Otto Bovensiepen

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Bovensiepen is taken into Allied custody on August 11, 1945 in Copenhagen.

Otto Bovensiepen (* July 8, 1905 in Duisburg ; † February 18, 1979 in Zusmarshausen ) was a German lawyer , in Magdeburg , Recklinghausen , Dortmund , Bielefeld , Köslin and Halle , head of the state police stations and the Berlin state police control center and until the end of the war in 1945 the commander of the Security Police and the Security Service in Denmark , SS-Standartenführer .

Life

After graduating from high school in 1925, Bovensiepen studied law in Bonn . During his studies he became a member of the Frankonia fraternity in Bonn in 1925 , from which he left in 1934. Here he also joined the NSDAP as a student in May 1926 . He passed the first state examination on October 22, 1929, and the second state examination on July 15, 1933. After working as a court assessor at the Duisburg District Court and as a legal assistant in the finance and tax department of the Duisburg-Hamborn city ​​administration , Bovensiepen joined the Secret State Police on November 15, 1933 . Since December 16 he worked at the state police station in Düsseldorf . Almost at the same time - on November 6, 1933 - Bovensiepen joined the SA . On June 24, 1934, he was commissioned by the Secret State Police Office with the provisional management of the Magdeburg State Police Station , which Bovensiepen finally took over on August 1, 1934.

As early as February 5, 1935, the Secret State Police Office transferred him to the Recklinghausen State Police Station as head. After heading the state police stations in Dortmund, Bielefeld and Köslin, Bovensiepen returned to the province of Saxony - joining the SS on November 1, 1936 - where he ran the state police station in Halle (Saale) from October 1, 1937 to March 17, 1941 . On March 11, 1938, shortly before the annexation of Austria , the Secret State Police Office commissioned the SS-Untersturmführer to set up the new state police station in Eisenstadt in Austria . He stayed there until August 1938 and then returned to Halle an der Saale.

From March 18, 1941, Bovensiepen headed the largest Gestapo office in the " Altreich ", the Berlin State Police Headquarters . Bovensiepen, although only appointed SS-Sturmbannführer on February 15, 1941 , was promoted to SS-Obersturmbannführer on April 20, 1941 . In addition, the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) appointed him deputy inspector of the Security Police and the SD in Berlin in December 1941 . Relocated to RSHA (Amt III) on April 30, 1943 as a result of a corruption affair , the career kink lasted only briefly - Ernst Kaltenbrunner placed Bovensiepen on a provisional basis on April 30, 1943, and on October 2, 1943 as inspector of the Security Police and SD for Military District IX in Kassel .

In January 1944, Bovensiepen, now with effect from November 9, 1943, both colonel of the police and SS-Standartenführer , took over the management of the security police and the security service in Denmark . He fought the Danish resistance movement with the so-called "counter sabotage" method. Captured at the end of the war , the Copenhagen District Court sentenced Bovensiepen to death in September 1948 at the Great War Crimes Trial . The sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in March 1950 . Bovensiepen was released on December 1, 1953 and was expelled from Denmark. He then worked as managing director of an insurance company in Mülheim an der Ruhr .

From 1963, the Berlin public prosecutor's office was investigating Bovensiepen. The subject of investigation was the deportations of the more than 50,000 Jews of the then Reich capital to the ghettos in occupied Eastern Europe, to Theresienstadt and to the extermination camps that had fallen during Bovensiepen's tenure as Gestapo chief in Berlin. It was not until December 1969 that the main hearing against Bovensiepen began before the Berlin Regional Court . After a heart attack, the judiciary suspended the proceedings against Bovensiepen on September 15, 1970 on the basis of an expert opinion, and finally on November 19, 1971 because of permanent incapacity to stand trial.

literature

  • Helge Dvorak: Biographical Lexicon of the German Burschenschaft. Volume I: Politicians. Volume 7: Supplement A – K. Winter, Heidelberg 2013, ISBN 978-3-8253-6050-4 , pp. 131-132.
  • Alexander Sperk: The state police (head) office in Magdeburg, its leaders and the smashing of the KPD . In: Police & History. Independent interdisciplinary journal for police history , 1/2009, Verlag für Polizeiwissenschaft, ISSN  1865-7354 , pp. 7–8.
  • Andreas Nachama (ed.): Reich Security Main Office and Post-War Justice. The Bovensiepen trial and the deportations of the Jews from Berlin (= Topography of Terror. Notes, Volume 10). Hentrich and Hentrich, Berlin 2015, ISBN 978-3-95565-130-5 .
  • Short biography of Otto Bovensiepen at the International Holocaust Memorial Yad Vashem, online at: http://db.yadvashem.org/deportation/supervisorsDetails.html?language=de&itemId=7452247

Films, film contributions

  • Gerolf Karwath: Hitler's elite after 1945 . Part 4: Lawyers - acquittal in their own right . Director: Holger Hillesheim. Südwestrundfunk (SWR, 2002).

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See for example: Karl Christian Lammers, Late trials and mild punishments. The war crimes trials against Germans in Denmark, in: Norbert Frei (Hrsg.), Transnational Past Policy. How to deal with German war criminals in Europe after the Second World War, Göttingen 2006, p. 363f.
  2. ↑ Andreas Nachama (Ed.): Reich Security Main Office and Post-War Justice. The Bovensiepen trial and the deportations of the Jews from Berlin (=  Topography of Terror. Notes, Volume 10 ). Hentrich & Hentrich, Berlin 2015, ISBN 978-3-95565-130-5 .
personal data
SURNAME Bovensiepen, Otto
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German Gestapo officer
DATE OF BIRTH July 8, 1905
PLACE OF BIRTH Duisburg
DATE OF DEATH 18th February 1979
Place of death Zusmarshausen