von Dohnanyi Hans

Dohnanyi, Hans von The anti-Nazi resistance fighter Hans von Dohnanyi was born in Vienna on January 1, 1902. His father, Erno von Dohnanyi, was a Hungarian conductor and composer of note. His mother, Elisabeth von Dohnanyi (née Kunwald) was an esteemed piano player. About a year later, in 1903, the Dohnanyi’s moved to Berlin, where they settled in the fashionable Grunewald district, on the outskirts of the city. In 1913, when Dohnanyi was 11 years old, his parents separated and Hans and his younger sister remained in the custody of their mother. Following the separation, Elisabeth von Dohnanyi, who got into financial difficulties, had to leave Grunewald for a less privileged part of Berlin. She kept, however, most of her former musical and social contacts. Hans was sent to study at the liberal Grunewald-Gymnasium, favored by many of Berlin's professorial families. Among those who studied there were Christine Bonhoeffer, Dohnanyi's future wife, and her two brothers, Klaus and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Their father was Karl Bonhoeffer, a renowned psychiatrist and professor at the university of Berlin. Another schoolmate was Justus Delbrück, the son of a history professor. All four men – Dohnanyi, the two Bonhoeffer brothers and Delbrück, were later executed for their part in the anti-Hitler conspiracy. In 1920, Dohnanyi began his law studies in Berlin, passing his civil service trainee examination in 1924. A year later he married Christine Bonhoeffer, having accepted a position as research assistant at the prestigious Institute for Foreign Affairs in Hamburg. He worked concurrently on a doctoral dissertation and in September 1926 was awarded the doctoral degree. Dohnanyi began in January 1929 a highly successful career in the German justice administration, serving as the personal aide of successive Reich Justice Ministers. Hitler’s rise to power at the end of January 1933 did not stop Dohnanyi’s rapid climb up the bureaucratic ladder. In May 1933, the Reich Ministerof Justice, Franz Gürtner, asked him to take charge of the reform of the German penal system. The hard working and brilliant young jurist soon won the unbounded confidence of Gürtner, who in October 1934 appointed him chief of his ministerial bureau. This gave Dohnanyi free access to the inner secrets of the Justice Ministry at a time when the Nazis were extending their fateful hold over German society in general and the legal system in particular. Dohnanyi took advantage of his privileged position to systematically assemble evidence on the crimes of the Nazis probably for possible future legal prosecution. From the outset, the Nazi treatment of the Jews was a key factor in Dohnanyi’s growing opposition to Hitler. On September 10, 1933 professor Kurt Perels, Dohnanyi’s teacher at the University of Hamburg committed suicide following his dismissal. Among those affected was also Gerhard Leibholz, Dohnanyi’s brother-in-law and childhood friend who was “excused” from his lectureship at the University of Göttingen in March 1935. Dohnanyi would use his insider knowledge and contacts to enable those who sought his help at the Justice Ministry to defend their legal rights. However, with the progressive erosion of the State of Laws and growing arbitrariness of the administration, his ability to help became more and more restricted. The secret information that Dohnanyi passed on to Sabine (Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s twin sister) and her husband Gerhard Leibholz concerning the incarceration of Jews and opponents of the Regime in Nazi concentration camps was decisive in making them decide to leave Germany in 1937. Dohnanyi’s special relationship to Gürtner aroused the suspicion of devoted Nazis within the Ministry, who were well aware of his antipathy to Nazism. In their efforts to discredit Dohnanyi, they were able to play on his dubious “Aryan” ancestry - the fact that his maternal grandfather had - according to the birth certificate issued by a Hungarian Jewish community - twoJewish parents. In an expert opinion that his archenemy Friedrich submitted to Martin Bormann, then head of the office of Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy in the party, on April 30, 1937 he concluded that Dohnanyi was “1/2 Hungarian, ¼ German, ¼ Jew”. As to the political stance of Dohnanyi, Friedrich commented that: “In accordance with his racial composition - which indeed you cannot tell by his external looks - he has no understanding for the racial legislation of the Third Reich, to which he is internally opposed. Thus he expressed the view that the racist position of National Socialism is impossible because it contradicts the Christian view of the Protestant Church”. In September 1938, Reich Justice Minister Gürtner, no longer able to protect his protégé, appointed him to be a judge at the Reich Supreme Court in Leipzig. The not yet 37 year-old Dohnanyi was probably one of the youngest judges ever to be nominated to that venerable institution. By that time, Dohnanyi was already deeply involved with the opposition against Hitler in the military, which crystallized round the intelligence office of the High Command of the Army under Admiral Wilhelm Canaris. In August 1939, shortly before the outbreak of war, Canaris and his right-hand man, Major-General Hans Oster, had Dohnanyi assigned to the central department of the intelligence office as a civilian Specialist. His real task there was to coordinate the preparations for the projected coup against Hitler. However, the sweeping German victories in Poland and on the western front had the effect of weakening the inclination for key military leaders to cooperate with the resistance. From his vantage point in the Abwehr (military intelligence), Dohnanyi observed with growing alarm the radicalization of the measures taken against the Jews. He was especially concerned with the fate of two individuals, the Jewish lawyers’ representatives Julius Fliess and Fritz W. Arnold, a baptized Jew. The two were among the last 49Jewish Consultants who were allowed to practice in Berlin after November 1938. Both were severely wounded and highly decorated veterans of WWI. Dohnanyi had come to know and respect them while acting as chief of Gürtner’s ministerial bureau. When in November 1941 he learned of Fliess’ impending deportation, he made Canaris