Otto Steinbrinck

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Otto Steinbrinck during the Nuremberg Trials on February 14, 1947.

Otto Steinbrinck (born December 19, 1888 in Lippstadt , † August 16, 1949 in Landsberg am Lech ) was a German naval officer , industrialist and convicted defendant in the Nuremberg Flick Trial .

Life

The son of a teacher joined the Imperial Navy as a midshipman on April 3, 1907 and served on several submarines from 1911 . In 1911 he became a lieutenant at sea. During the First World War , Steinbrinck was in command of the submarines U 6 , UB 10 , UB 18 , UB 57 and UC 65 , with which he was usually assigned to the U-Flotilla Flanders and was able to sink a total of 216 enemy ships with over 230,000 GRT on 24 operations . Among them was the English cruiser Ariadne . On March 29, 1916 he was awarded the order Pour le Mérite . He was the most successful of the so-called "Flanders commanders". In April 1918 he became an admiral staff officer in the staff of the commander of the submarines in Flanders.

In 1917 he married Lola Vogelsang.

After the end of the war, he retired from active service with the rank of lieutenant commander , as Germany was prohibited from owning submarines by the Treaty of Versailles . Steinbrinck worked in the Armistice Commission and then as deputy managing director and syndic of the Association of German Iron and Steel Industries under Jakob Reichert ; There he was responsible for economic, foreign trade and transport policy and also participated in the preparation of the peace treaty. Friedrich Flick read his paper on the economic situation in Upper Silesia in 1920 in the run-up to the referendum. In 1923 Flick offered him a new position, which he refused and instead took a managerial position at Linke-Hofmann-Lauchhammer AG under the director Friedrich Möller. From February 1925 he was the private secretary of General Director Friedrich Flick; later he rose to vice-president. Steinbrinck also worked as a board member in numerous companies. After the founding of Flick KG, Steinbrinck acted as general representative for the Flick Group from 1937 to 1939. As early as 1933 Steinbrinck spoke to Flick about his separation from the group and in 1936 he gave up tasks due to work overload until he finally quit in 1939. This should have been preceded by a falling out between the wives. Odilo Burkart and Bernhard Weiß took over his field of activity at Flick, the steel and coal sectors as well as the processing industry .

On May 1, 1933, he joined the NSDAP ( membership number 2.638.206), became SS-Standartenführer on May 30, 1933 (SS number 63.084) and in April 1935 SS-Oberführer . He also became a member of the so-called Freundeskreis Reichsführer SS and persuaded Friedrich Flick to become a member of this Freundeskreis. Friedrich Flick used Steinbrinck as a "liaison officer" because of his excellent contacts with the military, ministries, the NSDAP and the SS. In April 1938 Steinbrinck became military economic leader and from January 1939 SS brigade leader (comparable to the rank of major general ). He was the bearer of the SS ring of honor , the badge of honor of the Reichsführer SS and was presented with the Julleuchter .

Steinbrinck was a guest in Heinrich Himmler's apartment in Munich several times . Himmler invited him to his home for a weekend in October 1933.

When he left the Flick Group in the summer of 1939, he acted as a trustee of the Thyssen assets from December of that year . Shortly before, he had been reactivated as a frigate captain . From 1940 he was on the supervisory board of the United Stahlwerke AG , in which Thyssen owned the majority of shares, and was deputy chairman there until the end of the war.

From May 1940 to March 1942 Steinbrinck worked as a general representative for the steel industry in Luxembourg , Belgium and France . Since April 1941 he was a member of the Presidium of the Reichsvereinigung coal and was from March 1942 until the evacuation of the western occupation areas in autumn 1944 as their general representative responsible for the coal mining and the coal industry in Holland , Belgium and France, the so-called Beko (command command) West .

Shortly before the end of the war, Steinbrinck operated in April 1945 as a liaison between the Ruhr industry and Army Group B under Field Marshal Walter Model .

judgment

On August 30, 1945, Steinbrinck was arrested by the Americans and indicted in Nuremberg in the Flick trial. There he suffered a heart attack on the second day of the trial and was absent for the first week of the trial. Steinbrinck was charged on several counts and defended by Hans Flächsner , who was also Albert Speer's lawyer. Steinbrinck was the only one charged in the Flick trial for membership in a criminal organization , the SS. Steinbrinck claimed in the court proceedings that he had only joined the SS and NSDAP for the good of the group. On the contrary, he only did this to lessen the anti-capitalist and anti-corporate sentiment of the NSDAP against the Flick concern. The award of the SS ranks was made by Göring on the basis of his public esteem and he did not know anything about the crimes of the SS. The indictment stated:

"The participation of Flick, Steinbrinck and Kaletsch in the draft of a general Aryanization law proves with all desirable clarity their participation in the general process of making life in Germany impossible for Jews."

- From the indictment of the Flick trial

On December 22, 1947, he was sentenced to five years in prison.

Steinbrinck's defense attorney, Hans Flächsner, stated in a letter to Steinbrinck's wife that the verdict on the charges of slave labor and Aryanization was a “ very cheap ” solution. Shortly before the start of the general wave of pardons, Steinbrinck died in custody.

literature

  • Johannes Bähr et al .: The Flick Group in the Third Reich. Edited by Institute for Contemporary History Munich-Berlin on behalf of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation. Oldenbourger Wissenschaftsverlag, Munich 2008. ISBN 978-3-486-58683-1 .
  • Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. Fischer Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt am Main 2003, ISBN 3-10-039309-0 .
  • Susanne Jung: Legal Problems of the Nuremberg Trials. Depicted in the trial against Friedrich Flick . Tübingen 1992. ISBN 978-3-16-145941-2 . Partly available online: Nuremberg Trials

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Werner von Langsdorff: U-Boats am Feind, Gütersloh 1937, p. 321
  2. ↑ uboat.net Otto Steinbrinck
  3. ^ Andreas Michelsen : The U-Boat War 1914-1918 , v. Hase & Koehler Verlag, Leipzig 1925, p. 200
  4. ^ Bähr: Flick Group. P. 184
  5. ↑ a b Susanne Jung: legal problems. P. 27
  6. ^ Bähr: Flick Group. P. 186
  7. ↑ Susanne Jung: Legal Problems. P. 28
  8. ↑ Manfred Ohlsen: Billions for the vulture. or The Fall of the Peaceful Flick . Berlin 1985, p. 208.
  9. ↑ Susanne Jung: Legal Problems. P. 33
  10. ↑ Susanne Jung: Legal Problems. P. 74
  11. ↑ Thomas Ramge: Die Flicks: a German family story about money, power and politics . Campus Verlag Frankfurt / New York, 2004. ISBN 3-593-37404-8 . P. 110. Online partial view
  12. ^ Bähr: Flick Group. P. 644
personal data
SURNAME Steinbrinck, Otto
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German naval officer, industrialist and defendant in the Nuremberg Flick Trial
DATE OF BIRTH December 19, 1888
PLACE OF BIRTH Lippstadt
DATE OF DEATH August 16, 1949
Place of death Landsberg am Lech