Rainer Beck (sailor)

Rainer Beck (born October 16, 1916 in Gleiwitz , † May 13, 1945 in Amsterdam ) was a German sailor and one of the last victims of Nazi military justice . Beck was of Jewish descent and deserted from the Wehrmacht to avoid the genocide of the Jews . Five days after the end of World War II, he was convicted of desertion by a German court martial with the consent of Allied authorities and executed . The death sentence was overturned in 1997.

Life

Beck grew up in Gleiwitz, where his father was police chief . As an SPD member , he lost his position in 1933 due to the law to restore the professional civil service . The front officer obtained at least a monthly pension of almost 300 Reichsmarks from the Prussian Interior Minister Hermann Göring with the threat that he would hire himself out as a street violinist with uniform and medals . But when he died in 1938, his widow Elsa was canceled because she was Jewish. Rainer was expelled from grammar school as a " half-Jew " at the age of sixteen, his sister Fredegund from university. Sister Berthilde was banned from working as a midwife. The family was publicly defamed by the rulers as a “ Jewish-Marxist plague”.

Rainer Beck went on a whaling harpooner in 1936 and got engaged in Canada, but returned when his father died to look after his mother. He was hired on a German fish steamer that was drafted into service in 1941. Beck and his team were drafted into the Navy . On his home leave in Gleiwitz, Beck demonstratively appeared in uniform to protect his family members, although he was aware that he was wearing the uniform of the people who wanted to destroy him and his family.

In September 1944 Beck was with the IJmuiden harbor protection group near Amsterdam . On September 5, 1944, he received a marching order to Germany. The connection to the mother was broken, in the Reich itself the danger of becoming a victim of the Holocaust was significantly greater for Beck. He decided to desert and hid in Amsterdam with the help of Dutch resistance fighters until the German surrender on May 8, 1945 . On May 5, 1945, the fortress of Holland had surrendered, two days later Amsterdam was liberated by Canadian troops . The nearly 3,000 members of the Navy in Amsterdam were accommodated in a former Ford factory on May 11 and 12, 1945 by Canadian orders in the Hembrook camp near Amsterdam. The Canadians appointed the former German port commander, Frigate Captain Alexander Stein , as camp commandant. He was subordinate to the Canadian Major Pierce, whose superior in turn was Major Mace. The Amsterdam branch of the Admiral's court in the Netherlands was moved to this camp at the same time. There the crews were disarmed, but officers kept their pistols, because according to the Canadian view, the Germans in Hembrook were not prisoners of war , but “surrendered troops”. The German officers were also given full command and disciplinary power, because Law No. 153 of the German Military Government of May 4, 1945 explicitly guaranteed the continued existence of the German field courts with restrictions on the sentence.

After the German surrender , Beck turned to the Canadian troops - and on May 12, 1945, together with Corporal Bruno Dörfer , who had deserted in March 1945 and who had also reported to Canadian authorities after the surrender, became the German camp commandant Hembrook surrenders. Both were arrested there for deserting . That same evening, camp commandant Alexander Stein decided to bring the naval judges Köhn and Bechtel, Beck and Dörfer to court martial. Major Pierce as well as the superior German military justice authority were informed and asked for permission. This was granted by both sides. The next morning the German court martial was chaired by Naval Chief Justice Wilhelm Köhn , and the Prosecutor was Naval Chief Justice Bechtel. Defense counsel was assigned to the defendants , so that the court martial was properly staffed according to the War Penal Procedure Code . In addition to numerous inmates, a supervisory judge of the court of the German admiral in the Netherlands and the Canadian and German camp commanders and their translators took part in the hearing. The trial lasted an hour or two. Beck and Dörfer had the opportunity to comment on the indictment. After about five minutes of deliberation, chairman Köhn announced the verdict: death by shooting for desertion. Camp commandant Stein confirmed the verdict in the afternoon. A German firing squad under the command of the German first lieutenant John Ossenbrücken was equipped with carbines and ammunition from German stocks and Canadian vehicles on Canadian orders. Accompanied by the Canadian lieutenant Swinton, the firing squad was driven with the two convicts to the shooting range in Amsterdam-Schellingwoude outside the camp, where they were both shot and buried.

These were probably the last of 23,000 executed judgments by the Nazi military justice system . Corresponding judgments afterwards were at least not known. The High Command of the Navy in Meierwik (in the special area Mürwik ) finally confirmed death sentences in northern Germany and Norway until May 15, 1945, with the subsequent demand to carry them out. Only on the day in question did the high command announce that death sentences, corporal punishment and the mere use of German weapons were prohibited on the basis of an order from the British occupying forces .

The Canadian armed forces' unusual willingness to cooperate and the generally caring treatment of surrendered Wehrmacht troops by the British and Commonwealth armed forces can be explained by the approaching Cold War and Winston Churchill's plan to partially arm the Wehrmacht again in the event of a war with the Soviet Union ( Operation Unthinkable ).

In response to Beck's sister's criminal complaint, the Cologne public prosecutor initiated an investigation against Köhn, who was now a judge at the Cologne Higher Regional Court . However, the proceedings were discontinued in 1973 due to a lack of sufficient suspicion .

At the end of 1996, the Evangelical University of Applied Sciences in Hanover , department of social knowledge, suggested resuming the court martial against Beck with the aim of acquittal. In 1997, the public prosecutor applied for a retrial with the aim of acquittal. She supported the proposal & a. insisted that Beck's Jewish descent justified the desertion. The Cologne Regional Court lifted on 19 December 1997 the verdict of the court martial, and said Beck free.

Those involved in the court martial were not prosecuted.

In 2002, the law to repeal injustice judgments in the criminal justice system repealed the judgments against deserters of the Wehrmacht. However, victims and survivors were not compensated.

literature

• Regional Court of Cologne, decision of December 19, 1997, NJW 1998, page 2688f. online (PDF; 600 kB)
• Karl-Heinz Lehmann "Not the murderer, the murdered person is guilty" - application for the retrial of a death sentence passed after the end of the war for "desertion" , Kritische Justiz , 1997, page 94ff online (PDF; 945 kB)
• “ Courts of war - humanly oppressive ”, in: Der Spiegel , 38/1966.
• Chris Madsen, Victims of Circumstance: The Execution of German Deserters by surrendered German Troops under Canadian Control in Amsterdam, May 1945 , in Canadian Military History 2 , 1993, pp. 93–113 online (PDF; 405 kB)

Movie

Die in the Dirt , Italian-Yugoslav film from 1969 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c} Stephan Scholz: A lazy head spoils the whole load , tilt 1/1997.
2. ↑ Der Spiegel : "In the interest of male discipline" , from: May 12, 1997; accessed on: September 29, 2019
3. ↑ Gerhard Paul, Broder Schwensen (Ed.): May '45. End of the war in Flensburg. Flensburg 2015, p. 109 f.