Rudolf Aschenauer

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Rudolf Aschenauer (right) in the Einsatzgruppen trial (1947/48)

Rudolf Aschenauer (born December 21, 1913 in Regensburg ; † January 28, 1983 in Nuremberg ) was a German lawyer . He became known as a criminal defense attorney in war crimes trials and Nazi trials after the end of World War II . Aschenauer represented hundreds of accused war criminals , including Otto Ohlendorf in the Einsatzgruppen trial , Walther Funk during his detention in Spandau and Wilhelm Boger in the Auschwitz trial . Aschenauer was active as a publicist, organizer and chairman of the " Silent Aid " for many years in the right-wing extremist spectrum.

Life

time of the nationalsocialism

The son of a Reichsbahnwerkmeister attended the Theresien-Gymnasium in Munich from 1928 and joined the Marian Student Congregation Westend. From 1933 he was a member of the SA , which he had to leave after a year for health reasons. From 1934 he studied law at the Munich Ludwig Maximilians University , joined the NSDStB and belonged to the Catholic student association K.St.V. Ottonia Munich in the Cartel Association of Catholic German Student Associations . He adhered to a radical nationalism with ethnic connotations. As a schoolboy, Aschenauer was already active in the Association for Germans Abroad (VDA), whose events he organized in Munich from 1934. In 1938 and 1941, Aschenauer passed the state legal examinations with "sufficient" marks. On May 1, 1938, he joined the NSDAP . He was in his local NSDAP branch block leader and responsible for matters hostile to the people and the state. In his court case in 1946, Aschenauer claimed that he had left the party in 1941. The archivist Christoph Bachmann accepted this admission. For the historian Jens Westemeier, Aschenauer lied that “the beams bent”. Hubert Seliger points out that Aschenauers' alleged resignation from the party because of Gestapo surveillance of a related priest was not substantiated in the arbitration chamber proceedings.

Drafted into the Wehrmacht on April 1, 1941, Aschenauer came to an artillery unit on Lake Ladoga as an auxiliary interpreter and paymaster. Aschenauer also worked from 1939 to 1945 for the Reich Propaganda Office in Munich-Upper Bavaria, to which he was considered a "reliable, ready-to-use and usable National Socialist" who "stands up for movement and the state at all times". After he was initially classified as a "minor offender" in an arbitration chamber proceedings in 1946, he succeeded by an objection to be denazified as "exonerated" (group IV) on July 8, 1947 .

Defender of Nazi perpetrators

After his release from captivity, the assessor Aschenauer first carried out cleaning work in the library of the Munich Regional Court . On April 24, 1946 he became one of the SA's official defenders before the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg . He then became a clerk at the Munich II public prosecutor's office, but on May 7, 1947, he entered the legal trial service with the lawyer and politician Fritz Schäffer . In the Einsatzgruppen trial in 1947, Aschenauer was the defender of Otto Ohlendorf , the most prominent defendant in the trial. He argued that mass executions were preventive measures against an attack by the Bolsheviks on the German Reich ( putativnothilfe ). Up until the execution of Ohlendorf in 1951, Aschenauer tried to obtain a revision of the sentence or a pardon. After training assignment to the firm Fritz Schaffer in Munich he received an on Feb. 1, 1949 Admitted to the bar .

Between 1948 and 1953 Aschenauer stood up as one of several lawyers for Walther Funk, who was sentenced to life imprisonment in the Nuremberg trial of the main war criminals in 1946 . Funk's wife Louise had commissioned him to do this; Aschenauer did not have a mandate from Funk himself, since corresponding letters from Funk to Aschenauer's office were withheld by the Soviet management of the Spandau war crimes prison .

In 1949 Aschenauer contacted (presumably with the help of German-Americans from Wisconsin ) the then largely unknown Senator Joseph McCarthy at the national level in the USA and claimed that the conviction in the Malmedy trial only came about with the help of confessions extorted through torture . McCarthy made these allegations in a US Senate hearing in May 1949. Aschenauer, in turn, used this hearing as evidence for publications in the German press which questioned the legality of all judgments against war criminals.

