Konrad morning

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Konrad Morgen (seated left) as a witness for the defense on June 10, 1947 on the witness stand at the main Buchenwald trial

Georg Konrad Morgen (* 8. June 1909 in Frankfurt am Main , † 4. February 1982 ) was a German lawyer , obersturmbannführer and SS - Richter . His job was to judge corruption in the SS.

Career

Konrad Morgen grew up as the child of a train driver in Frankfurt am Main, attended a secondary school there and, after graduating, initially worked in a bank . He then studied law in Frankfurt, Rome, Berlin, The Hague and Kiel. During his studies he joined the university group of the German People's Party (DVP). He explained his change to the NSDAP ( membership number 2.536.236) and his entry into the SS (SS number 124.940) in April 1933 with his sense of decency, which forbade him to overflow immediately after leaving the DVP. It was 1936 in Frankfurt with the thesis " war propaganda and war prevention" to Dr. jur. PhD .

On April 1, 1939, Konrad Morgen took over his first job as a judge at the Stettin Regional Court . He was dismissed from the judiciary after an argument in which his superiors reprimanded his conduct in a court case. After the beginning of the Second World War he served with the Waffen SS in occupied Poznan until he was appointed judge at the main SS court in Munich in 1940 . From January 1, 1941, Morgen worked at the SS and Police Court in Cracow in the Generalgouvernement . His first major trial was against Georg von Sauberzweig, the head of the Waffen SS military camp in Warsaw. Sauberzweig had sold confiscated goods on the black market. Sauberzweig and some co-defendants were sentenced to death and executed. The arrest of Oskar Dirlewanger, however, failed because he was under the protection of Gottlob Berger .

Morgen asked for his transfer to Norway in 1942. Instead, he was from Heinrich Himmler dismissed in 1942 of the Office and in rank from obersturmführer for SS Sturmmann demoted . This was followed by deployment on the Eastern Front with the SS Panzer Grenadier Division "Wiking" . Allegedly he had acquitted a defendant in a racial disgrace ; Morgen himself also saw his investigations into corruption cases as the cause of his dismissal, as numerous SS figures felt threatened by him.

From May 1943 he was personally commissioned by Himmler at the Reich Criminal Police Office in Berlin to investigate corruption cases in concentration camps . That is why he came into contact with Christian Wirth , was immediately familiar with the extermination policy of the SS state and, according to a self-assessment, became a “specialist in concentration camp crimes”. By “concentration camp crimes” he primarily understood economic crime in connection with the confiscated property of concentration camp inmates and not institutionalized crimes against humanity . However, he also investigated individual killings that the perpetrators had carried out without authorization. From autumn 1944 he was the chief SS judge in Krakow and was responsible for the Auschwitz concentration camp . In the last year of the war he was an SS judge in Breslau .

Work as an SS judge in the morning

According to Morgen's own statements, Himmler authorized him to continue investigations in Buchenwald concentration camp . This led to charges against the camp commandant Karl Koch , his wife Ilse and accomplices like Martin Sommer for corruption, murder and bodily harm with fatal outcome . Karl Koch was sentenced to death twice for murder and executed shortly before the end of the war . Konrad Morgen sentenced another person involved, Waldemar Hoven , to death. However, the sentence was not carried out.

In another case, a security guard at the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp wanted to send more than a kilo of remelted dental gold to his wife in a field parcel. The gold had been intercepted by German customs. In the course of the subsequent investigations, Konrad Morgen, in his function as SS judge, also went to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp and had the extermination machinery explained to him in detail. In doing so, according to later information, he made the discovery that the camp staff enriched themselves commercially with the booty of the murdered.

As a result, Morgen investigated other crimes in concentration camps, including those in Dachau , Flossenbürg and Lublin . According to his own account, a total of 800 proceedings were initiated, of which 200 were completed.

When M Morgen's investigations continued to spread and he was also investigating the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, in April 1944, on Himmler's orders, he had to limit his activities to the Koch case and stop other investigations.

Nevertheless, he succeeded in indicting a number of well-known concentration camp commanders and in some cases convicting them:

After the end of the war

Tomorrow surrendered to the CIC and was held in the Dachau internment camp . He was interrogated at the Nuremberg Trial of Major War Criminals as an exonerating witness for the defense that represented the accused SS organization. In his interrogation, he described the Buchenwald concentration camp as an idyllic place. When asked whether the SS was a criminal organization, he claimed that the order to set up the Sobibor , Treblinka and Belzec extermination camps was not issued by Heinrich Himmler , but by Hitler himself. Morgen wrote affidavits for the defense of Joachim Mrugowsky and Karl Brandt for the Nuremberg Doctors' Trial . In August 1947, tomorrow was also a witness of the defense in the trial of the SS Main Office and Administrative Office (USA vs. Oswald Pohl et al.) . Shortly before, in June 1947, he had testified as a defense witness in the main Buchenwald trial , which took place as part of the Dachau trials .

A ruling chamber of the internment camp Ludwigsburg classified Morgen 1948 as “exonerated”. He was not guilty of perversion or repression of the law, but fought against the highest SS leaders and thus offered resistance. He had been transferred to a sentence and even had to fear for his life.

Eugen Kogon accused Morgen of using murderous investigative methods in the prosecution of corruption cases. Based on a testimony from Kogon, Raul Hilberg presented the facts that an important witness in the Karl Koch case died unexpectedly. Konrad Morgen believed in a poisoning and had the remains of the stomach contents administered to four Soviet prisoners of war, who then died. In 1950, however, Kogon put his incriminating testimony into perspective before a different panel; proceedings for the killing of Russian prisoners of war were finally abandoned on March 6, 1961. Another case for involvement in the extermination of Hungarian Jews was dropped in 1972.

