Otto Bergemann

Otto Bergemann (* 1903 ; † January 15, 1960 in Leipzig ) was a German alleged war criminal in World War II and a poisoner . He was sentenced to death for murder and several attempted murders in the GDR and executed.

Life

War crimes

Bergemann, the son of farm workers, had lived with his parents on the Kaltenhausen estate in the village of Kloster Zinna in Brandenburg since 1935 . In 1939 he was drafted into the German Wehrmacht and fought in World War II . It later became known that Bergemann had volunteered in November 1941 in Rowno, what is now Ukraine, in mass shootings of Jews and Soviet prisoners of war . Over 40,000 people were allegedly murdered there with Bergemann's participation. Later there were two witnesses who stated that Bergemann had volunteered to be shot.

In a later revoked confession, Bergemann himself stated that at an unspecified point in time during the war he fired a machine gun into a barrack with unarmed Soviet prisoners of war. The later conviction of Bergemann for these war crimes is only based on his later revoked confessions, so that from today's point of view it is not conclusively clarified whether Bergemann was actually involved in this war crime.

Poisoning

After the end of the war, Bergemann returned to Gut Kaltenhausen and became a farm worker in the now state-run estate . He lived in simple circumstances with his wife and a son on the property. The Denczyk family lived in the immediate vicinity. Bergemann made advances to 17-year-old Anna Denczyk, who was more than thirty years his junior, who rejected them.

In 1953 Ernst Denczyk, a child in the neighborhood, was poisoned. It was later claimed that the child had received sweets from Bergemann. He later stated that the boy accidentally got hold of negligently stored arsenic . Shortly afterwards the boy complained of nausea and passed away after a short time. After an autopsy that was carried out in Halle , massive arsenic poisoning was found to be the cause of death. Since arsenic was used in agriculture and also on the Kaltenhausen estate at that time, it was assumed that there was an accident. A preliminary investigation did not produce any concrete results and the case was closed.

Until 1955, Bergemann continued to pursue the neighboring daughter Anna Denczyk, who was meanwhile doing an apprenticeship in a fish factory in Sassnitz . Shortly after Christmas 1955, Denczyk received a parcel with the sender “Santa Claus from Jüterbog”, which among other things contained gingerbread with icing. Denczyk ate the gingerbread with a friend. Symptoms of poisoning immediately became noticeable in both women, and an emergency doctor was called. The women came to the hospital and survived, but suffered from the effects of the poisoning for life. Arsenic was again found to be the cause.

Investigation and death sentence

Anna Denczyk suspected Otto Bergemann of being responsible for the poisoning of her little brother Ernst and herself. Due to the conflict of jurisdiction between the public prosecutor's office , the police and the Ministry for State Security (MfS) of the GDR, however, there were considerable incidents of investigation and the disappearance of various pieces of evidence, so that Bergemann was not molested until April 1956. Then the Potsdam Murder Commission of the East German People's Police took over the case.

The investigators were able to locate the post office employee who had received the package with the poisoned food, who gave a personal description of the sender that applied to Bergemann. On April 10, 1956, an arrest warrant was issued and Bergemann was arrested and taken to the Potsdam remand prison. After several days of interrogation, also with the use of a so-called special investigator from the MfS, Bergemann confessed to the poisoning of Anna Denczyk, but denied the murder of Ernst Denczyk. Under the pressure of the interviews, Bergemann also admitted the war crimes, which the investigators had not expected.

Due to the surprising revelations, the case was submitted to the highest authorities in the GDR and was finally discussed by the Politburo of the Central Committee of the SED, which instructed the Attorney General to apply for the death penalty against Bergemann for war crimes . In the meantime, Bergemann retracted his confessions and claimed that only under the pressure of the interrogations he had admitted acts that had never taken place, or that he had described the experiences of comrades.

In the main hearing before the Potsdam District Court , Bergemann revoked his confessions again. After another questioning and reprimanding the judge, Bergemann collapsed and confessed again, this time also to the murder of Ernst Denczyk. After this, the lawyer Bergemanns resigned his mandate and was replaced, which was very unusual in the GDR because he was apparently convinced of the innocence of his client. On June 11, 1959, the court sentenced Bergemann to death. On January 15, 1960, he was executed by guillotine in the central execution site of the GDR in Leipzig .

Doubts about guilt

According to the current state of research, there are still doubts about Otto Bergemann's role in World War II and the murder of the boy next door in 1953. The court files reveal considerable inaccuracies. In the first confession there was talk of shootings in 1943 and only after further interrogations were the details corrected to 1941. The case was politically explosive, as the GDR leadership wanted to demonstrate severity towards war criminals and use the case for propaganda purposes in the Cold War . Apparently the investigators were asked to use psychological pressure to force a confession from the simple farm laborer, who was not up to the task. Specialists from the MfS were used for this, which was not the rule in criminal cases. The murder of the boy next door could not be substantiated by any clues or evidence , but only by the confession. It is theoretically conceivable that this actually was an accident. The poisoning of the neighboring daughter and her girlfriend, which Bergemann has been proven beyond doubt, would not have resulted in a death sentence in the GDR in the 1950s either.

literature

• Helfried Spitra (ed.): The great criminal cases . Poison package to Rügen. Campus Verlag, 2004, ISBN 978-3-593-37438-3 .

Web links

• Poison package to Rügen , documentary, film by Ute Bönnen and Gerald Endres ( SFB ) on YouTube

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Gift package to Rügen on www.daserste.de
2. ↑ Heinz Mohnhaupt: standard enforcement in Eastern European post-war societies. Klostermann, Frankfurt a. M. 2003, ISBN 978-3465032410 .