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Georg Konrad Morgen

Georg Konrad Morgen (8 June 1909 – 4 February 1982) was an SS judge and lawyer who investigated crimes committed in Nazi concentration camps. He rose to the rank of SS-Sturmbannführer (major). After the war, Morgen served as witness at several anti-Nazi trials and continued his legal career in Frankfurt.

Georg Konrad Morgen
A formal portrait of Morgen
Born(1909-06-08)8 June 1909
Frankfurt am Main, Grand Duchy of Hesse, German Empire
Died4 February 1982(1982-02-04) (aged 72)
West Germany
Other namesThe Bloodhound Judge
SS career
Allegiance Germany
Service / branch Schutzstaffel
Years of service1933–1945
RankSturmbannführer

Morgen was known as a Blutrichter, or 'blood judge', as a result of being one of the members of the judiciary authorised to issue the death penalty.[1] A mistranslation of this may also be the reason that he earned the nickname 'The Bloodhound Judge', said to be for his determination and doggedness in achieving justice.[2]

Early life and war service

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Born to a railwayman in Frankfurt, Morgen graduated from the University of Frankfurt and The Hague Academy of International Law, before becoming a judge in Stettin. Morgen joined the Nazi Party on 1 April 1933 ("on the advice of my parents"), and had joined the SS in March.[3] He was dismissed for acquitting a teacher who had been brought up on charges of excessive corporal punishment, probably at the instigation of the Hitler Youth.[4] At the outbreak of the war, he entered the Waffen-SS and was sent for basic military training. After the invasion of France in 1940, he was demobilized and employed as a judge in the SS Judiciary, which assigned him to its court in Kraków. In Kraków he investigated several highly placed SS officers for corruption, including Hermann Fegelein, a favorite of Heinrich Himmler's and the future brother-in-law of Eva Braun. He also exposed one of Fegelein's co-conspirators, Jaroslawa Mirowska, as a double agent for the Polish underground.[5]

The first German soldier to be executed on Morgen's orders was Georg von Sauberzweig in 1941, for having resold some supplies reserved for the troops on the black market.[6]

After requesting a transfer, Morgen was instead dismissed by Himmler, ostensibly for acquitting an SS officer of the racial crime of sexual relations with an alien race, but also perhaps for meddling in Himmler's affairs.[7] He was punished by being sent to the Wiking Division on the Eastern Front. However, in mid-1943, Himmler recalled Morgen to investigate and prosecute corruption in the concentration camp system, displeased by SS officers looting from victims for self-gain. He instead preferred that they handed over the property to the government.[8]

Morgen's investigations began with Karl-Otto Koch, the commandant of Buchenwald and Majdanek, Koch's wife Ilse Koch, sadistic SS NCO Martin Sommer, and Buchenwald's camp doctor Waldemar Hoven. Charges included theft, military insubordination, and murder.[9][10] Koch was tried, convicted, and executed shortly before the end of the war. In post-war testimony, Morgen claimed the stories of Frau Koch's fetish with lampshades made of human skin were merely a legend: he had personally searched Koch's home near Buchenwald and found nothing of the kind. He later told the American journalist John Toland that he persisted in denying the story while being threatened with beatings and while actually being beaten twice by his Allied interrogators after the war.[11]

 
10 June 1947. "10 June. L/r: Defense witness, Dr. Morgen; German radio reporter, Werner Klein; interpreter, Rudolph Nathanson, WDC; and defense attorney, Dr. Wacker. Dr. Morgen was an investigator who came to Buchenwald to investigate Commander Koch, who was in charge at the time. As a result of Dr. Morgen's investigation, Koch was arrested and executed. Dr. Morgen is also a prisoner at Dachau."

In addition to prosecuting concentration-camp officers, Morgen sought an arrest warrant for Adolf Eichmann, on charges of having taken possession of precious stones seized from prisoners,[12] as Eichmann himself confirmed at his trial in Jerusalem,[13][14] but Morgen's request was rejected.

