Walter lens

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Walter Linse in Soviet custody, 1953

Walter Linse (born August 23, 1903 in Chemnitz , † December 15, 1953 in Moscow ) was a German lawyer. He worked for the West Berlin Investigation Committee of Freedom Lawyers (UFJ), which documented human rights violations in the GDR . On July 8, 1952, he was kidnapped by the Ministry for State Security (MfS) to East Berlin and executed in December 1953 in Moscow's Butyrka prison. In 1996 he was rehabilitated as a political victim by the Russian Attorney General. His previous work during the National Socialist era as a representative for the “ Aryanization ” of Jewish companies at the Chamber of Commerce and Industry became known to the public in 2007 and was the cause of ongoing controversy about his behavior and personality at the time.

Life

Linse was the son of a postal secretary in Chemnitz, where he first attended secondary school and then upper secondary school. After graduating from high school (1924), he studied law in Leipzig , where he became a member of the Corps Saxo-Borussia Leipzig (now Landsmannschaft Hansea auf dem Wels ) in the summer semester of 1924 . In 1927, after only seven semesters, he passed the first state examination in law, then he completed a legal clerkship in Saxony and in 1931 the second state examination in Dresden. He then worked as an assessor in the Saxon civil service and assistant judge in Leipzig, but left the civil service for unknown reasons at the end of 1933. In the following years he prepared a legal dissertation on the concept of the " unsuitable attempt " in criminal law and received his doctorate in 1936 at the University of Leipzig .

time of the nationalsocialism

In 1938 he joined the Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Chemnitz as a consultant , where in September 1938 he was responsible for the “processing of de-Judaism processes” and until 1940/41 was exclusively entrusted with the “Aryanization” of the Jewish- owned businesses in the Chemnitz district . According to a membership card found in the Federal Archives, Linse joined the NSDAP on October 1, 1940 with membership number 8.336.675 . You won't find a signature from Linse there. In addition, his first name is written slightly differently (in the unabbreviated spelling Walther ). After the completion of the "Aryanization", he worked as a "force requirement advisor" at the Chemnitz Chamber of Industry and Commerce and also took on tasks in the context of the "total war effort" in coordinating Jewish forced labor and was responsible, among other things, for submitting applications from war-important companies for exemption for " half-Jewish “ To process employees from assignments as forced laborers in the Todt organization . His department IIIe remained responsible for all "Jewish affairs" in the Chamber of Commerce and Industry Chemnitz until 1945.

Soviet occupation zone

After Chemnitz was occupied by Soviet troops on May 8, 1945, Linse remained largely unchallenged in office and in June 1945 had a note made on the files of the Chamber of Commerce in which he described the "Aryanization" of Jewish companies as "injustice" , but spoke out against a return to the original Jewish owners, as long as the reparation was not regulated uniformly for the Reich or the country.

However, he had to justify himself because of two reports in 1945 and 1948 because of his earlier membership in the NSDAP. Linse denied this by stating that, under pressure from his superior, he had registered for membership but never joined the party. In June 1945 he was certified by a fellow citizen named Eugen Fischer that he had belonged to a resistance group called "Ciphero" during the war, but that only two such statements by Fischer and otherwise no further evidence. In later years he was once again certified by a letter that he had contributed to the rescue of a Jew from the Buchenwald concentration camp “by sacrificing his existence” . The police investigations triggered by the reports remained unsuccessful, but Linse drew the consequence that he ended a brief engagement in the LDP in 1945 and did not pursue his wish to become Minister of Economic Affairs.

Linse rose to the position of general manager of the Chamber of Industry and Commerce and, in this function, carried out the denazification of the tax and economic advisory professions at the Chamber of Industry and Commerce in Chemnitz in 1946/47 , whereby the committee he headed in the corresponding examination procedures in some cases also granted permission for heavily stressed persons to continue their work Should have given professional.

He remained active as general manager of the Chemnitz Chamber of Commerce until June 1949 and is said to have been the last chief manager of the Chamber of Industry and Commerce in the Soviet occupation zone who had not yet become a member of the SED .

West Berlin

At the beginning of 1949 , Linse fled to West Berlin, where he initially worked as a company lawyer for an industrial company. In January 1951 he took a job at the investigative committee of freedom lawyers , advised traders from the GDR on expropriation issues and became head of the economic department. In 1952, Linse was busy preparing an international congress of lawyers in Berlin, which took place between July 25th and 28th and attended by lawyers from 42 countries. The International Legal Commission emerged from the congress .

