Kurt-Walter Hanssen

Kurt Walter Hanssen (born March 18, 1903 in Lägerdorf ; † October 3, 1945 in special prison No. 7 , Frankfurt an der Oder ) was a German lawyer and political functionary ( NSDAP ). As attorney general at the Kammergericht in Berlin during the last two years of the Second World War he was the u. a. participated in numerous death sentences .

Life and activity

Kurt-Walter Hanssen's curriculum vitae.

Earlier career

Hanssen was the eldest son of the general practitioner Peter Hanssen. At Easter 1910 he entered pre-school and at Easter 1913 he moved to the main institution of the municipal Reform Realgymnasium in Kiel, today's Humboldt School in Kiel , which he left at Easter 1922 with the Abitur. As a student, Hanssen was a member of the Kiel Volunteer Regiment in 1920, with which he took part in the Kapp Putsch in Kiel in March 1920 .

After attending school, Hanssen studied law and political science at the universities of Hamburg, Kiel (summer semester 1923 and winter semester 1923/1924), Munich (summer semester 1924) and again Kiel (winter semester 1924/1925) from the summer semester 1922. He passed the first state legal examination on October 22nd and 23rd, 1925 before the examination committee at the Higher Regional Court in Kiel with the rating "good". This was followed by the legal preparatory service as a trainee lawyer, which he completed at various courts (including the Kiel Higher Regional Court) and graduated with passing the second state legal examination in May 1929. In 1928 he was promoted to Dr. jur. PhD . In May 1929, Hanssen came to the district and regional court in Kiel as a judge, where he was appointed assistant judge that same year. From there he was transferred to Flensburg , where he was appointed regional judge in July 1931.

On May 1, 1933, Hanssen joined the NSDAP . Later he also became a member of the SS , in which he achieved the rank of SS-Obersturmbannführer in 1940 . In 1936 Hanssen spent a year as a training supervisor in the Hanns Kerrl camp for trainee lawyers in Jüterbog . This was followed by a brief employment as an unskilled worker in the Reich Ministry of Justice .

In 1937 Hanssen was seconded to the staff of the Deputy Leader (SdF), where he worked until 1942. The SdF was the new central control body created in 1933 for the management and supervision of the party apparatus, whose day-to-day management Adolf Hitler, as party chairman of the NSDAP, shortly after the NSDAP took over government authority in the spring of 1933, to his confidant Rudolf Hess , who has since been deputy of the Fuehrer's company name, had transferred.

On the staff of the Führer’s deputy, Hanssen took over the position of personal adjutant to Martin Bormann , who as Staff Leader von Hess (the Führer’s deputy ) was the second highest man in this institution. As part of his work in the Heß'schen Dienststelle, Hanssen was promoted to the rank of ministerial advisor (April 1, 1939) and a ministerial director (June 1, 1941). Even more important than this formal advancement was that Hanssen, according to Johannes Tuchel's judgment , had “a fast and steep career”.

In 1939 Hanssen married Annemarie Hartung, a daughter of the SA leader Fritz Hermann Hartung, with the approval of the Race and Settlement Main Office of the SS.

After Hess' resignation in May 1941, the staff of the Deputy Leader was renamed the Party Chancellery of the NSDAP . Hanssen returned a year and a half later, on December 1, 1942, to the Reich Ministry of Justice, where he was assigned the management of a subdivision of the criminal law department. In this position he was directly subordinate to the Justice Minister Otto Thierack , who also headed the department mentioned. His successor as Bormann's right-hand man was Hellmuth von Hummel from October 1942 .

Public Prosecutor's Office at the Supreme Court (1943 to 1945)

In May 1943, on Thierack's recommendation, Hanssen was appointed as the new attorney general at the Kammergericht in Berlin, which was then the largest court in Germany. His introduction to this office on 19 May 1943. In this capacity he was responsible for the tasks performed by the Attorney General during the last two years of the war in this court indictments, many of which to executions led the accused. According to the relevant study by Johannes Tuchel on the judgment practice of the Court of Appeal during the war, "most of the indictments that have been handed down" before the Court of Justice during the last years of the war bear "the signature of Kurt-Walter Hanssen".

In addition to the filing of charges before the Higher Regional Court - which Hanssen did not carry out himself in practice, but was procured by subordinates on his behalf - the following prisons were under Hanssen's supervision: remand prison at the criminal court in Moabit , the prison cell prison , the women's prison in Barnimstrasse , the prison Plötzensee , the Tegel prison , the Brandenburg an der Havel prison , the Cottbus prison for women, the Luckau prison , the Sonnenburg prison and the Spandau prison.