sign a letter of protest, which had the effect of temporarily deferring the deportation. However, with the ever-intensifying waves of deportations, the chances of slipping through the Nazi dragnet became slimmer and slimmer. Sometime in May or June 1942, Dohnanyi conceived the daring idea of permanently moving Fliess and Arnold and their families out of harm’s way by dispatching them across the border to a neutral country as ostensible intelligence agents. Canaris, who gave his immediate assent, added to the list of those to be rescued some family friends, who although professing Protestants, ranked as Jewish by Nazi racial criteria. These included the widowed Annemarie Conzen, with her “half-Jewish” daughters and Ilse Rennefeld with her blind “Aryan” husband. Charlotte Friedenthal, a Protestant social worker close to the leadership of the Confessing Church, was included at the suggestion of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The theologian and resistance opponent had been brought to the Intelligence Office in October 1940 by his brother-in-law, Dohnanyi. Because the scheme originally involved seven adult “full Jews” according to the Nuremberg Laws (Fliess, his wife and daughter, Arnold, Conzen, Rennefeld and Friedenthal), it was given the code name U-7 (Unternehmen Sieben). However, together with Rennefeld’s husband, Conzen’s two daughters, Arnold's “Arian” wife and his three children considered Mischlinge 1. Grade (Mixed Race of 1st Degree) by Nazi racial criteria the actual number soon rose to 14. Although the plan had the full support of the Intelligence Chief Canaris, its actual organization was an exceedingly complicated affair. The dispatch of Jewishsecret agents abroad, at a time when all Jewish emigration had been banned, required the prior consent of Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler which was obtained by Canaris in one of the meetings between them. The true purpose of the operation did not only have to be kept secret from Himmler and his underlings in the RSHA, but also from the regime loyalists within military intelligence itself. Dohnanyi, the actual initiator and wire puller, had to operate behind the scenes because the launching of secret agents abroad went beyond his professional competence, which was exclusively administrative. The Swiss authorities, who were controlling their borders against a dreaded flood of Jewish refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe, had to be satisfied in their turn that the asylum seekers would not constitute any sort of financial burden on the country. For this purpose, Dohnanyi had to provide them with cash money to the value of 100,000 US dollars that he drew from secret military intelligence funds - dedicated for the resistance - in Switzerland. In return, the fugitives made over to the Intelligence Office their own assets in Germany. Finally, with all the obstacles cleared out of the way, the main group was able to board the Berlin-Basel train, arriving in Basel on September 30, 1942. Charlotte Friedenthal and Arnold’s oldest daughter reached Switzerland by other ways. For Hans von Dohnanyi and his fellow plotters in the Intelligence Office, the Via Dolorosa had only just begun. The planning and implementation of the rescue operation masked as an intelligence mission had left too many loose ends, not least those connected with its intricate financial aspects. The latter played into the hands of the Nazi sympathizers within the Intelligence Office, who pressed for a thorough investigation of the whole affair. The person appointed in charge of the investigation, Oberkriegsgerichtsrat Roeder, was considered one of the most ruthless and unscrupulous military judges of theThird Reich. On April 5, 1943, Dohnanyi was arrested in the presence of Canaris and his immediate superior Oster. Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Christine von Dohnanyi were also arrested the same day in Berlin. Roeder tried at first to impute to Dohnanyi personal corruption. While there was little hard evidence for the accusation of personal enrichment, the fact that the alleged intelligence “agents” did not engage in any intelligence gathering activity in Switzerland and did not reach South America, their alleged intelligence target, aroused suspicion. Nor could it be concealed that the Intelligence Office had intervened several times to prevent the deportation of Arnold and Fliess to the “East”. Even so, Roeder did not succeed in cracking the resistance of Dohnanyi, who kept denying everything despite the brutal pressure to which he was subjected. Before the charges could be brought to court, Roeder was replaced by another judge who started the whole investigation anew. In fact, the case, which dragged on inconclusively for more than a year, was about to be dropped, when the failed attempt to assassinate Hitler of July 20, 1944 and its aftermath reenergized the zeal of the Gestapo investigators. On August 20, 1944, Dohnanyi, who was suffering from self-inflicted diphtheria, was moved from the epidemic hospital in Potsdam to the Nazi “model” concentration camp of Sachsenhausen where he was interrogated on a twice-weekly basis. Even then, the investigators were fumbling in the dark until a chance discovery of a safe in the Army High Command brought to light secret documentation relating to the 1938 plans for the overthrow of Hitler. Still unsatisfied with their progress, Dohnanyi’s interrogators transferred him to the Gestapo prison in Berlin where they hoped to extort a full confession by withholding all medical care. Dohnanyi did not break but his condition deteriorated rapidly. His father-in-law, Professor Karl Bonhoeffer, succeeded in having him moved to theprisoner section of the State Hospital, where he was devotedly looked after by Dr. Albrecht Tietze*, the chief neurologist. Tietze, a long-time opponent of the Nazis, tried to devise a last minute escape plan. But this was not to be. On April 6, 1945, Dohnanyi was brought on a stretcher from the state hospital to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp where he was sentenced to death for high treason by an SS court martial. He was probably hanged on April 9, the same day that Hans Oster, Canaris and Dietrich Bonhoeffer were hanged in Flossenbürg. On June 17, 2003, Yad Vashem recognized Hans von Dohnanyi as Righteous among the Nations.