Aschenauer received his doctorate in law in 1949 from the University of Erlangen with a dissertation on the jurisdiction of the American military courts in Nuremberg. The work was supervised by the canon lawyer Franz Tibor Hollós . Aschenauer made the arguments of Otto Ohlendorf's defense his own. Hubert Seliger sees evidence that the briefs in this process were not written by Aschenauer, but by Reinhart Maurach or the RSHA lawyer Heinrich Malz . At least many of Aschenauer's later pamphlets were written by Malz.

On the initiative of Aschenauer and Georg Fröschmann , the “ Committee for Church Aid for Prisoners ” was founded in 1949 . The founding meeting took place on November 26, 1949 in the Archbishop's Office in Munich. In addition to Aschenauer, the auxiliary bishop Neuhäusler , cathedral capitular Thalhamer and other high church officials took part in the meeting. The former RSHA employee Heinrich Malz took over the office management . In the Landsberg am Lech war crimes prison , Aschenauer looked after 57 clients, including those convicted of the Dachau Malmedy Trial in 1946, but not Joachim Peiper . He organized petitions to the federal government and published justifications that were financed by the veterans' organization of the Waffen-SS , the mutual aid community of members of the former Waffen-SS .

Aschenauer was a member of the “Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Recht und Wirtschaft”, Munich, which also operated press work and support for accused and convicted war criminals. From 1950 to 1953 he published the magazine The Other Side , the editor of which was the Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Recht und Wirtschaft. From 1949 onwards, Aschenauer also took part in the quarterly meetings of the Heidelberg Juristenkreis , which coordinated the revision of the judgments from the allied war criminals and Nazi trials . In 1951 Aschenauer was a member of the founding board of the association " Silent Help for Prisoners of War and Internees ", another association with this aim. Aschenauer appeared as a lawyer and as a shop steward for the Socialist Reich Party (SRP), which was banned in 1952 . However, at the time he was (since the spring of 1952) an employee of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution and the “Catholic Intelligence Service” as well as for the Naumann group , a network z. T. formerly a leading National Socialist, active. In the endeavor of the Naumann Group to develop the German Reich Party into a national rallying party for the 1953 Bundestag elections, all attempts by the leadership of the banned Socialist Reich Party to reorganize initially “failed” . Aschenauer was involved or informed about these experiments. Aschenauer had excellent contacts through the “Catholic Intelligence Service”, including Adenauer, whom he even represented a year later in a trial brought against Adenauer by the German Reich Party. Since leading members of the Naumann group were arrested by the British secret service in the spring of 1953, the desired national gathering party no longer came about.

In 1958 Aschenauer defended the main defendant Werner Hersmann in the Ulm Einsatzgruppen trial . In 1960 he was the defense attorney for Max Simon , who was charged in the so-called Ansbach trial for the murder of the men from Brettheim who disarmed the Hitler Youth shortly before the end of the war . Aschenauer obtained an acquittal in the first instance because the court martial judgments were formally correct; this judgment was later overturned by the Federal Court of Justice.

In 1964, Aschenauer was defender of Karl Wolff before the Munich II regional court , who was charged with aiding and abetting the murder of 300,000 Jews. In 1965 he defended the main defendant Wilhelm Boger in the Auschwitz trial . Aschenauer appeared in 1968 together with the lawyer Sauer as defense lawyer for Wilhelm Rosenbaum , who was charged with the collective murder of Jewish women, children and men in 169 cases in the SD school in Bad Rabka.

In 1977 Aschenauer was chairman of the "right-wing" Society for German Cultural Relations Abroad (VDA) and published in the right-wing extremist magazine " Nation und Europa ". Aschenauer's published books were either self-published or in the right-wing extremist publishing company Berg or in Damm-Verlag , Munich, which also published JG Burg , the Holocaust denier Rassinier and the convicted war criminal Rendulic .

