The newspaper Vorwaerts, an organ of Chancellor Willy Brandt’s Social Democratic Party, accused party leaders today of protecting a former high ranking SS leader who was an aide to Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler and a direct superior of the arch war criminal Adolf Eichmann. The paper named Prof. Reinhard Hoehn who is director general of the Academy for Senior Industrial Managers and is allegedly getting tax money for the vocational training of pensioned German Army officers, presumably former Nazis.
The paper cited various documents culled from the archives of the Nazi era to prove Hoehn’s close personal friendship with Himmler and with Reinhard Heydrich, the “butcher of Lidice.” “There is no doubt that Hoehn was a high-ranking SS leader, one of the ‘desk criminals’ of the Nazi era,” Vorwaerts said. A “desk criminal” is the term applied to those high ranking Nazis who ordered mass murders and deportations without personally participating in them.
The paper said it was hard to understand how prominent Social Democrats and parliamentarians such as Carlo Schmid, vice-president of the Bundestag, and Harald Koch, a leading SPD member, could support Hoehn on the dubious grounds that he has abandoned his Nazi views and is now a staunch democrat.
The paper cited writings by Hoehn in the Nazi press during World War II and a directive by Brandt’s Cabinet asking for an investigation of Hoehn’s past. Vorwaerts published an open letter from its editors asking Defense Minister Helmut Schmidt if he is aware that “Hoehn was one of the leading theoreticians of the Nazi legal machine” or that his academy employs “a number of former Nazis who have been seriously incriminated” by German justice.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