During the late summer and fall of 1943, Morgen looked into rumors that Christian Wirth – who was, unbeknownst to Morgen, supervisor of the extermination centers of Operation Reinhard – had permitted SS officers to participate in a drunken Jewish wedding near Lublin.[15] Investigating, he found Wirth presiding over a collection center for vast quantities of clothing and valuables from the victims. On one visit to Lublin, Morgen became an accidental witness to the aftermath of Operation Harvest Festival: the liquidation of three large (Majdanek, Poniatowa, and Trawniki) and several smaller Jewish labor camps in the Lublin area. The operation, ostensibly a preemptive security measure, was said to have been ordered by Himmler on the grounds that the inmates had obtained weapons and made contact with communist partisans active in the surrounding forests.[16] In fact the Jews in each camp were disarmed with negligible resistance and no casualties; and during the mass executions which followed, carried out on the spot over a two-day span, some 43,000 male and female prisoners were shot. Morgen arrived the day after the massacre had ended.[17] He compiled a report from the testimony of eyewitnesses, a portion of which was read out in the pre-trial interrogation of Ernst Kaltenbrunner at Nuremberg: "the men went first, filing into one trench, and later the nude women had their own separate trenches....all passed silently and methodically through the trenches, so the executions went very quickly."[18] (Claims that Morgen was present at the massacre itself, and tried to prevent the industrialist Walter Toebbens from intervening, are unfounded.)[19]

Two packages of dental gold, sent by an Auschwitz dental technician to his wife, had been confiscated by postal inspectors and passed on to Morgen for investigation.[20] Realizing that the gold must have been collected from Holocaust victims, Morgen sent an investigative team to Auschwitz and later visited himself, receiving a thorough tour of the killing center at Birkenau. His investigation was not popular, and a building where evidence files were stored was burned down.[21] Although he could not prosecute the mass extermination of Jews – which, as he explained after the war, was legalized by order of Hitler – he still went on to prosecute the camp commandant Rudolf Höss and the Chief of the camp Gestapo, Maximilian Grabner, for crimes including murder.[22]

Morgen's investigations were eventually halted by Heinrich Himmler, who assigned him to a different position. Some SS officials had wanted him sent to a concentration camp.[23]

Post-war

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After the war, Morgen was a witness for the defense at the trial of Nazi war criminals at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, the WVHA trial, and the 1965 Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt am Main.

Morgen claimed after the war that his prosecutions were an attempt to impede the mass extermination, and two scholars (Herlinde Pauer-Studer and David Velleman, who wrote a biography about Morgen) found this explanation credible in light of the evidence. However, the reason for Morgen's opposition can be questioned, and the scholars noted that Morgen "deplored the concentration camp system not in principle but for its corrupting effects on individuals who went on to commit individual crimes."[24]

After the Nuremberg trials, he continued his legal career in Frankfurt, although not before he was himself brutally beaten, arrested and taken into custody on January 28, 1946, in Ludwigsburg. Because of his membership and high rank in the SS he was brought before a denazification tribunal in 1948. He defended himself with the claim he had become a lawyer "to serve justice" and told the court he had fought against "crimes against humanity". Despite Morgen's position, the court decided to classify him as an Entlasteter (innocent) since he had put himself at risk during his investigations. A revision of the trial against him took place in 1950 by the district court of Nord-Württemberg. This time, he was indicted as a Mitläufer (follower), but he remained a free man.[25]

Additionally, the district court of Frankfurt am Main opened three legal investigations against Morgen. He was accused of involvement in the deportation of Hungarian Jews and of participating in a medical experiment on Russian prisoners of war in Buchenwald. In the absence of evidence, he was not prosecuted.[26]

Morgen appeared in the television series World at War, including in the programme "Hitler's Germany: Total War 1939 - 1945" (Part 5 DVD 1 in the DVD boxed set). In the latter, he said he could not understand why Germany kept fighting when it was obvious that the war was lost, and blamed the leaders of the regime.

