Kurt Becher

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Kurt Andreas Ernst Becher (born September 12, 1909 in Hamburg ; † August 8, 1995 in Bremen ) was a German merchant and standard leader of the SS.

Life

Becher was born the son of a Hamburg merchant and learned the same profession in the animal feed industry. At the age of 22 he was an authorized signatory at a Hamburg company. An enthusiastic rider, he joined the Reiter-SS after Adolf Hitler came to power in 1934 . From the 1950s he lived temporarily in Bremen and was active in equestrian sports with his wife . His wife moved back to Hamburg after his death.

Career

In 1937 he became a member of the NSDAP and at the beginning of the war came to the SS-Totenkopf-Reiterstandarte 1 under its commander Hermann Fegelein , the later husband of Eva Braun's sister Margarete.

Becher was soon promoted and platoon leader in the 1st Squadron, which "distinguished itself" through its execution work in Warsaw . Known for their efficient cruelty, this force was also used to fight partisans during the war against the Soviet Union . The cavalry unit, later the brigade, was subordinate to the SS police command in the area of Army Group Center , Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski . During the fight against partisans in the Pripjet swamps , orders were strictly followed, which read: “Every partisan is to be shot. Jews are basically to be regarded as partisans. "

During this time his unit murdered around 14,000 Jews, and Becher was promoted more and more, first to 1st orderly officer of his unit, then to SS-Obersturmführer . In mid-March 1942, Becher was transferred to the SS Leadership Main Office as SS-Hauptsturmführer . There he took over the inspection of the riding and driving system of the SS. After two further missions on the Eastern Front, he was awarded the German Cross in Gold in 1944 . He soon became SS-Sturmbannführer and finally SS-Obersturmbannführer on January 30, 1944 .

Only three months later, in March 1944, after the invasion of Hungary, he was called to Budapest to officially buy equipment and horses on behalf of the SS. In addition to procuring material for the Waffen SS , Becher also set about securing assets for the SS.

In this context, he managed to take over the management of the group founded by Manfréd Weiss . Becher had an easy time of it, since Weiss was a Jew and at that time the Hungarian Jews were already being systematically arrested and brought to Auschwitz-Birkenau . According to his own account, Becher negotiated with the former group representative, Dr. Franz Chorin, who was arrested by the Hungarian government. It was agreed that the majority of the Weiss family's shares would be transferred to the SS against a payment of 3 million Reichsmarks in foreign currency. In return, the Weiss family, which consisted mainly of Jews, was allowed to travel to Switzerland and Portugal with the retention of five hostages (according to other information there were nine) . The contract for this was signed on May 17, 1944.

Afterwards, Becher approached the Jewish Aid Committee in Budapest as a competitor to Adolf Eichmann , who had already established the contacts. At this point in time Heinrich Himmler already seemed to be interested in doing business with Jewish organizations in order to later develop a position for negotiations with the Allies. He offered to release 1 million Jews for around 10,000 trucks and winter equipment. When the negotiations finally broke down, Becher had a direct order from Himmler to keep looking for deals under the motto “blood for goods”. In December 1944, for example, 1,684 “ exchange Jews ” were ransomed for jewelry worth several million Swiss francs via a stopover in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and emigrated to Switzerland Switzerland. At several meetings with Saly Mayer , the chairman of the Swiss Association of Israelites , the release of this group of prisoners from Bergen-Belsen was negotiated in autumn 1944. The Hungarian Rudolf Kasztner was the mediator . Becher was appointed SS-Standartenführer on January 1, 1945 .

With the negotiations, Becher slowly built up a position that should make him appear in a more favorable light after the war. His unselfishness in the negotiations was an issue for many years. From today's perspective, however, it seems that Becher worked systematically on his post-war legend. Finally, at the end of the war, on April 9, 1945, he was appointed "Reich Special Commissioner for All Concentration Camps". At this point in time, however, he had practically no influence on the events in the camps. But Becher used the time to prepare for the end of the war.

post war period

In May 1945 Kurt Becher was arrested by the American military authorities in Nuremberg. Although he was heard as a witness at the Nuremberg trials , he was not personally charged. Becher escaped the prosecution at the time primarily because of the testimony of Kasztner, his negotiating partner from his time in Budapest. Becher was spared any further charges in Germany, but testified in the Eichmann trial before the Bremen district court. Becher refused to come to Israel because he feared he would be arrested there as a war criminal. Through his testimony to the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961 and in the trial of Hermann Krumey and Otto Hunsche in Frankfurt am Main in 1964, Becher once again attracted public attention.

