal consistently until the end of the war persevered and was last imprisoned in a concentration camp. He died on December 12, 1997 in Munich.

literature

• Stefan Klemp : Not determined. Police Battalions and the Post War Justice. A manual. Klartext, Essen 2005, ISBN 3-89861-381-X .
• Gerd R. Ueberschär : The police officer Klaus Hornig. From refusing to give orders to concentration camp inmate . In: moral courage. Outraged, helpers and rescuers from the Wehrmacht, police and SS . Edited by Wolfram Wette . Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2004, ISBN 3-596-15852-4 , pp. 77-93.
• Hornig, Klaus. In: Society for Student History and Student Customs (Hrsg.): Resistance and persecution in the CV . Munich 1983, pp. 105-106.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Gerd R. Ueberschär: The police officer Klaus Hornig. From refusing to give orders to concentration camp inmate . In: moral courage. Outraged, helpers and rescuers from the Wehrmacht, police and SS . Edited by Wolfram Wette. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2004, pp. 77–93, here p. 78.
2. ↑ Gerd R. Ueberschär: The police officer Klaus Hornig. From refusal to give orders to concentration camp inmate , p. 81.
3. ↑ Gerd R. Ueberschär: The police officer Klaus Hornig. From refusal to give orders to concentration camp inmate , p. 81f.
4. ↑ Stefan Klemp: Not determined. Police Battalions and the Post War Justice. A manual. Klartext, Essen 2005, p. 225.
5. ↑ ^{a b} Gerd R. Ueberschär: The police officer Klaus Hornig. From refusing to give orders to concentration camp inmate . In: moral courage. Outraged, helpers and rescuers from the Wehrmacht, police and SS . Edited by Wolfram Wette. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2004, p. 82.
6. ↑ Gerd R. Ueberschär: The police officer Klaus Hornig. From the refuser to the concentration camp inmate , p. 82 f.
7. ↑ Gerd R. Ueberschär: The police officer Klaus Hornig. From the refuser to the concentration camp inmate , p. 79 (quote) and p. 84f. See also Stefan Klemp: Not determined. Police Battalions and the Post War Justice. A manual. Klartext, Essen 2005, p. 52f.
8. ↑ Gerd R. Ueberschär: The police officer Klaus Hornig. From refusal to give orders to concentration camp inmate , pp. 83–87.
9. ↑ Gerd R. Ueberschär: The police officer Klaus Hornig. From the refuser to the concentration camp inmate , p. 87 f., Quotation p. 88.
10. ↑ Gerd R. Ueberschär: The police officer Klaus Hornig. From refusal to give orders to concentration camp inmate , p. 88.
11. ↑ ^{a b} Gerd R. Ueberschär: The police officer Klaus Hornig. From refusing to give orders to concentration camp inmate . In: moral courage. Outraged, helpers and rescuers from the Wehrmacht, police and SS . Edited by Wolfram Wette. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2004, pp. 87 ff.
12. ↑ Gerd R. Ueberschär: The police officer Klaus Hornig. From refusal to give orders to concentration camp inmate , p. 90.
13. ↑ Sabine Loitfellner: The reception of jury trials for Nazi crimes in selected Austrian newspapers 1956–1975 (PDF; 825 kB). In: nachkriegsjustiz.at , June 12, 2003, p. 48.
14. ↑ Sabine Loitfellner: The reception of jury trials for Nazi crimes in selected Austrian newspapers 1956–1975 . In: nachkriegsjustiz.at , June 12, 2003, p. 46ff.
15. ↑ Sabine Loitfellner: The reception of jury trials for Nazi crimes in selected Austrian newspapers 1956–1975 . In: nachkriegsjustiz.at , June 12, 2003, p. 53.
16. ↑ Stefan Klemp: Not determined. Police Battalions and the Post War Justice. A manual. Klartext, Essen 2005, p. 397.
17. ↑ Gerd R. Ueberschär: The police officer Klaus Hornig. From refusal to give orders to concentration camp inmate , p. 89.
18. ↑ Helmar Klier: Death of a Silesian Officer. The resistance fighter Dr. Dr. Klaus Hornig (1907-1997). In: Kulturpolitische Korrespondenz 1032 (February 15, 1998), p. 12 (on the date and place of death).