Max Horn (SS member)

Max Horn (born May 12, 1904 in Stuttgart ; † October 24, 1989 in Ulm ) was managing director of Ostindustrie GmbH in the Generalgouvernement during the time of National Socialism and founded an auditing company after the war .

education

After completing secondary school, Max Horn worked in the Reich Finance Administration and from 1927 in a trust company. In addition to his professional activity, he studied economics and commercial law in Leipzig and Stuttgart . In 1930 he passed the diploma examination as a tax expert and received his doctorate in 1934. In 1936, Horn completed an examination as a chartered accountant ; In 1937 he was admitted as a tax advisor in Hamburg and in 1942 he became an auditor at the Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Stuttgart .

Career in the Third Reich

On May 1, 1933 , Max Horn became a member of the NSDAP and in July 1933 he was accepted into the SS . In Hamburg he became an SS-Untersturmführer as a welfare officer for a Sturmbann .

At the beginning of the war, Horn was drafted into the Wehrmacht , deployed in Denmark and Belgium and promoted to lieutenant. Due to an injury, he was classified as no longer suitable for the front in 1942 as an economic specialist at the main economic and administrative office under Oswald Pohl .

From February 1943 until the liquidation of the company, Max Horn ran “ Ostindustrie GmbH ” (OSTI) together with Odilo Globocnik . In the Generalgouvernement, this company exploited the movable assets of Jews who had been deported to extermination camps. In addition, the OSTI set up several SS-owned factories in which Jewish forced laborers produced uniforms and equipment, among other things, and carried out repairs for the Wehrmacht.

Almost all the forced laborers were murdered during the harvest festival , so that the OSTI workshops could no longer produce. After the liquidation of "Ostindustrie GmbH", Horn became managing director of the SS company " German Research Institute for Nutrition and Meals " in Feldberg . Shortly before the end of the war, Max Horn, now in the rank of SS- Hauptsturmführer , was deployed as commander of an alarm battalion.

After the war

Max Horn was taken prisoner by the Soviets. After his release in 1950 he was classified as a “fellow traveler” in the denazification process .

Horn soon became self-employed as an auditor and tax consultant and founded his own auditing company in 1966. He has published over 650 articles in prestigious journals. A festschrift was dedicated to him in honor of his 70th birthday .

Horn was summoned as a witness in various Nazi trials, but was never tried as a defendant himself.

Fonts

• The tax accounts of the cooperatives . Hamburg: Dt. Großeinkaufs-Ges. mbH, 1935

literature

• Jan Erik Schulte : Forced Labor and Extermination. The economic empire of the SS. Oswald Pohl and the SS-Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt 1933-1945. Paderborn 2001, ISBN 3-506-78245-2 .
• Jan Erik Schulte : Forced Labor for the SS Jews in the Ostindustrie GmbH. In: Norbert Frei et al. (Ed.): Exploitation, destruction, public. New Studies on National Socialist Camp Policy. Saur, Munich 2000, ISBN 3-598-24033-3 , ( representations and sources on the history of Auschwitz 4), pp. 53–57.