Kidnapping and death

These preparations were known to the Ministry of State Security and the Soviet secret service MGB . With a kidnapping of Linsen, the Congress should be prevented or at least damaged. The kidnapping of the Stasi officer recruited Paul Marustzök to transfer Bruno Beaters in June 1952 difficult criminal Berlin band leader Harry Bennewitz at the Berlin East in Stadtvogtei sat in custody. With the consent of Erich Mielke from Bennewitz and three other criminals, Marustzök put together the kidnapping gang . After five attempts to kidnap Lens since the order was issued on June 14th, planning was changed. On July 8, 1952, the MfS took control of a West Berlin taxi of the Opel Kapitän type, including its driver, while a new car of the same design, bought by the MfS especially for Bennewitz in West Berlin, now with the original taxi sign and the car - License plate prepared and used to kidnap Linsen. In the morning at around 7:30 a.m., a few meters away from his house at Richtstrasse 12 in Berlin-Lichterfelde , a member of the gang asked him for a fire. Lens, who was looking in his briefcase, was attacked and, despite strong resistance, pulled into the car. When Lens refused to pull his hanging legs into the car, Bennewitz shot him in the calf. A van driver tried unsuccessfully to ram the car but was shot at. He stopped a police vehicle that was in pursuit, but the hijacking vehicle escaped at high speed from the American sector to the GDR in Teltow . There Marustzög was waiting, who climbed into the kidnapping vehicle with Lens in order to deliver him to the “submarine” , the central remand prison of the Stasi in East Berlin. The gang and their family members spent the period from July 21 to September 2, 1952 in a MfS convalescent home in Heringsdorf , because the action had caused unexpectedly high waves in the western public. In the meantime, the MfS found new residences scattered throughout the GDR for her and another seven secret employees involved in the case and their relatives.

Linse was imprisoned in the MfS prison in Hohenschönhausen until December 1952. The MfS recorded his self-talk and prayers with hidden microphones. The MfS then handed it over to the Soviet secret service MGB (forerunner of the KGB ) in Berlin-Karlshorst . Worn down by the interrogations, Linse pleaded guilty to the interrogators of espionage and subversion against the GDR. On September 23, 1953, a Soviet military court sentenced him to death for " espionage , anti-Soviet propaganda and formation of an anti-Soviet organization" .

After his application for cassation he was transferred to Moscow's Lubyanka . There the military college of the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union confirmed the existing court judgment on December 15, 1953. Lens was shot dead in Butyrka prison in Moscow on the same day . The body was cremated in a crematorium on the grounds of the Donskoy cemetery and its ashes were buried in a mass grave.

In West Berlin, two days after the kidnapping, a protest rally for the release of Linses took place in front of Schöneberg Town Hall , attended by 25,000 people. Ernst Reuter appealed to the world's conscience. As a reaction to the kidnapping with a car, the road crossings from West Berlin to East Berlin and into the GDR were blocked with barriers to vehicle traffic, with the exception of a few controlled crossings.

Aftermath of the kidnapping

A little later, a gang member named Knobloch had bragged about the catch bonus in front of friends and then, when asked, about the deed. Knobloch therefore had to move to Leipzig by order of the MfS to hide. From there he secretly set out for West Berlin in March 1953 to commit a long-planned break-in. Before that, he visited his fiancée's brother, who lived in West Berlin and who knew about the kidnapping. This notified the police, who arrested Knobloch at the scene. In the following process, the confessed defendant was able to elucidate the course of Linse's kidnapping in minute detail. The 2nd Large Criminal Chamber of the Berlin Regional Court sentenced Knobloch on June 4, 1954 to ten years in prison. After serving his sentence, he returned to East Berlin, where he died in 1992.

The Knobloch trial had finally revealed the role of the Stasi in the Linse case. Marustzök's career as a kidnapping specialist ended with a transfer to Leipzig. His successor in looking after the gang members came to the MfS Otto Knye.

Gang leader Bennewitz had pretended to be an MfS employee in hotels, kept making new maintenance demands and threatened to end the cooperation with the MfS. He also had to move to Leipzig. In September 1953, Knye persuaded Bennewitz to move to Poland , where he was immediately handed over to the brother organization MBP with a new identity as a Portuguese in order to combat foreign exchange offenses in the port of Danzig . Despite marriage and monthly hush money payments as well as benefits in kind for private black market transactions by the MfS, Bennewitz was unable to gain a foothold in Poland. Two years after his return, Bennewitz had a fatal accident in November 1958 in the port of Rostock . The members of the Bennewitz family had meanwhile become confidants of the Linses kidnapping and received monthly hush money of four hundred to one thousand GDR marks from the MfS until the 1980s .

In 1991 a preliminary investigation into the kidnapping of Linsen was started. However, in 1995 only Mielke was still alive from those responsible. Pursuant to § 154 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, the investigation against Mielke because of its already completed conviction for murder was in the process Bülowplatz set .

Similar fates of other West Berlin anti-communists such as B. that of Günter Malkowski and other students at the Free University of Berlin were only processed in the 1990s. After the construction of the Berlin Wall , the Stasi also increasingly switched to murders and attempted murder in the West instead of deporting the dissidents to the East, as in the cases of Bernd Moldenhauer and Wolfgang Welsch .

Afterlife

In May 1960, at the request of its German sister organization, the Soviet Red Cross announced that Linse had died on December 15, 1953 in a Soviet prison camp . Despite the denial that was announced soon after, this announcement was the first official admission of the responsibility of the Soviet Union for the kidnapping and death of Linse.

