Otto Hunsche

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Heinrich Otto Hunsche (* 15. September 1911 in Recklinghausen , † 2. September 1994 in Mülheim an der Ruhr ) was a German jurist and Government in the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA). As a member of the Eichmann Sonderkommando, Hunsche was instrumental in the deportation of the Jews in Hungary and was sentenced to twelve years in prison in 1969.

biography

The son of a businessman studied law and received his doctorate . He joined the SA in 1933 and the NSDAP in 1937 and was also a member of the National Socialist Lawyers' Association from 1935 . In 1938 he worked as an assistant judge at the Elbing Regional Court . After he found employment with the Gestapo in 1939 , he worked at the Gestapo control center in Berlin from 1940 and soon afterwards as a deputy head of the Düsseldorf Gestapo. From November 1941 he worked as a deputy head of department and from autumn 1942 as a department head in the so-called Eichmannreferat (IV B 4b - law) of the RSHA under Adolf Eichmann . Its tasks included legal issues, in particular the denial of nationality and the confiscation of the property of the deportation victims. Hunsche, who was authorized to wear the uniform of an SS-Hauptsturmführer, was a participant in one of the follow-up conferences of the Wannsee Conference on the “ Final Solution of the Jewish Question ” in the RSHA in October 1942 .

Eichmann Special Command

From March to November 1944, Hunsche was a member of the Eichmann Sonderkommando , which was tasked with “eliminating and concentrating the Hungarian Jews from public life, then deporting them and exterminating them with the exception of those who were fully capable of working.” He was also in this context worked as legal advisor for "Jewish issues" in the Hungarian Ministry of the Interior. Even after the official end of the deportations, Hunsche organized the deportation of Hungarian Jews from the Kistarcsa internment camp to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp on his own responsibility .

On April 16, 1945 Otto Hunsche and Hermann Krumey accompanied the representative of the Budapest Jewish Rescue Committee, Rudolf Kasztner , to the Theresienstadt ghetto to a screening of the propaganda film “ Theresienstadt. A documentary film from the Jewish settlement area ”, in order to be able to counteract the foreign“ atrocity propaganda ”regarding the mass murder of Jews.

After the end of the war

Hunsche was arrested on May 12, 1945 on an alpine pasture near Altaussee and was then interned until 1948. After his release from the Esterwegen internment camp , he was classified as a “fellow traveler” as part of the denazification process . From 1954 Hunsche worked as a lawyer in Datteln . Hunsches brief vita was listed in the Brown Book of the GDR .

The members of the "Sonderkommando Eichmann" were investigated after the end of the war because of the deportations of the Hungarian Jews. While Adolf Eichmann in 1961 in Jerusalem was sentenced to death and later executed, Hunsche and Eichmann's deputy Krumey first came in 1957 in custody . Hunsche was sentenced to five years in prison for aiding and abetting murder in 1962 by the Frankfurt am Main regional court . Due to the pre-trial detention and other circumstances, he only had to serve two of the five years imprisonment and was released from prison in February 1963. However, the Federal Court of Justice (BGH) overturned this judgment on May 20, 1963 with the stipulation that the sentence was corrected. The process was then combined with that of Krumey and known as the Krumey-Hunsche process. In this process, Hunsche, who was defended by Hans Laternser , was acquitted on February 3, 1965. Krumey was sentenced to five years in prison. After this judgment was also overturned by the BGH, there was another trial. On August 29, 1969, Hunsche was sentenced to twelve years for aiding and abetting murder and Krumey to life imprisonment for murder.

Nothing is known about Hunsche's further life.

literature

  • Fritz Bauer , Joachim Perels and Irmtrud Wojak : The humanity of the legal order. Selected Writings. Campus Verlag, Frankfurt / Main 1998, ISBN 3-593-35841-7 .
  • Kerstin Freudiger: The legal processing of Nazi crimes . Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2002. ISBN 3-1614-7687-5 .
  • Ernst Klee : Auschwitz. Perpetrators, accomplices, victims and what became of them. A dictionary of persons . S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2013, ISBN 978-3-10-039333-3 .
  • Torben Fischer, Matthias N. Lorenz: Lexicon of "Coping with the Past" in Germany - Debate and Discourse History of National Socialism after 1945 , Transcript Verlag, Bielefeld 2007, ISBN 3899427734 .
  • Israel Gutman (Ed.): Encyclopedia of the Holocaust - The persecution and murder of European Jews , Piper Verlag, Munich / Zurich 1998, 3 volumes, ISBN 3-492-22700-7
  • Gerhard Mauz : vicious circle of blood and ink . In: Der Spiegel . No. 7 , 1965 ( online - on the judgment in the Krumey-Hunsche trial).

Individual evidence

  1. ^ City archive Mülheim an der Ruhr, holdings 1290
  2. ↑ a b c Ernst Klee: Auschwitz. Perpetrators, accomplices and victims and what became of them. A dictionary of persons. Frankfurt am Main 2013, p. 191
  3. ↑ Encyclopedia of the Holocaust ; Piper Verlag, Munich 1998, volume 2, page 628.
  4. ↑ Regional Court Frankfurt am Main Ks 1/63, p. 71, quoted from: Kerstin Freudiger: The legal processing of Nazi crimes . Tübingen 2002, p. 100.
  5. ↑ The deputy . In: Der Spiegel . No. 18 , 1964, pp. 38 ( Online - Apr. 29, 1964 ).
  6. ^ Fritz Bauer Institute (ed.): History, Reception and Effect . Campus Verlag 1996, ISBN 3593354411 , p. 334.
  7. ^ National Council of the National Front of Democratic Germany - Documentation Center of the State Archives Administration of the GDR (ed.): BRAUNBUCH - WAR AND NAZIVERBRECHER IN THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC AND IN WESTBERLIN , State Publishing House of the German Democratic Republic Berlin 1968 online ( Memento from October 14, 2008 on the Internet Archives )
  8. ^ Kerstin Freudiger: The legal processing of Nazi crimes , Tübingen 2002, p. 98.
  9. ↑ Torben Fischer, Matthias N. Lorenz: Lexicon of "Coping with the Past" in Germany - Debate and Discourse History of National Socialism after 1945 , 2007, p. 142f.
personal data
SURNAME Hunsche, Otto
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hunsche, Heinrich Otto
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German government councilor and perpetrator of the Holocaust
DATE OF BIRTH September 15, 1911
PLACE OF BIRTH Recklinghausen
DATE OF DEATH 2nd September 1994
Place of death Mülheim an der Ruhr