Tomorrow he played down his own role as an SS member as a witness in the 1st Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial . His statement there reveals his evaluations, his moral standards and traditional Nazi mentality. His conclusion that the confiscated nugget of gold "represented the equivalent of twenty, fifty or hundreds of thousands of corpses, so to speak", initially indicated empathy with the victims. His outrage was not directed against the perpetrators because of the mass murder, but because of their personal enrichment: “A shocking thought. But the almost incomprehensible thing about it was that the perpetrator was able to move such significant numbers aside without being noticed. ”With regard to his service in the SS unit on the Eastern Front, he particularly emphasized the comradely loyalty that prevailed there, right up to death. They were "young idealists" whose aim it was to "defend European culture against the surging Bolshevism". He even thought through an accusation against Hitler, he described in his testimony, but this was of course ruled out due to the Führer principle and the resulting power of Hitler.

Morgen worked as a lawyer in Frankfurt am Main after the war and was registered with the local bar association until January 19, 1979 .

The German author Volker H. Altwasser used his novel The Last Skin Morning Investigation in Buchenwald Concentration Camp as a template for his 2009 novel .

Sources and literature

  • IMT: The Nuremberg Trial against the Major War Criminals , Reprint Munich 1984, ISBN 3-7735-2510-9 , Vol. XX, pp. 531-563 (7th and 8th August 1946) on the Internet zeno-org
  • The Auschwitz Trial , ed. from the Fritz Bauer Institute Frankfurt am Main and the State Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau. DVD-Rom, Berlin 2004. ISBN 3-89853-501-0 , pp. 5556-5696.
  • Raphael Gross: The Ethics of the Truth-Seeking Judge, In: Werner Konitzer and Raphael Gross (ed.): Morality of Evil - Ethics and National Socialist Crimes, ed. on behalf of the Fritz Bauer Institute. Frankfurt-New York 2009, ISBN 978-3-593-39021-5 , pp. 243-264.
  • The order under the skull . In: Der Spiegel . No. 1 , 1967 ( online - further information on the extermination of the Jews in Poland and on the role of Konrad Morgen).
  • 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 .
  • Herlinde Pauer-Studer and J. David Velleman : »Because I'm a justice fanatic«. The case of SS judge Konrad Morgen . Berlin 2017, ISBN 978-3-518-42599-2 .
  • Miloš Vec : The SS judge who wanted to charge Eichmann. Review of “Because I'm a justice fanatic”. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung , September 15, 2017, p. 39 ( online ).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Ernst Klee: Auschwitz. Perpetrators, accomplices, victims and what became of them. Lexicon of persons. Frankfurt / M. 2013, p. 284f.
  2. ^ Raphael Gross: The ethics of the truth-seeking judge, p. 245 In: Werner Konitzer and Raphael Gross (ed.): Morality of Evil - Ethics and National Socialist Crimes, ed. on behalf of the Fritz Bauer Institute. Frankfurt – New York 2009, ISBN 978-3-593-39021-5 .
  3. ↑ Martin Doerry : The strange case of Konrad morning . In: Der Spiegel 16/2016
  4. ↑ Raphael Gross: The Ethics ... , p. 247.
  5. ↑ Raphael Gross: The Ethics ... , p. 247.
  6. ↑ International Military Tribunal: The Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal , Volume 20; Munich: Delphin, 1984 (reprint = Nuremberg 1948); ISBN 3-7735-2510-9 ; Pp. 531-563 (August 7 and 8, 1946).
  7. ↑ Development tape for microfiche edition: With an introduction by Angelika Ebbinghaus on the history of the process and short biographies of the process involved . P. 124. Karsten Linne (Ed.): The Nuremberg Medical Process 1946/47. Verbal transcripts, prosecution and defense material, sources on the environment. Published by Klaus Dörner , German edition, microfiche edition, Munich 1999 on behalf of the Hamburg Foundation for Social History of the 20th Century
  8. ↑ Introduction to NMT Case 4 - USA v. Pohl et al. ( Memento of July 9, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) on www. nuremberg.law.harvard.edu
  9. ↑ Raphael Gross: Die Ethik , p. 251.
  10. ↑ Eugen Kogon: The SS State . The system of the German concentration camps, Munich 1974, p. 325f
  11. ^ Raul Hilberg: The annihilation of the European Jews. Frankfurt / Main 1990, ISBN 3-596-24417-X , Vol. 2, p. 970.
  12. ↑ Raphael Gross: Die Ethik , pp. 248 and 251.
  13. ^ Fritz Bauer Institute Frankfurt am Main, State Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau (ed.): The Auschwitz Process ; DVD-ROM; Berlin: Directmedia Publishing, 2005; ISBN 3-89853-501-0 ; P. 4462.
  14. ↑ Tape recording and minutes of the testimony of Konrad Morgens on March 9, 1964, 25th day of the trial in the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial [1]
  15. ↑ Tape recording and minutes of the testimony of Konrad Morgens on March 9, 1964, 25th day of the trial in the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial [2]
  16. ↑ Volker Altwasser: Last Skin. Matthes & Seitz, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-88221-744-5 . See also: Soraya Levin's review on Future Needs Remembrance .
personal data
SURNAME Tomorrow, Konrad
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Tomorrow, Georg Konrad
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German lawyer, SS-Sturmbannführer and SS judge
DATE OF BIRTH June 8, 1909
PLACE OF BIRTH Frankfurt am Main
DATE OF DEATH 4th February 1982