Publications

As an author

  • On the question of a revision of the war crimes trials . Self-published by Rudolf Aschenauer, Nuremberg 1949.
  • On the Law and Truth in the Malmedy Case - A Statement on the Report of an Inquiry Committee of the American Senate into the Malmedy Trial . Self-published by Rudolf Aschenauer, Nuremberg 1950.
  • Landsberg - a documentary report from the German side . Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Recht und Wirtschaft, Munich 1951. (About the Landsberg correctional facility , where the prisoners from the Nazi trials were held.)
  • Power versus Law - Unknown material from the American and British war criminal practice . Working Group for Law and Economics, Munich 5, 1952
  • The Malmedy case - 7 years after the verdict . Self-published by Rudolf Aschenauer, Munich 1953
  • The Schörner case - a clarification . Self-published by Rudolf Aschenauer, Munich 1962. (About the case of Ferdinand Schörner .)
  • The Herbert Kappler case - a plea for law, truth and understanding . Damm-Verlag, Munich 1968
  • About truth and justice in the Herbert Kappler case . Damm-Verlag, Munich 1969. (About Herbert Kappler, represented by Aschenauer .)
  • The Reder case - a plea for law and truth . Vowinckel-Verlag , Berg am See 1978. ISBN 3-921625-13-0 . (A document about the case of SS-Sturmbannführer Walter Reder , who was convicted in Italy, but who was not defended by Aschenauer, but by the Italian lawyer Schiró and his German colleague Claus-Joachim von Heydebreck .)
  • The Germans Abroad - 100 Years of National Work, Achievement and Fate . Türmer-Verlag , Berg / Starnberger See 1981. ISBN 3-87829-065-9 .
  • War without borders - the partisan struggle against Germany 1939–1945 . Druffel-Verlag , Leoni am Starnberger See 1982, ISBN 3-8061-1017-4 .

