Rudolf Brandt (lawyer)

Rudolf Brandt as a defendant in the Nuremberg medical trial

Rudolf Hermann Brandt (born June 2, 1909 in Frankfurt (Oder) ; † June 2, 1948 in the Landsberg War Crimes Prison ) was SS-Standartenführer (1944), Heinrich Himmler's personal advisor and Ministerialrat in the Reich Ministry of the Interior .

biography

Rudolf Brandt was a trained stenographer. After studying law in Berlin and Jena and obtaining a doctorate as a Dr. jur. In 1934 he rose to the position of ministerial advisor and head of the ministerial office in the Reich Ministry of the Interior. Even before his doctorate, he became a member of the NSDAP in 1932 ( membership number 1,331,536) and in 1933 of the SS (SS number 129,771). From December 11, 1933, Brandt was on the "Personal Staff of the Reichsführer-SS" and worked there from 1936 until the end of the war as Himmler's personal advisor. From the late 1930s he was Himmler's liaison officer for the Reich Ministry of the Interior and finally from 1943 Ministerialrat in the Reich Ministry of the Interior. Brandt was a member ofResearch Association of German Ahnenerbe of the SS, which carried out human experiments and art theft. As of 1941, as a member of Himmler's personal staff, he was involved in the coordination and organization of numerous forced sterilizations - in addition to preparatory human experiments - of female prisoners in the Ravensbrück and Auschwitz concentration camps by the SS doctor Dr. med. Carl Glauberg. Among other things, Brandt was involved as an organizer in the murder of 86 Jews whose skeletons were intended for the " Strasbourg skull collection " of the SS anatomist August Hirt . In the last days of the Nazi state he was one of the few companions Heinrich Himmler had and was probably arrested in Bremervörde at the end of May 1945 .

In the Nuremberg doctors' trial , Rudolf Brandt was brought to trial as one of three non-doctors and sentenced to death by the US military court on August 20, 1947 . He was found guilty of participating in decisions about human experiments in Nazi concentration camps and the killing of concentration camp prisoners . The death sentence was in prison for war criminals in Landsberg on 2 June 1948 by hanging carried out.

literature

• Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich . Who was what before and after 1945 . 2nd Edition. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-596-16048-8 .
• Ernst Klee: Auschwitz, Nazi medicine and its victims. 3. Edition. ibid. 1997, ISBN 3-596-14906-1
• Jeffrey Herf : Nazi propaganda to the Arab world. Yale UP, New Haven 2009 ISBN 978-0-300-14579-3 (Brandt p. 199 & note, see index)

Fiction

• Brandt plays a role in the novel Die Wohlgesinnten (2006)

Web links

Commons : Rudolf Brandt  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Rudolf Brandt in the catalog of the German National Library
• Short biography

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c} Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945 . Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Second updated edition, Frankfurt am Main 2005, p. 71.
2. ↑ Statement by Rudolf Brandt from December 10, 1946 ( Memento of the original from October 29, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. on Nuremberg trials Project 
3. ^ Clauberg Carl (Wilhelm) Prof. Dr. med. Retrieved December 2, 2020 . 
4. ↑ Rudolf Brandt on www.deathcamps.org