Morgen died on 4 February 1982.[2]

Nazis indicted by Konrad Morgen

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Footnotes

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  1. ^ Letter to Maria Wachter, 12 December 1944, Morgen Nachlass, Fritz Bauer Institut.
  2. ^ a b "Konrad Morgen, 'The Bloodhound Judge', Investigating corruption within the SS". holocaustresearchproject.org. Retrieved 27 May 2024.
  3. ^ Pauer-Studer, Herlinde; Velleman, J. David (2015), Pauer-Studer, Herlinde; Velleman, J. David (eds.), "The SS Man", Konrad Morgen: The Conscience of a Nazi Judge, London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, pp. 11–17, doi:10.1057/9781137496959_2, ISBN 978-1-137-49695-9, retrieved 9 September 2022
  4. ^ Morgen's interrogations by the American Counterintelligence Corps, U.S. National Archives, Record Group 238, Microfilm 1019, Roll 47, interrogation of 30 August 1946, pp. 2-3.
  5. ^ Memos between Morgen, Norbert Pohl, and Martin Tondock, Nuremberg document NO-2366 "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 22 December 2015. Retrieved 20 December 2015.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  6. ^ "The only SS judge who brought Nazis to trial". The Jewish Chronicle. Retrieved 27 May 2024.
  7. ^ Morgen's CIC interrogation of 30 August 1946, pp. 18–19.
  8. ^ Pauer-Studer, Herlinde; David Velleman, J. (2015). Konrad Morgen: The Conscience of a Nazi Judge. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-1137496942.
  9. ^ Hackett, David A. (1995). The Buchenwald Report. Westview Press. p. 341.
  10. ^ Morgen's Anklageschrift (bill of indictment), in Nuremberg document NO-2366.
  11. ^ Toland, John (1976). Adolf Hitler. pp. 845-846. ISBN 9780385037242.
  12. ^ International Military Tribunal (IMT, Blue Volume Series), Vol XX, 514.
  13. ^ The Trial of Adolf Eichmann (1992), Session 39, 15 May 1961. Vol. II. p. 712.
  14. ^ "Eichmann trial: The complete transcripts". Archived from the original on 19 September 2012. Retrieved 21 December 2015.
  15. ^ IMT (Blue Volume Series), Vol XX, 492-93.
  16. ^ Report by Jakob Sporrenberg, Historische Mitteilungen 6 (1993): 250–277.
  17. ^ Morgen's affidavit to the Majdanek-Prozess, dated Düsseldorf 19 September 1973. Landgericht Düsseldorf I 4/71. Bundesarchiv Ludwigsburg B162/2359.
  18. ^ IMT (Red Volume series), Supplement Vol. B, pp. 1309-11.
  19. ^ The claim appears in Dan Kurzman (1976), The Bravest Battle - the Twenty-Eight days of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, p. 345.
  20. ^ Morgen's testimony at the Frankfurt Auschwitz Prozess, Published as Der Auschwitz-Prozess : Tonbandmitschnitte, Protokolle, Dokumente, 25. Verhandlungstag 9.3.1964 (Berlin: Direct Media Publishing, 2004), pp. 5550–5693.
  21. ^ Cawthorne, Nigel (2012). The Story of the SS. Arcturus Publishing. p. 88. ISBN 978-1848589476.
  22. ^ Pauer-Studer, Herlinde; Velleman, J. David (2015), "Rudolf Höss and Eleonore Hodys", Konrad Morgen, Palgrave Macmillan UK, pp. 112–114, doi:10.1057/9781137496959_17, ISBN 9781349505043
  23. ^ Fried, Charles (6 October 2015). "The Nazi Judge Who Claimed He Fought Hitler by Overenthusiastically Enforcing Nazi Laws". Slate Magazine. Retrieved 15 July 2022.
  24. ^ Herlinde Pauer-Studer; J. David Velleman (2015). Konrad Morgen: The Conscience of a Nazi Judge. Palgrave. pp. 122–123. ISBN 978-1-349-50504-3.
  25. ^ Kevin Prenger (2021). A Judge in Auschwitz. Pen & Sword. pp. 131–136. ISBN 978-1-399-01876-0.
  26. ^ Kevin Prenger (2021). A Judge in Auschwitz. Pen & Sword. pp. 137–141. ISBN 978-1-399-01876-0.
  27. ^ Kirsten, Holm; Kirsten, Wulf (2002). Stimmen aus Buchenwald: ein Lesebuch (in German). Wallstein Verlag. p. 68. ISBN 978-3-89244-574-6.

References

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