As editor

literature

  • Christoph Bachmann: Guilt and Atonement? The prosecution of Nazi crimes by the Upper Bavarian judicial authorities and their archival processing in the Munich State Archives , in: ZBLG Volume 68 (2005), p. 1163ff.
  • Beate Baldow: Episode or Danger - The Naumann Affair ; Dissertation; FU Berlin 2012. ( PDF , 2.17 MB)
  • Hilary Earl: The Nuremberg SS-Einsatzgruppen Trial, 1945–1958: Atrocity, Law, and History . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2009, ISBN 978-0-521-45608-1 .
  • Norbert Frei : Politics of the past: the beginnings of the Federal Republic and the Nazi past . Beck, Munich 1996, ISBN 3-406-41310-2 .
  • Oliver Schröm and Andrea Röpke: Silent help for brown comrades: the secret network of old and neo-Nazis . Ch. Links Verlag, Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-86153-266-2 .
  • Hubert Seliger: Political lawyers? The defenders of the Nuremberg trials . Nomos, Baden-Baden 2016.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Precise life data from: Europa Ethnica , Volume 40, 1983
  2. ↑ Martin A. Lee names Aschenauer in The Beast Reawakens , Taylor & Francis, 1999, ISBN 0-415-92546-0 , an attorney with close ties to Remer's SRP and the postwar Nazi underground (p. 70), pro-Nazi attorney (P. 83) and West Germany's big-wheel ultranationalist attorney (p. 88). Analogous translation: Lawyer with close ties to Remers SRP and the old Nazi underground movement , pro-Nazi lawyer, West Germany's influential, nationalist lawyer .
  3. ↑ a b c Christoph Bachmann: Guilt and atonement? The prosecution of Nazi crimes by the Upper Bavarian judicial authorities and their archival processing in the Munich State Archives . In: Zeitschrift für Bayerische Landesgeschichte 68 (2005), pp. 1135–1179, here pp. 1163 f.
  4. ↑ a b c d Jens Westemeier: Himmler's warriors. Joachim Peiper and the Waffen-SS in the war and the post-war period. Partly zugl .: Potsdam, Univ., Diss., 2009. Schöningh, Paderborn 2014, ISBN 9783506772411 , p. 480.
  5. ↑ Hubert Seliger: Political Lawyers? The defenders of the Nuremberg trials . Nomos, Baden-Baden 2016, p. 74.
  6. ^ A b Hubert Seliger: Political lawyers? The defenders of the Nuremberg trials . Nomos, Baden-Baden 2016, p. 75.
  7. ^ Hilary Earl: The Nuremberg SS-Einsatzgruppen Trial . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2009, p. 271.
  8. ↑ Oliver Schröm and Andrea Röpke: Silent help for brown comrades: the secret network of old and neo-Nazis . Ch. Links, Berlin 2002, pp. 79-80.
  9. ↑ Hubert Seliger: Political Lawyers? The defenders of the Nuremberg trials . Nomos, Baden-Baden 2016, p. 191.
  10. ↑ Hubert Seliger: Political Lawyers? The defenders of the Nuremberg trials . Nomos, Baden-Baden 2016, p. 206.
  11. ^ Trials of War Criminals Before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals Under Control Council Law No. 10: United States of America vs. Otto Ohlendorf, et al. (Case 9: “Einsatzgruppen Case”). In: Vol. 4, p. 54. 1950, accessed on May 29, 2020 .
  12. Jump up ↑ Norman JW Goda: Tales from Spandau: Nazi criminals and the Cold War . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2007, ISBN 0-521-86720-7 , pp. 65-66.
  13. ↑ Richard Rovere Halworth: Senator Joe McCarthy . University of California Press, Berkeley 1996, ISBN 0-520-20472-7 , p. 112. (Reprint of the original edition published by Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, New York 1959.)
  14. ↑ To the problem of judicial review right and judicial criminal liability with special consideration of the case law at the American military courts in Nuremberg . 1949. (Dissertation.) Erlangen, Jur. F., Diss. V. Nov 15, 1949
  15. ↑ Hubert Seliger: Political Lawyers? The defenders of the Nuremberg trials . Nomos, Baden-Baden 2016, p. 351 f.
  16. ↑ Ernst Klee : [1] . In: Die ZEIT, No. 9/1992 of February 21, 1992.
  17. ^ Jens Westemeier: Himmler's warriors. Joachim Peiper and the Waffen-SS in the war and the post-war period. Partly zugl .: Potsdam, Univ., Diss., 2009. Schöningh, Paderborn 2014, ISBN 9783506772411 , p. 481.
  18. ↑ Martin A. Lee: The Beast Reawakens . Routledge, London 1999, ISBN 0-415-92546-0 , p. 88.
  19. ↑ Entry on The Other Side : ZDB -ID 704952-3 .
  20. ↑ Norbert Frei: Politics of the Past . Beck, Munich 1996, pp. 163-167.
  21. ↑ a b Beate Baldow: Episode or Danger - The Naumann Affair , p. 176, note 1075.
  22. ↑ The Naumann group, exposed in the spring of 1953 by the British secret service, but without legal consequences, rejected the SRP as counterproductive and Baldow therefore suspects that Aschenauer z. B. could have informed the Spiegel about a planned "cover organization" (Der Spiegel No. 33 of August 13, 1952, p. 7; When the ban comes. ) Beate Baldow: Episode or Danger - The Naumann Affair , p. 176 , Note 1075 - after the Naumann group was unmasked, SRP members suddenly managed to campaign for the former SRP chairman Fritz Dorls as a German rebuilding association in Lower Saxony and Hesse.
  23. ↑ Der Spiegel No. 44/1954; "When nobody talks about it." [2]
  24. ↑ Ulm history (s): 'The Ulm Trial'
  25. ↑ Simon defense attorney pleads for acquittal . In: "Hamburger Abendblatt", No. 215 of July 16, 1960, p. 1.
  26. ↑ Today plea in the Wolff trial , dpa report. In: "Hamburger Abendblatt", No. 215 of September 15, 1964, p. 1.
  27. ↑ final word in the Hamburg trial by jury . In: Hamburger Abendblatt, No. 185 of August 10, 1968, p. 5.
  28. ↑ Runs well . In: Der Spiegel . No. 42 , 1977, pp. 60 ( online - 10 October 1977 ).
personal data
SURNAME Aschenauer, Rudolf
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German lawyer
DATE OF BIRTH December 21, 1913
PLACE OF BIRTH regensburg
DATE OF DEATH January 28, 1983
Place of death Nuremberg