Theodor Horst Grell

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Theodor Horst Grell (born December 19, 1909 in Breslau ; died April 21, 1987 in Munich ) was a German NSDAP functionary and diplomat during the National Socialist era .

Life

Grell attended the Friedrichwerder grammar school in Berlin and the reform grammar school in Goldap . From 1928 to 1932 he studied law in Marburg , Lausanne and Königsberg . After completing his legal traineeship and his doctorate , he joined the judiciary in April 1933 and switched to administration in the same year. He had already joined the Jungsturm at the age of fourteen . From 1928 to 1932 he was a member of the SA , from March 1, 1933 of the SS , most recently as Obersturmführer on the staff of the Reich Security Main Office . In 1926/27 he was a member of the Deutschvölkische Freedom Party , on May 1, 1929 he became a member of the NSDAP . From 1930 to 1933 he was legal manager of the East Prussian Gauleitung and Gauredner , then manager of the legal department of the NSV in Kurhessen.

In 1937 he joined the Foreign Office as an attaché and was deployed in Marseille and Ankara . At the beginning of the Second World War , Grell was enlisted in September 1939, but was seriously wounded in April 1940. Even before the German invasion of Yugoslavia , he came to the embassy in Belgrade on November 27, 1940 and headed the consulate in Orșova in western Romania from April 1941 to the end of 1942 . After working at the Berlin headquarters, he was consul in Marseille from February to October 1943. After the German occupation of Hungary in April 1944, he came to the embassy in Budapest on May 23, 1944 as a clerk for Jewish questions . Here Edmund Veesenmayer was appointed "Plenipotentiary of the Greater German Empire in Hungary". On the instructions of the Jewish advisor at the Berlin headquarters, Eberhard von Thadden, Grell was supposed to report the Jewish measures directly to the Reich Foreign Minister. Since April 1944, was Eichmann command with support from the Hungarian authorities and the German Embassy here, 400,000 Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz to deport . When the Hungarian Jews were deported, Grell took on the task of sorting out the foreign Jews from Adolf Hezinger , for which purpose he had to go to the Hungarian interim camps.

On August 19, 1944, Grell reported to the Foreign Office that the Hungarian Interior Minister Andor Jaross had allowed the evacuation of the Budapest Jews on August 25, 1944. The first transport with six train trains and a total of 20,000 Jews was to start on August 27th, followed by three trains a day with a total of 9,000 Jews. The "concentration is carried out exclusively by the Hungarian gendarmerie". Having come under pressure from abroad, however, the Horthy regime prevented the deportations from continuing. In October 1944, after the coup d'état by the Arrow Cross members supported by the Germans , they were supposed to be resumed, but due to the war this was only possible to a rudimentary degree , as Adolf Eichmann organized a walk of around 50,000 Jews from Budapest towards the southeast wall due to the lack of transport capacity on the railroad .

Investigations

Since Grell had been a member of the Wehrmacht again as a lieutenant since February 1945 , he was taken prisoner of war by the Americans at the Mauerkirchen release camp , from which he was released in July 1945 and went to Marburg . He was arrested again in 1947 as part of the investigation into the Wilhelmstrasse trial and questioned on July 22, 1947 in Kassel . He claimed that he knew nothing about the extermination and was released from witness custody in August 1948. His denazification is not known, but the result was that he was allowed to work as a lawyer in the Federal Republic. During the investigation against Hermann Krumey and Otto Hunsche in 1957, Grell was also interrogated by the Stuttgart public prosecutor. Between November 1959 and March 1960 Grell was arrested again by the Frankfurt Public Prosecutor and interrogated for his involvement in the murder of Hungarian Jews.

As part of the Eichmann trial , Grell was heard as a defense witness - Eichmann's defense attorney was Robert Servatius - on June 14, 1961 before the Berchtesgaden District Court , since Grell was domiciled there. At that time Grell described himself as a retired lawyer. Grell also stated that the testimony given at the Nuremberg trials in 1948 was untrue in that all the blame was placed on the Nazi officials, who were dead or presumably dead at the time.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Eckart Conze u. a .: The office and the past. German diplomats in the Third Reich and in the Federal Republic , Munich 2010, p. 260.
  2. ↑ Record by Thadden, May 26, 1944, in: Files on German foreign policy: 1918–1945 / from the archive of the German Foreign Office - Baden-Baden: Impr. Nationale. Ser. E, 1941-1945: Vol. 8 :. May 1, 1944 to May 8, 1945. 1979 p. 74ff, here p. 76.
  3. ^ Legation Council Grell to AA, August 19, 1944, in: Files on German foreign policy: 1918–1945 / from the archive of the German Foreign Office - Baden-Baden: Impr. Nationale. Ser. E, 1941-1945: Vol. 8 :. May 1, 1944 to May 8, 1945. 1979 p. 333f.
  4. ↑ Conze u. a .: The office and the past. German diplomats in the Third Reich and in the Federal Republic , Munich 2010, note 181, p. 745.
  5. ↑ Conze u. a .: The office and the past. German diplomats in the Third Reich and in the Federal Republic , Munich 2010, note 181, p. 265.
personal data
SURNAME Grell, Theodor Horst
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German NSDAP functionary and diplomat during the Nazi era
DATE OF BIRTH December 19, 1909
PLACE OF BIRTH Wroclaw
DATE OF DEATH April 21, 1987
Place of death Munich