Hanssen made his view of war crime clear in a situation report to the Reich Ministry of Justice on May 31, 1943:

"Obviously as a result of the difficulties on the fronts mentioned at the beginning, which always became known very quickly, but also because of the increasing indispensability of their labor for the Reich, a constantly increasing impudence of the foreign workers can be observed ... This has an effect in an increase in criminal proceedings for dealing with prisoners of war, especially French people who have had sexual intercourse with German women, and an increase in criminal proceedings for breach of employment contract - including almost all nations represented ... In the area of ​​the Berlin public prosecutor's office, for example, from 15. From January 1, 1943 to May 15, 1943, 26 of 51 death sentences passed against foreigners. The proportion of foreigners incarcerated in the Tegel prison has risen to over 50%. "

On September 6, 1943, Hanssen visited the Plötzensee prison, which was badly damaged on the night of September 3 to 4, 1943. The purpose of the visit was to find out what should happen to the more than 300 prisoners sentenced to death, especially with regard to further air strikes. Hanssen then ordered that pardon proceedings for those convicted of the special court should be “accelerated to the utmost”. In addition, the Brandenburg and Plötzensee penal institutions were to receive machine guns to prevent escapes in the event of further air strikes. Hanssen also ordered that "prisoners who made the slightest expression to move away in the event of an attack" should be shot.

In the following days, more than 250 people were executed by hanging on the gallows erected in Plötzensee at the end of 1942 , including many convicted by the Berlin Special Court, whose pardon proceedings had been "accelerated to the utmost" by Hanssen. There were even some people among those executed whose pardon proceedings had not yet been completed.

At the beginning of 1945 Hanssen had his official apartment in the Sonnenburg prison because his Berlin apartment had been bombed out. On the evening of January 30, 1945, due to the advance of the Red Army on Sonnenburg , Hanssen had the prisoners from Sonnenburg divided into two groups: Around 150 prisoners, who were classified as "useful elements" by the prison director and the Gestapo commando leader, were set off on a trek who left on the night of January 31st and reached Coswig in mid-February, where they were taken to the Elbe camp in Griebo. The other prisoners were systematically executed in the Sonnenburg prison: on February 2, 1945, the Red Army found at least 753 dead here. Four prisoners survived the massacre.

On February 22, 1945, Hanssen was appointed by the Reich Defense Commissioner for the Reich Defense District of Mark Brandenburg as a prosecutor in the newly established stand court in Potsdam.

post war period

On May 11, 1945, Hanssen was arrested by Soviet troops in the building of the Supreme Court. Because of his work as attorney general, he was indicted before the Soviet military tribunal of the 16th Air Army and sentenced to death on July 17, 1945 on the basis of Ukas 43 for war crimes . Hanssen died on October 3, 1945 - before the execution of the death sentence against him - in special prison No. 7 of the NKVD in Frankfurt an der Oder.

Archival material

• Bundesarchiv Berlin: R 3001/58943 to 58946: Hanssen personnel files from the holdings of the Reich Ministry of Justice

Fonts

• The term document in the official draft of a general German penal code , Breslau 1928. (Reprint 1977) (dissertation)

literature

• Files of the party chancellery of the NSDAP. Reconstruction of a lost inventory , published by the Institute for Contemporary History, Munich 1983, process 103 17750.
• Peter Longerich : Hitler's deputy. Leadership of the party and control of the state apparatus by the Hess staff and the Bormann party office. Saur, Munich [u. a.] 1992, ISBN 3-598-11081-2 , p. 120.
• Johannes Tuchel : "... and all of them the rope was waiting" The cell prison Lehrter Strasse 3 after July 20, 1944 , Lukas Verlag, Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-86732-178-5 , pp. 188ff.
• Johannes Tuchel: The death sentences of the Court of Appeal from 1943 to 1945: A documentation , Lukas Verlag, Berlin 2016, ISBN 978-3-86732-229-4 , pp. 42–47.
• Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich . Who was what before and after 1945 . 2nd Edition. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-596-16048-8 .
• Klaus-Dieter Müller, Thomas Schaarschmidt, Mike Schmeitzner, Andreas Weigelt: Death sentences of Soviet military tribunals against Germans (1944–1947). A historical-biographical study . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2015, ISBN 978-3-525-36968-5 , short biographies on the accompanying CD, p. 222 there.

Web links

Commons : Kurt Walter Hanssen  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Tuchel: p. 42.