Four from Breda

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Demonstrators in Bonn misleadingly demand the amnesty of the "German prisoners of war", October 26, 1971. The date and content speak in favor of an action involving the Nazi activists Manfred Roeder and Erwin Schönborn

The four of Breda ( three from Breda after 1966 and two from Breda after 1979 ) were convicted of Nazi violent crimes who were serving a life sentence in Breda , the Netherlands . Contrary to the long customary West German convention of calling them "prisoners of war", they were not such because their crimes were unrelated to military operations and exclusively part of the persecution and extermination of undesirable population groups practiced by the Nazi regime for racist motives, which from an international and human rights point of view have been referred to as "crimes against humanity" or in the Netherlands as "humanitarian misdaden" since 1945 according to international agreement . That was the crime on which her conviction was based.

  • Franz Fischer (released January 27, 1989, died September 19, 1989) worked in the Netherlands from February 1942 on in Gestapo special unit IV B 4, the so-called "Judenreferat", which was responsible for the registration, arrest and deportation of Jewish Dutch people. Fischer's area of ​​responsibility also included tracking down people who were hiding the persecuted. In the basement of the BdS service villa in Scheveningen, Fischer mistreated prisoners with sticks and iron bars in order to forcibly extort confessions. In the so-called "submarine game", a forerunner of the torture technique of " waterboarding ", he dived his victims under water until they revealed useful information. From August 1942 onwards, Fischer was instrumental in the deportation of 13,000 Hague Jews, including the sick, children and old people, to the extermination camps in the east. He was sentenced to death in a revision of a 1949 sentence to life in the following year for crimes against humanity / humanity.
  • Ferdinand Hugo from Fünten (released January 27, 1989, died April 19, 1989) headed the "Central Office for Jewish Emigration" in the occupied Netherlands in Amsterdam. He organized numerous raids and under his personal supervision the Jewish old people's homes, hospitals and the orphanage of the Israelite community were cleared. On January 21, 1943, he coordinated the removal of 1,200 mentally handicapped people and fifty nursing staff from the Jewish hospital in Apeldoorn. The Waffen-SS led the patients, some of them scantily clad or naked, to trucks, which they took to freight wagons, in which they were deported to the Westerbork transit camp and from there to be exterminated to Poland without food, heating or berths. After the trains left, the SS searched the patients' belongings. From the Fünten took the money he had found. He was sentenced to life in 1950 in a revision of a 1949 sentence for crimes against humanity / humanity.
  • Joseph Johann Kotalla (died in prison on July 31, 1979) was the camp leader and deputy commandant of the Amersfoort concentration camp. From November 1939 he did his service in various SS death's head associations, including in the Buchenwald concentration camp. After various other stations, he was assigned to the commander of the SiPo and the SD in The Hague in 1941 and came from there to Amersfoort. Here he was nicknamed "The executioner of Amersfoort" because of his sadism. He mistreated malnourished prisoners with canes and rubber truncheons or set dogs on them, he left prisoners for hours or days without food and water in a piece of land in the camp surrounded by barbed wire. He shot dozens of prisoners in a wooded area and on a shooting range. In December 1948 he was sentenced to death in Amsterdam, among other things for "shooting or participating in the execution of a total of 77 prisoners without trial".
  • Willy Paul Franz Lages (dismissed in 1966, died February 2, 1971) was head of SiPo and SD in Amsterdam, having previously held this position in The Hague. He "fought the resistance in the Netherlands with all his might." (Bohr) During his time in Amsterdam he gave arbitrary execution orders in 37 cases, which killed 237 people. During the "Silbertanne Operation" carried out by Lages, the SD and its Dutch henchmen murdered dozens of resistance fighters in an insidious manner. In 1941 Lages took over the supervision of the "Central Office for Jewish Emigration". His successor was the Fünten, with whom he jointly deported tens of thousands of Jews from the Netherlands to the extermination camps. He was sentenced to death in 1949 for the deportation of 70,000 Jews and for his leading role in the execution of a total of 300 people.

The death sentences were commuted to life imprisonment by royal decree. Lages was released in 1966 due to illness, Kotalla died in prison in 1979.

After the dismissal of numerous Nazi criminals and after the death of Rudolf Hess remained the world's last remaining imprisoned from Fünten and fishermen NSG -Straftäter.

The four prisoners in Breda and the requests from the federal government for their release were a burden on the West German-Dutch relationship in the post-war period because there was little acceptance of West German amnesty policy in Dutch society. West German society was accused of lacking distance from its Nazi past. Included in the criticism was the unending support of all federal governments for these criminals for reasons of West German "state reason", including the "social liberal" government under the SPD politician Willy Brandt, who fled into exile in Sweden after 1933 . It was about governmental "love gift packages" filled with cigarettes, chocolate, cognac and canned food, legal protection and legal fees, diplomatic intervention attempts and the demand for amnesty. Support continued until the remaining "Two from Breda" were released in January 1989. Since the 1960s it had been practiced covertly due to criticism abroad. Public actions were now in neo-Nazi associations such as a "German Citizens' Initiative" by Manfred Roeder or a " Combat League of German Soldiers " by Erwin Schönborn .

literature

  • Felix Nikolaus Bohr: The war criminals lobby. Federal German aid for Nazi perpetrators imprisoned abroad , Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-518-42840-5 .
  • Harald Fühner: Follow-up. Dutch politics and the persecution of collaborators and Nazi criminals, 1945–1989 , Waxmann, Münster / New York / Munich / Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-8309-1464-4 ( review by H-Soz-u-Kult . (PDF File; 83 kB))

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Felix Bohr, The War Criminal Lobby. Federal German aid for Nazi perpetrators imprisoned abroad, (series of publications by the Federal Agency for Civic Education, vol. 10.392), Bonn 2019, p. 43f.
  2. ↑ Felix Bohr, The War Criminal Lobby. Federal German aid for Nazi perpetrators imprisoned abroad, (series of publications by the Federal Agency for Civic Education, vol. 10.392), Bonn 2019, p. 47ff.
  3. ↑ For the spelling of his name, in the Netherlands he was called "Kotälla", see Fühner, p. 13.
  4. ↑ Felix Bohr, The War Criminal Lobby. Federal German help for Nazi perpetrators imprisoned abroad, (series of publications by the Federal Agency for Civic Education, vol. 10.392), Bonn 2019, p. 52f.
  5. ↑ Felix Bohr, The War Criminal Lobby. Federal German help for Nazi perpetrators imprisoned abroad, (series of publications by the Federal Agency for Civic Education, vol. 10.392), Bonn 2019, p. 48ff.
  6. ↑ Felix Bohr, The War Criminal Lobby. Federal German help for Nazi perpetrators imprisoned abroad, (series of publications by the Federal Agency for Civic Education, Vol. 10.392), Bonn 2019, passim.
  7. ↑ Rudolf Schneider, The SS is their role model. Neo-Nazi combat groups and action groups in the Federal Republic, Frankfurt a. M. 1981, p. 92.
  8. ↑ Philipp Glahé: The War Criminal Lobby - Federal German Aid for Nazi Criminals Imprisoned Abroad , Review, by histrhen, December 16, 2019