Robert Mulka

Robert Karl Ludwig Mulka (* 12. April 1895 in Hamburg , † 26. April 1969 ) was a German hauptsturmführer and has as adjutant of the camp commandant Rudolf Hoess instrumental in the murder of people in Auschwitz involved.

Life

Robert Mulka was the son of a postal assistant. He graduated from secondary school in Hamburg in 1911 and then trained as an export merchant with Arndt and Cohn . As a volunteer, he took part in various locations in the First World War as a soldier from August 1914 , where he rose to the rank of lieutenant in the reserve. After the war he was a member of the Baltic State Army until 1920 and took part in battles in the Baltic States . He then returned to Hamburg and in the meantime worked again in his training company until he became self-employed in 1931. Between 1928 and 1934 he was a member of the Stahlhelm, Bund der Frontsoldaten and he was also a member of the National Association of German Officers and the German Fichtebund . He had been married since 1920 and had two sons, including the sailor Rolf , and a daughter.

In 1935 he joined the Reichswehr , where he rose to senior lieutenant in the reserve. He was expelled from the Wehrmacht on account of an eight-month prison sentence for stolen goods in 1920, which he had kept secret .

Second World War

In 1940 he joined the NSDAP ( membership number 7.848.085). Since his efforts to be accepted again as an officer in the Wehrmacht failed, he successfully applied to the Waffen SS in 1941 . Initially with the rank of SS-Obersturmführer , he rose to SS-Hauptsturmführer on August 4, 1942 . After a short front-line assignment as a company commander of a pioneer unit , he was transferred to Auschwitz I concentration camp due to illness, still able to use garrisons .

In the camp he was company commander of the guard, from June 1942 to March 1943 then adjutant of the camp commandant Rudolf Höß, who was also in command of the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp . Mulka was responsible for the procurement and transport of the poison gas Zyklon B to Auschwitz and the transport of prisoners to the gas chambers . Evidently he had given the orders for murder operations on at least four transports and was present at least a few times during the " selections " on the ramp.

After a denunciation - Mulka is said to have made derogatory comments about Goebbels - he was briefly detained. However, proceedings initiated against him under the Heimtückegesetz were discontinued in early 1944. According to documents from the Nazi era, he was assigned to the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office (Office Group D - Concentration Camp) until January 19, 1944 and then to the SS Personnel Main Office until the end of August 1944 . From the beginning of September 1944 to January 19, 1945 he is said to have worked at the SS school in Rajsko and then at the SS pioneer and training replacement battalion in Dresden. Mulka himself later stated that after initiating the preliminary investigation against him, he initially stayed in an SS hospital in Berlin-Lichterfelde for several weeks . He had been suspended from work and left to go to Hamburg. At an unknown point in time after the bombing of Hamburg , he is said to have made himself available to the Higher SS and Police Leader North Sea Georg-Henning Graf von Bassewitz-Behr and to have been employed at an SS pioneer school until he went to Hamburg on leave at the beginning of January 1945 due to illness has been. At the end of the war he stayed in Hamburg.

After the end of the war he was arrested in June 1945 and held in several internment camps because of his membership of a criminal organization , the SS. At the end of March 1948 he was released from British internment. After a court hearing in Hamburg-Bergedorf , he was sentenced to one and a half years in prison, but denazified as "exonerated" after an appeal . Then he resumed his work as an export merchant in Hamburg.

Arrested and sentenced in the 1st Auschwitz trial

When the federal German judicial authorities began investigations into the crimes committed in Auschwitz from the late 1950s, Mulka was soon one of the main suspects. He was accidentally arrested in November 1960 when his previously unknown whereabouts could be determined. His son Rolf Mulka won a medal as a sailor at the 1960 Olympic Games in Rome, which made a Frankfurt public prosecutor prick up his ears. From March 1961 he was granted exemption from prison . The trial against him and (initially) 21 other members of the guards at the Auschwitz concentration camp, the so-called 1st Auschwitz Trial ("criminal case against Mulka and others", Az. 4 Ks 2/63), began on December 20, 1963 before the Frankfurt jury . The public prosecutor Joachim Kügler , who was involved in the preparations for the trial and who was also the clerk in the investigation against the concentration camp doctor Josef Mengele and who left the Hessian judicial service in 1965 after the trial was over, reported Mulka for insulting him because he was "a member of a uniformed murder squads ”. In court, Mulka claimed to have known nothing about the gassings in the camp. After 183 days of trial, the verdicts were pronounced on August 19 and 20, 1965. Mulka was sentenced to 14 years imprisonment for "joint aiding and abetting community murder in at least four cases of at least 750 people each" .

