Kurt Giese

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Kurt Giese (born November 25, 1905 in Brohse ( West Prussia ), † September 12, 1979 in Wennigsen (Deister) ) was head of the main office III of the Führer’s Chancellery in the National Socialist German Reich , assessor at the People's Court and in the selection of prisoners for the Participation in the " Destruction through Labor " campaign.

Life

Kurt Giese was born on November 25, 1905 in Brohse, West Prussia. As early as 1923 he joined a youth group of the NSDAP and the SA . In 1928 he became a member of the NSDAP. From November 1935 Giese worked in the Fuehrer's office, to which he belonged until the end of the war. Giese married and had five children. In 1941 he took over as head of the Reich Main Office with the management of Main Office III, the grace office for party affairs.

From September 1940 to 1944 he was a member of the 2nd Senate of the People's Court, with several interruptions.

As Minister of Justice Otto Thierack in October 1942, the head of the prisons on the Reichsfuhrer SS Heinrich Himmler taught "to the police release asocial prisoner" negotiated, was also Giese to the Commission, which toured the prison in November 1942, the " antisocial " to select. These were handed over to the police or to the SS concentration camps (KZ) , to relieve the prisons and to " destroy the German people of Poles , Russians , Jews and Gypsies " in the concentration camp. to free". From the point of view of the Minister of Justice, it was also only logical to also transfer the "anti-social" from the penal institutions to the concentration camp if the non-offenders of this undesirable social group were already there. Two thirds of the selected prisoners and those in preventive detention came to the Mauthausen concentration camp or its Gusen satellite camp . In April 1943, Oswald Pohl , the head of the SS Economic Administration Main Office , reported to the Minister of Justice that 5,935 of the 12,658 prisoners transferred to the concentration camp had already died. Giese, who visited the Mauthausen and Auschwitz concentration camps (June 28, 1944) in 1944, could not remember after the end of the war that prisoners had been tortured and murdered there en masse.

Giese was interned from May 1945 to March 1948. In October 1948 he was sentenced to a fine of 3,000 DM by the verdict court; the appeal by the prosecution was rejected by the highest verdict court in Hamm in March 1949. From March 1950 he was in custody in Wiesbaden.

Four officials of the Reich Ministry of Justice, the Ministerialdirigent Rudolf Marx , the Ministerialrat Dr. Albert Hupperschwiller, the Chief Public Prosecutor Friedrich-Wilhelm Meyer and the First Public Prosecutor Dr. Otto Gündner has been charged. All of the defendants were acquitted in a judgment of the Wiesbaden Regional Court of March 24, 1952, because "the evidence (...) did not even provide any indication" that the defendants knew that the government wanted bodily harm to the concentration camp inmates. " , P. 365f.)

Giese worked as a lawyer in Hanover after the war ; Among other things, he defended the T4 expert Hans Heinze .

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ [1] Helmut Kramer: The contribution of lawyers to the mass murder of prisoners and the criminal prosecution after 1945. (PDF file)
personal data
SURNAME Giese, Kurt
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German lawyer
DATE OF BIRTH November 25, 1905
PLACE OF BIRTH Brohse, West Prussia
DATE OF DEATH September 12, 1979
Place of death Wennigsen (Deister)