Robert Kempner

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Robert Max Wasilii Kempner (born October 17, 1899 in Freiburg im Breisgau , † August 15, 1993 in Königstein im Taunus ) (pseudonym Eike von Repkow) was a German lawyer . The Prussian civil servant was dismissed by the National Socialists in 1933 and emigrated to the USA. At the Nuremberg war crimes trials , he worked as deputy to the American chief prosecutor Robert H. Jackson . A Kempner employee found the so-called Wannsee Protocol in March 1947 , in which the planned organization for the “ final solution to the Jewish question ” was recorded in writing. In the period that followed, Kempner was committed to punishing National Socialist perpetrators and compensating the victims.

The first page of the Wannsee protocol. Found in Undersecretary Luther's files .

Life

Adolescent years

Robert Kempner was the eldest of three children of the Jewish academic couple Walter Kempner (1869–1920) and Lydia Rabinowitsch-Kempner (1871–1935), the second German professor. Kempner's godfather was Robert Koch , at whose institute for infectious diseases the parents met. His brother Walter was a doctor and a member of the George Circle . As a law student , he attended the trial of Soghomon Tehlirian as an observer . The Armenian had gunned down the former Ottoman Minister of the Interior, Talât Pasha, who was one of the main culprits in the Armenian genocide . He later said of the proceedings that "genocide can be fought by foreign states and is not an impermissible interference in internal affairs".

After studying in Freiburg im Breisgau , he first worked as a public prosecutor in Berlin. In 1928 he moved to the Prussian Ministry of the Interior . Already at this time Kempner was involved in the Republican Judges' Association and warned of the emergence of National Socialism . Attempts to bring Adolf Hitler to court for high treason and to have the NSDAP banned failed because of the obstruction of Hitler's sympathizers in the authorities. During this time, Kempner wrote several writings against Hitler and National Socialism (including a memorandum against the NSDAP and the prelude to the Third Reich (1932)). The book Justizdämmerung was published in 1932 under a pseudonym because Kempner had to maintain neutrality as an employee of the Prussian Ministry of the Interior.

1933 to 1945

After the transfer of power to the National Socialists in January 1933, Kempner was dismissed from the civil service because of “political unreliability in unity with continued Jewry”. In 1935 he married his second wife Ruth Lydia Hahn . Shortly afterwards, Kempner was arrested. Due to international protests, he was released shortly afterwards and fled to Italy . From April 1936, together with Werner Peiser , he was the successor to Moritz Goldstein and headed the Florence country school home . His work there, especially his behavior towards Wolfgang Wasow and the Manasse couple , was not without controversy. When the school had to close in 1938, Peiser and Kempner were still able to travel to Nice with some of the students and continue school operations there for a short time.

Kempner prepared his move to the USA through a friend of his mother's living in the USA, which he was able to enter on September 1, 1939. He was then in the United States government advisor to the Roosevelt government ( Franklin D. Roosevelt had become US President in 1933) and from 1943 a member of the United Nations War Crimes Commission .

Nuremberg Trials

When the Second World War ended in Europe, Kempner became the United States' deputy chief prosecutor in the Nuremberg trial of the major war criminals in 1945/1946 . In 1947/1948 he performed the same function in the so-called Wilhelmstrasse Trial (official name: "The United States of America vs. Ernst von Weizsäcker et al.") Against 21 officials from the Foreign Office .

Parkfriedhof Lichterfelde

Commitment to human rights

Kempner stayed in Germany after the end of his work as part of the Nuremberg Trials . He established himself as a lawyer in Frankfurt am Main in 1951 . As a lawyer, he dealt with the Nazi era in a large number of lawsuits in which he acted as a joint plaintiff for the punishment of the perpetrators. With the help of civil litigation, he obtained compensation for victims of National Socialism . Among other things, he represented the brother of Marinus van der Lubbe, who was sentenced to death for the fire in the Reichstag, in the retrial. In the Eichmann trial in the early 1960s he assisted the Israeli prosecutors in collecting evidence against Adolf Eichmann .

Kempner remained politically active into old age with publications and books and campaigned for democracy and human rights . A letter to the spokesman for the board of directors of Deutsche Bank ultimately initiated the compensation payments of the German economy for the Nazi forced labor (see also: Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future” ). He died at the age of 93 in Königstein im Taunus .

Kempner was buried in the Lichterfelde Park Cemetery in Berlin-Lichterfelde . The grave site in Dept. 4a-2 is one of the honor graves of the State of Berlin .

Criticism of Kempner

Critics accuse Kempner of emphasizing his own historical significance too much, and they criticize his "anecdotal [s] from memory reports", which led to vague and ambiguous formulations and numerous errors. In his book Eichmann und Accomplices , Kempner published the Wannsee Protocol for the first time as a facsimile, but used montages of copies and facsimiles without disclosing this at any point. This gave Holocaust deniers an opportunity to question this source .

