Otto Horn (SS member)

Otto Richard Horn (born December 14, 1903 in Obergrauschwitz , Amtshauptmannschaft Oschatz ; † February 21, 1999 in Berlin ) was a German SS sergeant and involved in " Aktion T4 " and " Aktion Reinhardt " in the Treblinka extermination camp . Horn was acquitted by the Düsseldorf Regional Court on September 3, 1965 in the Treblinka trials for lack of reliable evidence of his guilt.

Life

Horn, the son of a worker, grew up with his maternal grandparents. After dropping out of school early, he worked in agriculture and in a factory. From 1926 he completed training as a nurse at the sanatoriums in Arnsdorf and Sonnenstein near Pirna . After completing his training, he was employed at the Leipzig-Dosen sanatorium and from 1931 back in Arnsdorf. Horn had been married since 1931, and the childless marriage was divorced in 1951. From May 1937 he was a member of the NSDAP and also belonged to the DAF .

After the outbreak of World War II , he took part in the Polish and Western campaigns as a medic . From September 1940 he was stationed in the Warthegau and briefly took part in the war against the Soviet Union . After his discharge from the Wehrmacht in August 1941, he worked as a nurse again in Arnsdorf and was transferred from there to Sonnenstein. Later he was busy at the headquarters of Aktion T4 in Berlin, cataloging and taking photographs as well as creating files for the victims of the National Socialist murders. From the beginning of 1942 he worked briefly as a medic for the Todt Organization in a hospital in Minsk and returned to Berlin in the spring of 1942. There he again worked in an OT camp.

In September 1942, by order of the Aktion T4 headquarters, he was transferred to the Trawniki forced labor camp , where he completed a two-week military training course. From there he was transferred to the Treblinka extermination camp with the rank of SS-Unterscharführer, where he was deployed until mid-September 1943.

After the end of "Aktion Reinhardt", Horn was transferred to the Adriatic Coastal Operation Zone in Trieste in late 1943, as was the majority of the personnel of "Aktion Reinhardt" . Here he was a member of the " Special Department, Operation R ", which served the "extermination of Jews", the confiscation of Jewish property and the fight against partisans . In September 1944 there was another short stay in his home country and he was called up to a state rifle unit in Glauchau . After fighting in the Moravian-Ostrau area , he was taken prisoner by the Soviets, from which he was released at the end of December 1946. From Arnsdorf he finally moved to Berlin, where he was employed as a nurse again.

As part of the investigation into the crimes in the Treblinka extermination camp, Horn came into the sights of the investigative authorities and was arrested in the early 1960s. The Treblinka trial against ten defendants took place from October 12, 1964 to September 3, 1965 before the Düsseldorf Regional Court. The subject matter of the proceedings comprised the gassing of at least 700,000 predominantly Jewish people as well as the fatal abuse, shooting, slaughter and hanging of individual prisoners and also the mangling by Barry , the service dog of the camp commandant Kurt Franz . Mainly, Horn was deployed in the so-called "Pit Command", where he supervised the burial and later the burning of the corpses. Jewish survivors testify that Horn never mistreated any inmate or used his firearm. Within the SS guards, he had increasingly isolated himself with his negative attitude towards the extermination of the Jews, as the co-defendant Franz Suchomel confirmed. Horn was the only defendant to be acquitted of the putative emergency . Nothing is known about his further life.

See also

• John Demjanjuk

literature

• Henry Friedlander : The Origins of Nazi Genocide - From Euthanasia to the final Solution , Chapel Hill 1995, ISBN 0-8078-2208-6 .
• LG Düsseldorf, September 3, 1965 . In: Justice and Nazi crimes . Collection of German criminal judgments for Nazi homicidal crimes 1945–1966, Vol. XXII, edited by Irene Sagel-Grande, Adelheid L. Rüter-Ehlermann, HH Fuchs, CF Rüter . Amsterdam: University Press, 1981, No. 596, pp. 1–238 Subject matter of the proceedings: gassing of at least 700,000 predominantly Jewish men, women and children and, in a minority, also of gypsies. Fatal abuse, shooting, killing and hanging of individual prisoners as well as being mangled by 'Barry', the camp commandant's dog. ( Memento from February 22, 2013 in the web archive archive.today )

Web links

• Treblinka trial - judgment LG Düsseldorf from September 3, 1965 , (8 I Ks 2/64, Second Treblinka trial ) on www.holocaust-history.org
• Short biography and photo of Otto Horn
• Treblinka trial

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Death register of the Berlin registry office No. 305/1999.
2. ↑ ^{a b c} Treblinka Trial
3. ↑ Treblinka trial - judgment LG Düsseldorf dated September 3, 1965 ( Memento from March 21, 2014 in the web archive archive.today ), (8 I Ks 2/64, Second Treblinka trial ) on www.holocaust-history.org.