For the legal assessment, the court had to decide whether the accused had acted as a perpetrator , i.e. with intent with regard to the main offense , or as an assistant . Mulka was only convicted as an assistant because the court believed it could not prove the perpetrator's will. In the judgment it said:

“When weighing all of these points of view, there remains a considerable suspicion that the defendant Mulka, as adjutant, inwardly affirmed the mass killing of the Jews and willingly supported them, thus acting with the will of the perpetrator; Last doubts cannot be dispelled, however, that he was more concerned with the smooth execution of the extermination actions out of a submission to orders and a misunderstood view of duty, and thus only wanted to promote and support the acts of the main perpetrators.

Mulka survived a suicide attempt in the Kassel prison . In 1966 he was released early because of incapacity for prison.

exhibition

• Auschwitz Trial 4 Ks 2/63 Frankfurt / M (“Criminal case against Mulka and others”) Exhibition by the Fritz Bauer Institute

literature

• Bernd Naumann : Auschwitz. Report on the criminal case against Mulka et al. a. before the jury court Frankfurt , Frankfurt a. M., Bonn: Athenaeum, 1965.
• Ebbo Demant (Ed.): Auschwitz - “Right off the ramp ... Kaduk, Erber, Klehr; 3 perpetrators put on record ”. Rowohlt-Verlag, Hamburg 1979, ISBN 3-499-14438-7 .
• Fritz Bauer Institute (Ed.): The Auschwitz Trial. Tape recordings, minutes, documents. DVD-ROM, Directmedia Publishing, Berlin 2004. ISBN 3-89853-501-0 .
• 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 .
• Hermann Langbein : People in Auschwitz. Frankfurt am Main, Berlin Vienna, Ullstein-Verlag, 1980, ISBN 3-54833014-2 .
• Peter Weiss : The investigation , oratorio in 11 songs. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2008, ISBN 978-3-518-41989-2 (first 1965)

Web links

• Hans Michael Kloth: My neighbor, the concentration camp commandant. In: Spiegel online from Jan. 21, 2008
• Short portrait of Robert Mulka at www.auschwitz-prozess-frankfurt.de
• Short biography and photo of Robert Mulka at www.auschwitz-prozess-frankfurt.de
• Fritz Bauer Institute: Public Prosecutor Kügler's plea on Mulka and Höcker . 1. Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial »Criminal case against Mulka u. a. «, 4 Ks 2/63, Regional Court Frankfurt am Main, 159th day of the hearing, May 17, 1965

Individual evidence

1. ^ Fritz Bauer Institute: Plea of ​​the public prosecutor Kügler on Mulka and Höcker . 1. Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial »Criminal case against Mulka u. a. «, 4 Ks 2/63, Regional Court Frankfurt am Main, 159th day of the hearing, May 17, 1965
2. ↑ Auschwitz Trial - Judgment. LG Frankfurt / Main from 19./20. August 1965, 4 Ks 2/63
3. ↑ Die Welt: The mass murderer from Isestrasse
4. ↑ Werner Renz: Auschwitz before court: The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial (1963-1965), on the website of the Fritz Bauer Institute, accessed on January 25, 2015
5. ↑ Auschwitz Trial - Did you know about the gassings? . on stern.de from January 12, 2005
6. ↑ See Judicial and Nazi Crimes Judgments. Collection of German convictions for Nazi homicidal crimes 1945–1966. Edited by CF Rüter u. a. Amsterdam: University Press Amsterdam, 1979, Vol. XXI, No. 595, p. 144. - Likewise in: Friedrich-Martin Balzer, Werner Renz (Ed.): The judgment in the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial (1963–1965). Bonn: Pahl-Rugenstein Verlag, 2004, p. 121 f. and The Auschwitz Trial. Tape recordings, minutes and documents. Edited by the Fritz Bauer Institute and the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. DVD-ROM (digital library, vol. 101), Directmedia Publishing, 2nd, reviewed a. improved edition, Berlin 2005, p. 37.347 f.
7. ↑ Gerhard Ziegler: Too sick for prison? Robert Mulka incapable of custody - necessary addendum to the Auschwitz trial Die Zeit , July 15, 1966, updated on November 21, 2012