The head of the document control department in Nuremberg, Fred Niebergall, gave Kempner a blanket power of attorney and allowed him to “take material from the Nuremberg war crimes trials and keep them for research and study purposes, for writing and for lectures.” Although no such authorization can be a legally tenable basis "for an illegal appropriation of state property", numerous documents remained in his private possession until Kempner's death. Even after 1993, there was uncertainty for years about the scope and whereabouts of documents. This included a large part of Alfred Rosenberg's diary notes, which Kempner probably wanted to use for his own publications. Kempner is criticized for this “dubious appropriation” or “illegal appropriation of his treasure trove of documents”.

Awards

Fonts

  • Justice twilight: prelude to the Third Reich. Under the pseudonym Eike von Repkow. Volksfunk-Verlag, JHW ​​Dietz Verlag, Berlin 1932, DNB 572974132 . Kempner was only able to publish the article anonymously in 1932 because he was employed by the Prussian Ministry of the Interior. In 1963 there was a self-published photo-mechanical reprint in the Federal Republic of Germany.
  • with Carl Haensel : The verdict in the Wilhelmstrasse trial . Schwäbisch Gmünd 1950, DNB 455191344 .
  • Eichmann and accomplices. Zurich / Stuttgart / Vienna 1961, DNB 452379245 .
  • SS cross-examined. Munich 1964. New edition: Nördlingen 1987, DNB 452379261 .
  • Edith Stein and Anne Frank . Two in a hundred thousand. The revelations about the Nazi crimes in Holland before the jury in Munich. The murder of non- Aryan monks and nuns, Freiburg 1968, DNB 457181761 .
  • The Third Reich under cross-examination. From the unpublished interrogation protocols of Prosecutor Robert MW Kempner. Munich-Esslingen 1969, DNB 456489118 . New edition: Athenaeum / Droste Taschenbücher Geschichte, Düsseldorf 1980; with an introduction by Horst Möller . Herbig, Munich 2005.
  • American military courts in Germany. In: Hans-Jochen Vogel , Helmut Simon , Adalbert Podlech (ed.): The freedom of the other. Festschrift for Martin Hirsch . Baden-Baden 1981, ISBN 3-7890-0699-8 , pp. 145-163.
  • with Jörg Friedrich : Prosecutor of an era. Life memories. Ullstein, Frankfurt am Main / Berlin 1983, ISBN 3-550-07961-3 ; Paperback edition: (= Ullstein-Buch. Nr. 44076) Ullstein, Frankfurt am Main / Berlin 1986, ISBN 3-548-33076-2 (the book contains a detailed list of sources in the appendix).

literature

Web links

Commons : Robert Kempner  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Robert MW Kempner: Prosecutor of an Era - Memoirs of Life (= Ullstein book. No. 44076) Ullstein, Frankfurt am Main 1986, ISBN 3-548-33076-2 , p. 310 f. That employee was Kenneth Duke. “I was immediately alarmed” . In: Der Spiegel . No. 7 , 2002, p. 50 ( Online - Feb. 9, 2002 ). / Letter from Kempner: (January 19, 1992) ( Memento of March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Discovery of the Wannsee Protocol
  2. ^ Wiegrefe, Klaus: Genocide against the Armenians: "They had to undress and were all killed" , in: SPIEGEL ONLINE, accessed on June 2, 2016.
  3. ↑ Irmtraud Ubbens: The country school home in Florence. In: Childhood and Youth in Exile - A Generation Issue. (= Exile research. An International Yearbook. Volume 24). edition text + kritik, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-88377-844-3 , pp. 130-131.
  4. ↑ Irmtraud Ubbens: The country school home in Florence. In: Childhood and Youth in Exile - A Generation Issue. (= Exile research. An International Yearbook. Volume 24). edition text + kritik, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-88377-844-3 , p. 125.
  5. ^ Robert MW Kempner: Prosecutor of an Era. P. 147.
  6. ↑ Christian Mentel: The protocol of the Wannsee conference. In: Norbert Kampe, Peter Klein (ed.): The Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942 - documents, research status, controversies . Cologne 2013, ISBN 978-3-412-21070-0 , p. 123.
  7. ^ Robert Kempner: Eichmann and accomplices. Zurich 1961.
  8. ↑ Christian Mentel: The protocol of the Wannsee conference. In: Norbert Kampe, Peter Klein (ed.): The Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942 - documents, research status, controversies . Cologne 2013, ISBN 978-3-412-21070-0 , p. 126.
  9. ↑ Jürgen Matthäus, Frank Bajohr (Ed.): Alfred Rosenberg - The diaries 1934-1944. Frankfurt am Main 2018, ISBN 978-3-596-03281-5 , p. 32.
  10. ↑ Jürgen Matthäus, Frank Bajohr (Ed.): Alfred Rosenberg - The diaries 1934-1944. Frankfurt am Main 2018, ISBN 978-3-596-03281-5 , pp. 33 and 36.
personal data
SURNAME Kempner, Robert
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Kempner, Robert Max Wasilii
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-Jewish lawyer and attorney
DATE OF BIRTH October 17, 1899
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH August 15, 1993
Place of death Königstein im Taunus