Kurt Ash

Kurt Heinrich Asche (born October 11, 1909 in Hamburg ; † 1998 ) was a German SS - Obersturmführer and " Judenreferent " in Belgium, which was occupied by German troops . From 1942 to 1944 he was responsible for the deportation of 25,000 Jews and Sinti to Auschwitz .

Life

"Judenreferent"

Kurt Asche was born in Hamburg as the son of a master carpenter. After graduating from elementary school, he attended commercial school for two years and completed a three-year apprenticeship as a druggist including a poison test . In 1931 he joined the SA and became a member of the NSDAP . From April 1935 he was employed by the party's security service (SD), initially as a security guard and later as a typist. After the beginning of the war , he was a member of the SD service in occupied Lublin from 1939 to 1940 . There he was active in the Jewish department. As he later explained during his trial in the Kiel Regional Court, he was only “known from hearsay” about the mass shootings by task forces of the Security Police and the SD . In November 1941 it was introduced to Brussels by his colleague Theodor Dannecker , who has since become a Jewish advisor in Paris. Under the local BdS he was initially subordinate to the Judenreferenten Humpert. A few months later, Kurt Asche took over the management of the "Judenreferat" himself until he was forcibly transferred in October 1943.

In Brussels, Asche organized the deportations to Auschwitz. To this end, he kept in close contact with Adolf Eichmann , the head of the Eichmann department in the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) in Berlin, who organized the entire “ final solution to the Jewish question ”. He was in connection with the "Jewish Association" AJB (Association des Juifs en Belgique) founded in 1941 at the disposal of the German occupying power. The Holocaust was handled through this organization . Asche had " Jewish card files " made to record so-called labor assignment orders , which, however, meant certain death in Auschwitz. Of the 25,000 victims, only just under 500 survived. Asche led arrests against Jews in hiding, was present when the transports left the Mechelen assembly camp to Auschwitz and monitored compliance with “Jewish ordinances”. Witnesses later described him as “the devil on earth who decided between life and death”. Asche enriched himself personally from the wealth of Belgian Jews. Therefore he was transferred to the Ghent branch. On May 9, 1944, an SS and police court in Brussels sentenced him to one year and four months in prison for these offenses.

Life after the end of the war

After the war ended , Kurt Asche went into hiding immediately and adopted the cover name Kurt Klein until the mid-1950s . The former Jewish advisor was able to live undisturbed in the Federal Republic of Germany until 1962 , when the Ludwigsburg Central Office for Investigating Nazi Crimes was able to determine and clarify his identity. Nevertheless, the Schleswig-Holstein judiciary did not initiate investigations against Asche and his direct superior Ernst Ehlers , nor against his successor in office Constantin Canaris , a nephew of the former defense chief Canaris , and Karl Fielitz , head of the Antwerp branch, because Ernst Ehlers is now an administrative judge at the administrative court Schleswig had become and many former Nazi supporters were accommodated in the Schleswig-Holstein state administration, namely in the judiciary. Instead, the process was dragged off for decades. The proceedings against Heinz Hummitzsch , the Brussels commander of the security police and the SD, were delayed until he died in August 1975.

process

It was only after intensive research by the Paris lawyer Serge Klarsfeld and his wife Beate that the Kiel public prosecutor brought charges against Ehlers, Canaris, Asche and Fielitz at the Flensburg jury court in February 1975 . On 27 February 1975, the first criminal division of the Great rejected the District Court Flensburg the opening of the trial on the grounds that the accused will not be to prove that it was aware of the organized killing of Jews deported; a conviction therefore seems unlikely. The Flensburg judges only saw a "not insignificant suspicion" in Ehlers and Asche. And Canaris and Fielitz are also “burdened by a number of circumstances”, the latter by such “lower weight”. In May of the same year, Jewish demonstrators from Belgium, accompanied by a Brussels television team and Beate Klarsfeld, occupied Ernst Ehlers' apartment in Schleswig. They hung a banner from the window with the demand: "Convict the Nazi criminal Ehlers as soon as possible , responsible for the death of 25,000 Jews from Belgium".

In response to a complaint from the public prosecutor's office, the First Criminal Senate of the Schleswig Higher Regional Court overturned the decision of the Regional Court on March 1, 1977 and referred the proceedings to the Kiel Regional Court for the main hearing . Asche lodged a constitutional complaint against the referral decision on the grounds that it would be withdrawn from its legal judge. The Federal Constitutional Court refused to accept the complaint on November 23, 1979. The main hearing in the so-called ash trial began on November 26, 1980 before the Kiel jury court. The trial was conducted against Ernst Ehlers no more, because this just before the trial began on October 4, 1980 suicide had.

On July 8, 1981, Kurt Asche was sentenced to seven years imprisonment for aiding and abetting the murder of at least 10,000 Jews. The verdict stated that, like many others, he was a compliant assistant to a criminal system and its leaders, whose ideas and plans he supported. Kurt Asche began his sentence in January 1983 in the prison in Hamburg-Fuhlsbüttel , after it had been determined that he could be executed.

After serving his sentence, Kurt Asche lived in Hamburg-Eimsbüttel .

literature

• Eckard Colmorgen, Maren Wulf: Documents. The Ashes Trial. Documentation of the trial against the former "Judenreferenten" in Belgium, which was occupied by German troops, before the district court in Kiel . Edited by the Ash Process and AK Kieler Antifaschisten, Borbyer Werkstatt Verlag / KVA, Kiel 1985, ISBN 3-924964-05-X .
• Israel Gutman (Ed.): Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. The persecution and murder of the European Jews. 3 volumes. Piper Verlag, Munich et al. 1998, ISBN 3-492-22700-7 .
• Tuviah Friedman : The deportation of the Jews from Belgium and Luxembourg during the Nazi occupation 1940-1944: Document collection . Haifa: Institute of Documentation in Israel for the Investigation of Nazi War Crimes, 1999.
• Dan Michman : Belgium and the Holocaust: Jews, Belgians, Germans . Berghahn Books, 1998, ISBN 978-965-308068-3 .
• Serge Klarsfeld ; Maxime Steinberg (ed.): The final solution of the Jewish question in Belgium. Documents. 181 pages, the Beate Klarsfeld Foundation, New York approx. 1980.
• Insa Meinen: The Shoah in Belgium , Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt 2009, ISBN 978-3-534-22158-5 .
• Marion Schreiber : Silent rebels. The attack on the 20th deportation train to Auschwitz. Foreword by Paul Spiegel . Aufbau-Taschenbuch-Verlag 2002. ISBN 3-7466-8067-0 .

Web links

• Ash Process Working Group
• Biographical information on Kurt Asche as PDF ; (505 kB)
• Decision of the Higher Regional Court of Schleswig on March 8, 1977 to open the main proceedings against Ehlers, Canaris and Asche at the jury court of Kiel

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Bert Hoppe : The persecution and murder of the European Jews by National Socialist Germany 1933 - 1945 Vol. 12: Western and Northern Europe June 1942 - 1945 . Edited by Katja Happe, Barbara Lambauer and Clemens Maier-Wolthausen, 2015, ISBN 978-3-486-71843-0 .
2. ↑ Dietrich Strothmann , DIE ZEIT , November 29, 1980: Nazi trials in a humane spirit? Two “anniversaries”: five years of the Maidanek Tribunal in Düsseldorf, the start of the last major proceedings in Kiel