Wolfgang Otto (SS member)

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Wolfgang Otto in April 1947

Wolfgang Gunther Klaus Otto (born August 23, 1911 in Kattowitz ; † November 26, 1989 in Geldern ) was a German staff troop leader of the Waffen SS and was employed as head of the command post office in Buchenwald concentration camp .

Life

Wolfgang Otto grew up in the Katowice district of Eichenau and was raised strictly Catholic. After successfully completing his school days, Otto took up the profession of teacher and, after having passed the first teaching degree in 1936, taught at a normal two-tier elementary school from 1937. Otto, a member of the general SS since 1933 , also joined the NSDAP and became a member of the motorized SS.

Activity in Buchenwald concentration camp

On September 1, 1939, at the beginning of the Second World War , Otto was drafted into the Waffen SS and deployed in the Buchenwald concentration camp. There he passed his second teaching qualification as a trainer for young SS reservists. At first he performed guard duties as a member of the SS-Totenkopf-Sturmbannes Buchenwald. From summer 1941 to November 1941 he acted as an accounting officer and then as a clerk in the camp commandant's office until summer 1943. He then became the “ spit ” of the camp commandant's office and headed the commandant's office until April 11, 1945.

Otto was head of Kommando 99 , the execution squad of the concentration camp, and was present at the official executions as a “spit” of the camp commandant's office . He took part in executions of foreign agents eight times as a shooter, kept the record of 35 hangings and was also a participant in the execution squad that shot the first camp commandant of Buchenwald, Karl Otto Koch, on April 5, 1945. During the executions, Otto turned the radio up to drown out the gunshot noises. His task was to ensure the scheduling, compliance, covering of tracks and ensuring that the executions ran smoothly. He also took care of cigarettes, coffee and sausages for the members of the execution squad after the execution. After the war Otto denied involvement in the murder of the KPD chairman Ernst Thälmann on August 18, 1944.

Otto, who took the minutes of the hanging, said the following about the procedure during the Krefeld Thälmann Trial in 1985:

“In doing so, I first had to determine the personal details of the person to be hanged by reading out the name from the documents and asking whether it was the person to be hanged. The person concerned announced that it was him either by signs or by an intelligible sound. "

Regarding the executions on hooks on the wall in the basement of the crematorium, Otto explained:

"This sight was even less aesthetic than that of an execution by rope and staircase."

The prisoners “were lifted up, then the rope was put around their necks and died hanging on a hook”.

After the war

After the end of the war, Otto was arrested and charged with 30 other accused as part of the Dachau trials in the main Buchenwald trial. On August 14, 1947 Otto was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment for helping and participating in the violent crimes in Buchenwald concentration camp, which was later reduced to ten years imprisonment.

During his imprisonment in the Landsberg War Crimes Prison , Otto worked as a liturgically trained organist at the prison services. On March 6, 1952, Otto was released early from the Landsberg War Crimes Prison for good conduct. He had several Persilscheine , for example he had received one in 1947 from the former beech forest inmate Léon Blum because of his liaison activities between the camp commandant and the inmates. Otto applied as a teacher in North Rhine-Westphalia and in 1954 received a teaching post at the Catholic elementary school in Goch near Kleve because of his Persil certificates, despite his work in Buchenwald. Otto, who also taught religion, moved to a Catholic elementary school in Geldern in 1959. He did not hide his past from the school board there either, but embellished it by pretending to have only done paperwork and accounting in Buchenwald. On June 1, 1962, Otto was banned from exercising his official business with immediate effect because it became known that there were allegations against him in connection with crimes in Buchenwald. As a result, Otto received a lifelong pension of 1,700 DM per month, which he fought against the Ministry of Education in North Rhine-Westphalia by means of a settlement before the administrative court.

Processes

The Federal German judiciary was investigating Otto from 1959. The "Central Office of North Rhine-Westphalia for the Prosecution of Mass Crimes of Concentration Camps" at the Cologne Public Prosecutor's Office refrained from issuing an arrest warrant in December 1961 because, due to the transfer agreement that the Allies had concluded with the Federal Republic of Germany, only acts committed against German concentration camps Detainees could be prosecuted. Not a single German prisoner could be determined by name to have been executed by Otto, and the crimes against Allied prisoners had already been tried in the main Buchenwald trial.

The former Buchenwald prisoner Marian Zgoda from Poland had already brought the murder of Ernst Thalmann in connection with a perpetrator of Wolfgang Otto in a report broadcast on Deutschlandradio in 1947. With this declaration, Ludwig Landwehr, chairman of the Association of Persecuted Persons of the Nazi Regime in Lower Saxony, sparked a campaign in the GDR in 1962 because of Otto's perpetration. As a result, Thälmann's widow, Rosa Thälmann , who lives in East Berlin, filed a criminal complaint against Otto through her lawyer Friedrich Karl Kaul in Geldern for aiding and abetting murder . From 1962 onwards, a total of seven preliminary investigations were initiated against Otto over the next 25 years and were suspended again due to lack of evidence and once due to the statute of limitations . The GDR's extradition requests were not granted by the Federal Republic of Germany. Thälmann's daughter, Irma Gabel-Thälmann , filed an application for compulsory action before the Cologne Higher Regional Court through her lawyer Heinrich Hannover on February 24, 1982 , which subsequently led to main proceedings before the Krefeld Regional Court in 1985 , which led to the conviction on May 15, 1986 Otto ended up being four years in prison for an accessory to murder. On March 25, 1987, however, the Federal Court of Justice granted a petition for revision and overturned the judgment. On August 29, 1988, Otto was finally acquitted before the Düsseldorf Regional Court . The exact circumstances of the Thälmann murder could never be clarified beyond any doubt, despite witness statements. Wolfgang Otto died in Geldern in November 1989.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d precious georgelt . In: Der Spiegel . No. 25 , 1962, pp. 37 ( online ).
  2. ↑ a b Wolfgang Malanowski: Pleasant music when shot in the neck . In: Der Spiegel . No. 20 , 1986, pp. 84-93 ( online ).
  3. ^ Dietrich Strothmann : Back then, in Buchenwald - For the last time: The murder of Ernst Thälmann in court . In: Die Zeit , No. 13, 1988
  4. ↑ a b c Buchenwald main trial: Deputy Judge Advocate's Office 7708 War Crimes Group European Command APO 407: United States of America v. Josias Prince zu Waldeck et al. - Case 000-50-9 , November 1947 (English, PDF file, 33.0 MB)
  5. ↑ Friedrich Karl Kaul : "... is to be executed!" - A profile of the German class justice . Verlag Neues Leben , 2006, p. 160
  6. ↑ Hardly understandable . In: Der Spiegel . No. 42 , 1985, pp. 114-117 ( online ).
  7. ↑ Wolfgang Malanowski: Pleasant music when shot in the neck . In: Der Spiegel . No. 20 , 1986, pp. 85 f . ( online ).
  8. ^ Matthias Geis: Last chance . In: Die Zeit , No. 14, 1995
    Illegal to death . In: Der Spiegel . No. 16 , 1998, pp. 50 ( online ).
  9. ↑ Ernst Thälmann Memorial: Circular letter from the Thälmann House (PDF) No. 15, May 1984
  10. ↑ DIED Wolfgang Otto . In: Der Spiegel . No. 49 , 1989, pp. 284 ( online ).
personal data
SURNAME Otto, Wolfgang
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Otto, Wolfgang Gunther Klaus (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German SS-Stabsscharführer in Buchenwald concentration camp
DATE OF BIRTH August 23, 1911
PLACE OF BIRTH Katowice
DATE OF DEATH November 26, 1989
Place of death Funds