Walter Huppenkothen

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Walter Huppenkothen (born December 31, 1907 in Haan in the Rhineland ; † April 5, 1978 in Lübeck ) was a German lawyer , NSDAP member and SS standard leader , SD and Gestapo employee - most recently a department head in the Reich Security Main Office , member in 1939 of Einsatzgruppe I and thus a presumed accomplice in the approx. 60,000 to 80,000 murders of Poles up to the spring of 1940.

Life

Until 1945

Walter Huppenkothen was an only child in the family of a foreman. He attended the secondary school in Opladen . He then studied law and political science at the Universities of Cologne and Düsseldorf . In 1931 he passed the first state examination in law , and on November 7, 1934, he also passed the state examination in law.

After the takeover of the Nazis Huppenkothen joined as a trainee on 1 May 1933, the NSDAP and the end of 1933 the General SS in. After passing his second state examination, he applied to the SD Upper Section West in Düsseldorf. From January to November 1935 he worked there as a consultant for press and cultural affairs as well as for special assignments (“Race and Culture”). On December 1, 1935, he was taken over by the Gestapo - initially on a trial basis . In October 1936 he was appointed government assessor and was transferred to Königsberg as deputy head of the local Gestapo (Stapostellen Königsberg and Tilsit) . In November 1937 he handed over the Tilsit Stapostelle to government assessor Heinz Graefe . In October 1937 he took over the management of the Lüneburg Stapostelle - at that time "Gau capital" (Gauleiter: Otto Telschow ).

From there, Walter Huppenkothen took part in the invasion of the Czech Republic in March 1939 , as deputy leader of a task force (objective: "Fight all elements hostile to the Reich and German in enemy territory behind the fencing troops", according to the relevant guidelines). Thereupon his appointment to the Upper Government Council was proposed. At the beginning of July 1939 he was called to a central meeting with Reinhard Heydrich about the formation of five task forces of 400 men each for the attack on Poland (cover name: "Company Tannenberg"). On September 6, 1939, Huppenkothen left Vienna with the staff of Einsatzgruppe I under Bruno Linienbach and reached Krakow on September 7, 1939. There he held the post of liaison leader of Einsatzgruppe I of the Security Police to the 14th Army during the so-called "Intelligence Action" (murder of approx. 60,000 clergy, teachers, scientists, etc. on the basis of registration lists by Einsatzgruppen) ; then he was promoted. When the Einsatzgruppen in the occupied territories were disbanded in November 1939 and a civil administration was set up, he briefly received the post of Commander of the Security Police and the SD (KdS) in Krakow , but in February 1940 he moved to Lublin , where he first became head of the Gestapo and then worked as a KdS. The former members of the Einsatzgruppen now carried out a racist mass murder administratively in Poland (“general pacification campaign”): Huppenkothen was primarily responsible for huge forced labor measures (the SS was planning a gigantic “eastern wall” in this region) and for the ghettoization of the Lublin Jews .

At the beginning of July 1941, Huppenkothen was transferred to the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) in Berlin, established in September 1940, for "probation" with the Einsatzgruppen and during his work in the Lublin area - as Walter Schellenberg's successor . There he headed group E (police counter-espionage ) of Office IV (research and fight against opponents, head: Heinrich Müller ) as senior government councilor and SS-Standartenführer . He soon rose to become Müller's deputy head of the border police and took part in Ernst Kaltenbrunner's daily briefings .

In 1942 Walter married Huppenkothen; from his marriage to his wife Erika in 1945 a son was born.

When Office IV of the Reich Main Security Office was reorganized in connection with the assumption of the tasks of the Foreign Defense Office in the High Command of the Wehrmacht (OKW), which was dissolved in the spring of 1944 and until then headed by Admiral Wilhelm Canaris , Huppenkothen received the majority of his duties , from it a department. After the failed assassination attempt on July 20, 1944 , he became a member of a special commission. His “special merits” in the “cleanup of the group of people on the occasion of July 20, 1944” were highlighted in his personal file. He had written a comprehensive report on the resistance movement of July 20, 1944, of which only three copies were made (among others for Hitler and Himmler) and has not survived. In autumn 1944, Huppenkothen was promoted to government director on this occasion ; he also received the alignment rank of SS standard leader . After Dietrich Bonhoeffer's transfer to the RSHA in Berlin, he and an employee of the office were responsible for the “intensified interrogations” of Bonhoeffer in the basement of the RSHA.

