Klaus Zieschank
Klaus Zieschank (born December 10, 1951 in Buenos Aires , Argentina ; † May 1976 ), also known as Claudio Manfredo Zieschank Gmoser in Spanish , was kidnapped and murdered as a German-Argentine student under the Argentine military dictatorship .
Life
Zieschank grew up as the son of German immigrants in Argentina and had German and Argentine citizenship. From 1972 to 1976 he lived in Munich and studied at the Technical University . During this time he was already actively involved in the resistance movement against the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and was heavily involved in solidarity groups for Latin America. In March / April 1976 he wanted to do a four-week industrial internship at the Buxton company in the province of Buenos Aires , so he flew to Argentina via Chile. In Chile he brought financial support to the family of a refugee living in Germany, which is likely to have attracted the attention of the Argentine secret service.
Kidnapping, imprisonment and murder
Zieschank began his internship on March 22, 1976. Two days later, on March 24, the military staged a coup. On March 26, the then 24-year-old was kidnapped by the Argentine military in Buenos Aires. Klaus Zieschanks' mother, Annemarie Zieschank (Ana María Gmoser de Zieschank), described that her son and a colleague left the Buxton company on March 26, 1976 at 2:00 p.m. Four Ford Falcon cars were waiting in front of the factory. Gunmen in plain clothes got out of them and forced the two into their cars. One of the cars was marked with a white triangle, a symbol for army units in civilian clothes. The kidnapping was observed by several workers from the Buxton company. They then drove to Zieschank's mother's house, searched the apartment and took papers and personal valuables with them. When the mother asked what was going on against her son, the men replied with “Something will be fine” ( Spanish : “Por algo será”).
According to witness statements made later in Argentina and France, Zieschank was in the SIDE 128 torture camp from April to early May 1976, where he was called "the German". The camp was operated by the Argentine secret service Secretaría de Inteligencia de Estado (SIDE). One inmate of the camp was released through the intervention of a military member in his family and traveled to Bonn at the invitation of Amnesty International , where he reported on Klaus Zieschank's imprisonment at a press conference.
On May 27, 1976, the body of Klaus Zieschank was found on the river bed of the Río de la Plata near Ezpeleta in the province of Buenos Aires. She had been tied to another corpse (later identified as Héctor René Navarro) and driven to the bank with wire. It was part of the military practice to drop prisoners from planes over the sea in order to cover up any trace. Zieschank and Navarro were buried in anonymous graves. These graves were found in the course of coming to terms with the dictatorship in the 1980s. According to the expert report by Friedrich Wilhelm Rösing from the Institute for Human Genetics and Anthropology at the Ulm University Hospital on January 21, 1985, the body of Klaus Zieschank had been desecrated and badly damaged about two years earlier. The blurring of traces and the prevention of identification are assumed to be the motive for this desecration of the grave. Nevertheless, the identification could be carried out unequivocally. Strangulation was found to be the cause of death.
Role of the Federal Republic
The German Federal Government was informed of Klaus Zieschank's torture. The French Anita Larrea de Jaroslawsky, who was herself in military custody but was released under pressure from the French government, reported to the French embassy immediately after her release that she had met Klaus Zieschank on May 6, 1976. Since he wasn't wearing a mask, she knew he was meant to be killed. Only such prisoners were allowed to see the location of their captivity. Your report was immediately forwarded to the German embassy in Buenos Aires.
On July 12, 1976 the group “Initiative Freiheit für Klaus Zieschank” started a protest hunger strike in Bonn on the occasion of the visit of the Argentine Minister of Economic Affairs José Alfredo Martínez de Hoz , in which Zieschank's mother also took part. This had been announced days before. It was not until July 7, 1976, two months after Larrea de Jaroslawsky had received the information, that Chancellor Helmut Schmidt wrote a letter to General Jorge Rafael Videla, head of the Junta , in which "an urgent request for clarification" was requested. Videla replied that he could not help clarify anything, but there are rumors that Zieschank had died in a car accident in the Andes .
However, the federal government was already informed of the murder of Klaus Zieschank. The 81-year-old former German ambassador in Buenos Aires, Jörg Kastl, told the authors of the film , Elvira Ochoa and Frieder Wagner , the cause of death :
“Then in the summer of [1976] I heard an anonymous message through another channel, which I could not announce at the time, that Zieschank is dead. […] At that time I received a secret decree, signed by Genscher : We know. He is dead and you must keep this message with you, even under threat of your immediate removal. To this day I don't know where he got it from. "
Politically, the dictatorship was covered. During a state visit to Argentina in July 1976, the Minister of State in the Foreign Office in Bonn, Karl Moersch , first praised the military government's new economic policy and then its measures to combat terrorism. After his return to Bonn, Moersch distributed the versions of the Argentine military that Zieschank might have been held by an anti-government group or went underground. However, the government was not able to say anything about his whereabouts. In his view, the Argentine government had "not kept anything secret" on this matter. Secretary Lothar Lahn from the Foreign Office said after his Argentina trip with Minister of State Moersch in a radio interview them, the Argentine government throw Zieschank claims to have worked for an underground organization to have rendered services and distributes magazines. The ministerial director underlined that the Argentine government had "credibly assured" that it did not know where Zieschank was.