In Germany, Becher was able to pursue his business and built up several trading companies, including the Hungarian company Monimpex GmbH, which handled the German-Hungarian agricultural trade until the fall of the Berlin Wall. He became a wealthy businessman in Bremen and ran the Bremen grain and feed exchange. After 1960 he was one of the richest men in West Germany with an estimated net worth of US $ 30 million. In the 1980s, Becher last hit the headlines because he was proposed for a high post in German business, which he was unable to take on because of his past during the Nazi era.

In revisionist circles, Becher is often named as a witness when it came to relativizing the number of victims in the concentration camps. On the other hand, he was one of the few who knew of Himmler's attempts to get into conversation with the Allies and thus to conclude a separate peace. Until the end of his life, Becher was therefore always the target of various speculations. He last lived in Bremen on Blumenthalstrasse and died in 1995 at the age of 86 as a rich man without ever having stood trial for his crimes.

A medium-sized trading company in Bremen still bears his name. This was registered on June 28, 1949 at the Bremen District Court.

Film adaptations

  • Living goods , feature film, GDR, 1966, director: Wolfgang Luderer
  • Zug um Zug - Budapest 1944 , feature film, Germany, 2005, directors: Axel Brandt, Elias Perrig, Bertram von Boxberg

literature

  • Yehuda Bauer : Free ransom from Jews? Negotiations between National Socialist Germany and Jewish representatives 1933 to 1945. Translated by Klaus Binder and Jeremy Gaines. Jüdischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1996, ISBN 3-633-54107-1 .
  • Gábor Kádár, Zoltán Vági: Self-Financing Genocide. The Gold Train, the Becher Case and the Wealth of Hungarian Jewsi Central European University Press, Budapest u. a. 2004, ISBN 963-9241-53-9 .
  • Raul Hilberg : The Destruction of the European Jewsi Volume 1. 3rd edition. Yale University Press, New Haven CT et al. a. 2003, ISBN 0-300-09557-0 .
  • Karla Müller-Tupath: Reichsführer most obedient mug. A German career. Extended new edition. Structure, Hamburg 1999, ISBN 3-351-02494-0 . (First edition: Konkret-Literatur, Hamburg 1982).
  • Joachim Jahns: The Warsaw Ghetto King. Dingsda, Leipzig 2009, ISBN 978-3-928498-99-9 .
  • Ladislaus Löb : Business with the devil. The tragedy of Resző Kasztner, the rescuer of the Jews . Report from a survivor. Böhlau, Cologne 2010, ISBN 978-3-20389-4 .
  • 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 .
  • Andreas Biss : The stop of the final solution, fight against Himmler and Eichmann in Budapest . Seewald Verlag, Stuttgart 1966.
  • Towiah Friedman: The two representatives of Adolf Eichmann in Hungary in 1944: Kurt Becher, SS-Standartenführer and Hermann Krumey, SS-Obersturmbannführer, who were involved in the extermination of the Jews of Hungary and Romania! : Document collection . Institute of Documentation in Israel, 1997 ( Google Books ).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Reports in the Weser-Kurier on 13./14. September 1969 on page 35 below: "A birthday present for the husband"
  2. ↑ DER SPIEGEL 10/1967
  3. ↑ From the speech by Thomas Klestil on March 15, 2004 (PDF; 218 kB)
  4. ↑ Kurt Becher (PDF; 26.1 kB) Yad Vashem.
  5. ↑ Becher's statement in the Nuremberg Trial (1946)
  6. ↑ a b c Becher's statement in the Eichmann trial (1961)
  7. ↑ a b Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil , first published 1963, this edition Penguin Books, 1994. p. 141.
  8. ↑ Weser-Kurier on August 27, 1964, page 10: "Protection passports for Hungarian Jews - grain trader Becher from Bremen testified in the Krumey trial"
  9. ↑ Szabolcs Szita: Trading in Lives ?: Operations of the Jewish Relief and Rescue , Central European University Press, 2005, p. 209.
  10. ^ Ernst Klee: The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 34.
  11. ↑ Hecht, Ben. Perfidy , Milah Press, 1999, p. 84 and P. 259, footnote 48.
  12. ^ Israel Gutman , Eberhard Jäckel : Enzyklopädie des Holocaust , Piper, 1998, p. 162.
  13. ↑ Ronald W. Zweig: The Gold Train: The Destruction of the Jews and the Looting of Hungary , Harper Collins, 2002, p. 232.
  14. ↑ Bremen District Court, online register information, accessed on February 6, 2014
  15. ^ Fritz Bauer Institute: Cinematography of the Holocaust ( Memento from February 19, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
  16. ^ Fritz Bauer Institute: Cinematography of the Holocaust ( Memento from February 19, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
personal data
SURNAME Mug, Kurt
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Becher, Kurt Andreas Ernst (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German SS standard leader in World War II
DATE OF BIRTH September 12, 1909
PLACE OF BIRTH Hamburg
DATE OF DEATH August 8, 1995
Place of death Bremen