On April 5, 1945, the head of the Reich Main Security Office, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, ordered, on orders or with the approval of Hitler, to carry out an SS trial against Reich judge Hans von Dohnanyi , Admiral Wilhelm Canaris , Major General Oster , General Staff Judge Karl Sack , Captain Gehre and Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer , although all of the accused were not subject to SS jurisdiction, but only to martial law. Whether and to what extent Huppenkothen consulted or even drafted the arrangements made on April 5, 1945 cannot be ruled out or proven. All persons were burdened by the discovery of secret files in September 1944 that Hans von Dohnanyi had archived in an OKW building in Zossen. The SS court martial against Dohnanyi took place on April 6, 1945 in Sachsenhausen concentration camp , the others on April 8, 1945 in Flossenbürg concentration camp . In all cases, Huppenkothen acted as the prosecutor, who came with his wife, who was pregnant at the time and who was supposed to evade this transport to Bavaria. In Sachsenhausen a still unknown person was the judge, in Flossenbürg the SS judge Otto Thorbeck . In both places, the concentration camp commandant acted as assessor of the three-person court alongside an SS member. The defendants were not granted defense counsel, nor were there any clerks.

The defendant von Dohnanyi had to be carried into the courtroom on a stretcher; because he had been ill-treated while in custody and was partially paralyzed because of diphtheria. The death penalty applied for by Huppenkothen was imposed as expected and executed a few days later by hanging. On April 7, Huppenkothen traveled on to Flossenbürg concentration camp , where he also represented the prosecution. Admiral Canaris apparently had his nose broken there during the “court martial” session. Here, too, the death sentences applied for by Huppenkothen were pronounced against all defendants by the "SS stand trial" and immediately carried out; the convicts were humiliated. They had to undress and were “hanged” by “the murderers” in a “repulsive scene”. The "prosecutor" Huppenkothen was present at the hanging. He had failed to obtain the compulsory confirmation of the death sentences by the judge before the execution. Then Huppenkothen reported the execution to SS-Gruppenführer Müller in Berlin on April 9, 1945 and expected further instructions to the Regensburg police station.

After the end of the war

After the surrender came Walter Huppenkothen, who had gone in the last days of the war yet "to the force", in Upper Bavaria, as a member of the SS Division "Nibelungen" in American captivity . His knowledge of the Reich Security Main Office and the investigations he carried out then served the investigative authorities of the American occupation forces: From summer 1945 to January 27, 1949, he was interned in an American camp (" Camp King ") in the Taunus, which was responsible for researching high-ranking NS - Perpetrator served (including Gestapo experiences with communist espionage, e.g. the activity of the "Red Orchestra"). He thus escaped the “ Einsatzgruppen trials ” in Nuremberg in which Werner Best (head of Dept. I at the RSHA) was heard as a witness.

On December 1, 1949, Huppenkothen was finally arrested; against him and other parties involved, u. a. the SS judge Otto Thorbeck , was determined for the murder of Dohnanyi, Oster, Bonhoeffer and the other concentration camp prisoners shortly before the end of the war. Huppenkothen and others were due allowance for murder accused. Huppenkothen was defended by Alfred Seidl .

There were proceedings before the regional courts in Munich (two acquittals) and - after being referred back by the Federal Court of Justice (BGH) - in Augsburg (six years in prison). The BGH made three decisions on this. In his decision of 1952 he made the statement that the so-called SS stand trial proceedings were wrong. In a second case against Huppenkothen and Thorbeck, who has meanwhile been determined as the court chairman of the proceedings in the Flossenbürg concentration camp, the BGH ruled completely differently in 1956, as can be seen from the following sentences: “In a struggle to be or not to be, all peoples have always had strict laws for the protection of the state . ”A judge“ in view of his submission to the laws of the time ”could not be reproached if he“ believed ”that resistance fighters“ had to be sentenced to death ”. The actors of the resistance had thus been declared criminals. The role of judges and prosecutors, who, according to today's view, would be regarded as murderers or, in the case of Huppenkothens, as instigators of murder, was declared to be serious legal action by a Nazi judiciary that was considered to be just. For Huppenkothen, in the third BGH proceedings, there was still a prison sentence of seven and a half years. He was convicted on the one hand because of a mere formality, namely because of the failure to obtain confirmation of the judgments from the judge before execution, as required by the War Criminal Procedure Code , and on the other hand because of the manner of execution, namely the "hanging in full." undressed ”, ie because of disregard for human dignity. With its ruling from 1956, the BGH expressly turned away from the “ Radbruch formula ”, according to which positive law should not be applied if it contradicted justice to such an intolerable degree “that the law as an incorrect law should give way to justice Has".