Legal processing
In 1985, in the trial against members of the military junta, the Argentine judiciary confirmed in the verdict that Zieschank had been deprived of his freedom, held prisoner and murdered by armed soldiers. In 1990, the junta members were pardoned by President Carlos Menem .
On February 25, 1999, attorney Konstantin Thun, on behalf of the Coalition Against Impunity, filed criminal charges in Germany against seven Argentine military and police officers on suspicion of hostage-taking and murder in connection with the killing of Klaus Zieschank in Argentina in 1976.
Three years later, on November 28, 2003, at the request of the Nuremberg-Fürth public prosecutor's office, the Nuremberg District Court issued an arrest warrant for the former Argentine state president and head of the Argentine military junta Jorge Videla , the former Commander in Chief of the Navy and member of the junta, Emilio Massera, and the head of the 1st Army Corps of Zone 1, Guillermo Suárez Mason . There is an urgent suspicion of murder against all three accused as an indirect perpetrator of the German citizens Elisabeth Käsemann and Klaus Zieschank.
In 2004, the German federal government filed an extradition request for Videla, Massera and Suárez Mason. The request was dismissed by the Argentine Supreme Court in 2007. In 2010, a trial against Videla began in Argentina in which he was sentenced to life imprisonment. The Federal Republic of Germany acted as a joint plaintiff. Massera was no longer sued for dementia. Suárez Mason had died in 2005.
background
The kidnapping and murder of Klaus Zieschank is in the context of a larger political event, the investigation and criminal treatment of which continues to this day. In South America, almost every country in the 1970s and 1980s was ruled by right-wing US-backed military dictatorships for a long time . Almost all of them used force to suppress the mostly left-wing opposition in so-called dirty wars . A common means of doing this was the secret abduction ( disappearance ) of unpopular people by members of the security forces who remained anonymous. Most of the victims were cruelly tortured, humiliated and, in many cases, subsequently murdered in secret prisons (see Desaparecidos ). For arrest and murder it could sometimes be sufficient if the name appeared in a “suspicious” context or if the victim happened to know a (already arrested) suspect who had mentioned the name under the distress of torture. During the military dictatorship in Argentina from 1976 to 1983 alone, up to 30,000 people disappeared in this way without a trace. After the transition of states to democracy, mostly in the 1980s and 1990s, the prosecution of such crimes was prevented for years in many countries by general amnesty laws for the perpetrators. In recent years, however, these have been retroactively repealed in several countries , so that numerous former dictators and torturers have now been punished or are still on trial.
See also
literature
- Willi Baer, Karl-Heinz Dellwo (ed.): That you are silent for two days under torture. Laika-Verlag, Hamburg 2010, ISBN 978-3-942281-77-5 ( Library of Resistance. Volume 8).
- Willi Baer, Karl-Heinz Dellwo (ed.): Panteón Militar. Crusade Against Subversion. Laika-Verlag, Hamburg 2010, ISBN 978-3-942281-78-2 ( Library of Resistance. Volume 9).
Web links
- Exhibition on the topic ( Memento from October 9, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
Individual evidence
- ^ Recordatorio de Claus Zieschank. In: Equipo Federal del Trabajo Edition 27 of August 4, 2007, accessed June 9, 2016 (Spanish)
- ↑ a b c Arturo Blatezky: Between genocide and the hope of liberation. A chronology of human rights work in the Evangelical Church on La Plata. In: Die Evangelische Diaspora , 75th year, 2006, pp. 64–95, here p. 74.
- ↑ a b c d e Claudio Manfredo Zieschank on the website desaparecidos.org . Retrieved February 7, 2011.
- ↑ Héctor Rene Navarro on the comisionporlamemoria.chaco.gov.ar website
- ↑ Caso Nº 19: Zieschank, Claudio Manfredo . Text of the judgment on the Equipo Nizkor website. Retrieved February 7, 2011.
- ^ Text of the criminal complaint ( memento from September 27, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ Press release Nuremberg District Court ( Memento from August 14, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Zieschank, Klaus |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Zieschank Gmoser, Claudio Manfredo (Spanish name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German-Argentine student, victim of the Argentine military dictatorship |
| DATE OF BIRTH | December 10, 1951 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Buenos Aires |
| DATE OF DEATH | May 1976 |