In 1961, the Richtstrasse in Berlin-Lichterfelde was renamed Walter-Linse-Strasse and on December 16, 1962, Linse was officially declared dead in the Federal Republic of Germany. The Prosecutor General of Russia rehabilitated Lens on May 8, 1996 as a political victim.

On June 29, 2007, the Friends of the Stasi Memorial Berlin-Hohenschönhausen wrote a "Walter Lens Prize" worth 5000 euros to honor people who "made outstanding contributions to the confrontation with the communist dictatorship" . Shortly before, however, the Saxon Memorials Foundation had published a lens biography of the political scientist Benno Kirsch, through which references to the largely positive role of Linses during the Nazi era became public for the first time. After the Berlin State Commissioner for the Documents of the State Security Service of the former GDR, Martin Gutzeit , asked the chairman of the Friends 'Association, Jörg Kürschner, on July 6, 2007, to suspend the award until the burden on Linses was clarified, the Friends' Association made this request in August afterwards, but Kürschner was committed to protecting lens and accused Gutzeit of the "media manslaughter" of the human rights activist lens.

On behalf of the State Commissioner, the lawyer and historian Klaus Bästlein presented an expert opinion on Linses’s role in the years up to 1949, which dealt critically with Kirsch’s work and came to the conclusion on the basis of his own examination of archive documents and personal records of Linse’s that, in addition to his official duties, Linse did not excel with anti-Semitic declarations, but not only as an "assistant" to the Nazi regime, but from a historical point of view as a "Nazi perpetrator" who was "in control of the economic" Plundered Jews in the Chemnitz district and did not shy away from “putting Jews under massive pressure or denouncing them to the Gestapo ”. After the scientific advisory board of the Berlin-Hohenschönhausen memorial had asked the friends 'association to waive this name because of the unexplained extent of Lenses responsibility for Nazi injustice, the friends' association withdrew this name on December 6, 2007 and announced that the Instead, the prize should be called the “Hohenschönhausen Prize for coming to terms with the communist dictatorship”.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The presentation of the biography during the Nazi and Soviet occupation zone follows, unless otherwise stated, Klaus Bästlein: On the role of Dr. Walter Linse under Nazi rule and in the post-war years until 1949 . ( Memento of the original from October 25, 2012 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. (PDF; 201 kB) Brief expertise prepared on behalf of the Berlin State Commissioner for the Records of the State Security Service of the former GDR, Berlin, September 2007. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.berlin.de
  2. ↑ Klaus Bästlein: From Nazi perpetrator to victim of Stalinism: Dr. Walter Linse - A German Lawyer in the 20th Century . ( Memento of the original from October 21, 2012 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. (PDF; 389 kB) Berlin 2008, series of publications by the Berlin State Commissioner for the Records of the State Security Service of the former GDR, Volume 27, p. 65 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.berlin.de
  3. ^ Silke Schumann: Cooperation and efficiency in the service of the war of conquest. The organization of labor, recruitment of soldiers and forced labor in the Chemnitz region from 1939 to 1945 (= writings of the Hannah Arendt Institute for Research on Totalitarianism 61). Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 2016. ISBN 978-3-525-36973-9 , p. 21, circled from: http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/rezensions/2017-1-029
  4. ^ Benno Kirsch: Walter Linse. 1903-1953-1996 . Dresden 2007, p. 42 f.
  5. ↑ Unser-walter-linse.org ( memento of the original from August 19, 2014 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. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.unser-walter-linse.org
  6. ^ Benno Kirsch: GDR critic or Nazi perpetrator? In: Die Welt , November 2, 2007.
  7. ^ Benno Kirsch: Walter Linse. 1903-1953-1996 . Dresden 2007, p. 40.
  8. ↑ The further description follows, unless otherwise stated, Klaus Bästlein: The Mielke case. The investigation against the Minister for State Security of the GDR , Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, Baden-Baden 2002, ISBN 3-7890-7775-5 (= Redaktion Neue Justiz (Ed.): Series of Laws and Justice of the GDR, Volume 3), p. 147 -152
  9. ↑ The following details in Mampel (see literature), pp. 14-18
  10. ↑ On the course of the kidnapping, see Mampel pp. 14-18
  11. ↑ An overview of the camouflage measures compiled by the MfS is printed in Mampel pp. 25–28
  12. ↑ Mampel, p. 36. The denial was justified with a mix-up.
  13. ^ Bästlein: On the role of Dr. Walter Linse (2007), p. 13.
  14. ↑ Advisory board resolution on Walter-Linse-Preis ( Memento of the original from September 20, 2007 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. , November 6, 2007 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.stiftung-hsh.de
  15. ↑ The association now calls the honor the "Hohenschönhausen Prize" . Tagesspiegel, December 7, 2007
personal data
SURNAME Lens, Walter
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German lawyer
DATE OF BIRTH August 23, 1903
PLACE OF BIRTH Chemnitz
DATE OF DEATH December 15, 1953
Place of death Moscow