In 2002 the President of the BGH, Günter Hirsch , in a speech on the 100th birthday of Hans von Dohnanyi, explicitly criticized the BGH decision of 1956 and called it a "slap in the face" of the relatives. In the same year, the Bundestag, through an amendment to the Law to Repeal National Socialist Injustice Judgments in the Administration of Criminal Justice from 1998, overturned all judgments of the stand court proceedings during the Nazi era because they were considered to be injustice.

Even before his arrest at the end of 1949, and then again after having partially served his sentence (1959), Walter Huppenkothen received a job as a commercial lawyer from the FDP member and attorney Ernst Achenbach . He first lived as an employee of an insurance company in Mannheim, then in Mülheim / Ruhr and later in Cologne.

In 1961, at the request of the Israeli court, Huppenkothen had to testify in the Eichmann trial about responsibilities and procedures in the Reich Security Main Office. He did not make use of the "safe conduct" to Israel that was finally assured to him as a witness after discussions, but preferred to express himself in writing from his home town. In 1969 he supported Werner Best in his investigation, who - like him - had worked for the RSHA (sentenced to death in Denmark, later pardoned, then commercial lawyer at the Hugo Stinnes Group in Mülheim / Ruhr).

Walter Huppenkothen died on April 5, 1978 in Lübeck .

Literature and other media

  • 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 .
  • Michael Wildt : Generation of the Unconditional. The leadership corps of the Reich Security Main Office. Hamburger Edition, Hamburg 2003, ISBN 3-930908-87-5 .
  • LG Augsburg, October 15, 1955 . In: Justice and Nazi crimes . Collection of German criminal judgments for Nazi homicidal crimes 1945–1966, Vol. XIII, edited by Irene Sagel-Grande, HH Fuchs, CF Rüter . Amsterdam: University Press, 1975, No. 420, pp. 283–358 Subject matter of the proceedings: Participation in court-martial death sentences against Reich judge Hans von Dohnanyi in KL Sachsenhausen and against General Oster, Admiral Canaris, General Staff Judge Sack, Captain Gehre and Pastor Bonhoeffer in KL Flossenbürg by the head of the counter-espionage department of the Stapo Office in the Reich Security Main Office as the prosecutor in both proceedings and by a judge from the main office of the SS Court as chairman of the Flossenbürg case. The death sentences were carried out shortly afterwards - the Flossenbürger sentences by hanging ( online version )
  • Joachim Perels : The legal legacy of the “Third Reich”: Damage to the democratic legal system. Campus-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main / New York 1999, ISBN 3-593-36318-6 , pp. 181-202.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Walter Huppenkothen in the Munzinger archive .
  2. ↑ Wildt: Generation of the Unconditional. 2003, p. 485.
  3. ^ 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. 276.
  4. ↑ Joachim Perels : The legal legacy of the "Third Reich": Damage to the democratic legal system. Campus-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main / New York 1999, ISBN 3-593-36318-6 , pp. 181-202.
  5. ^ Günter Spendel : Perversion of the law through jurisprudence: 6 criminal law studies . Verlag de Gruyter, Berlin 1984, ISBN 3-11-009940-3 . P. 93.
  6. ↑ s. Weblinks BGH judgment 1952.
  7. ^ Henryk M. Broder : Servants of the law. How the rule of law found its judges. In: Der Spiegel . 20/1999, p. 126 ( version in the online archive ).
  8. ↑ s. Weblinks BGH judgment 1956.
  9. ↑ Perversion of law through jurisprudence: 6 criminal law studies. Verlag de Gruyter, Berlin 1984, ISBN 3-11-009940-3 , p. 94 ff.
  10. ↑ Christoph Ulrich Schminck-Gustavus: The "trial" against Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the release of his murderers. Volume 67, Dietz Taschenbuch, ed. 2, JHW ​​Dietz Nachf., Bonn 1995, p. 48.
  11. ↑ BGH, ruling v. June 19, 1956 - 1 StR 50/56.
personal data
SURNAME Huppenkothen, Walter
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German Nazi criminal
DATE OF BIRTH December 31, 1907
PLACE OF BIRTH Haan , Rhineland
DATE OF DEATH April 5th 1978
Place of death Lübeck