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Awarding of the Stanislav Zámečník Study Prize 2024
V.l.t.R. Mayor of Dachau Florian Hartmann, CID President Dominique Boueilh, Award winner Josch Döpp M.A., Prof. Dr. Sybille Steinbacher, Dr. Gabriele Hammermann
Laudation for the award winner Joscha Döpp M.A.
On the occasion of the awarding of the Stanislav Zámečník Study Prize for 2024, the President of the CID Dominique Boueilh, Secretary General Cristina Cristóbal, Dr. Ernst Berger, Prof. Dr. Sybille Steinbacher, Dr. Gabi Hammermann, Florian Hartmann, mayor of the city of Dachau, members of the CID and other invited guests met in the plenary hall of the New Dachau Town Hall to present the Stanislav Zámečník Study Prize for 2024.
The prize's namesake, Stanislav Zámečník, was imprisoned in the Dachau concentration camp from 1941 to 1945 and was heavily involved in resistance activities within the camp. After his liberation, he studied history and wrote the most comprehensive monograph to date on the Dachau concentration camp.
With this prize every two years, the international Dachau Committee honors outstanding scientific work that deals with the processing of Nazi crimes after the end of the Second World War as well as work that provides new perspectives and impulses for memorial and educational work. A jury chaired by Prof. Dr. Sybille Steinbacher, director of the Fritz Bauer Institute in Frankfurt am Main, chose the winner Joscha Döpp M.A. for 2024. He was honored for his academic work with the title: “Accused for mass murder in Ukraine, The Federal German investigations against SS-Hauptsturmführer Kuno Carlssen and the Darmstadt Einsatzgruppen Trial (1960 – 1968)” The prize is worth €6,000 and is awarded every two years by the Comité International de Dachau (CID).
After the opening by the CID Secretary General Cristina Cristóbal, the introductory words by Dr. Ernst Berger on the criteria for the prize was followed by short speeches by the mayor of Dachau, Florian Hartmann, and the CID president, Dominique Boueilh.
The laudatory speech for the award winner Mr. Joscha Döpp M.A. held by Prof. Dr. Sybille Steinbacher.
Laudator: Prof Dr Sybille Steinbacher
“In his study, Mr. Döpp examines the preparation and conduct of the trial that took place in 1967/68 at the Darmstadt Regional Court against Callsen, the main defendant, and the other ten defendants of the former SS special command. The troops were responsible for the mass murder of around 80,000 Ukrainian Jews in the summer and autumn of 1941.” Of these, over 33,000 were murdered in the Babyn Yar ravine near Kiev.
After the end of the war, Callsen initially remained unprosecuted. The Americans became aware of him in 1947/48 in connection with the preparation of the Nuremberg task force trial and interned him. But he did not have to face any legal proceedings. His crimes remained undetected.” In the tribunal proceedings he was classified as “minorly charged”. At the beginning of 1948, when he was released from American internment, Callsen was leading a middle-class family life in Neu-Isenburg near Frankfurt in southern Hesse, where he had already lived before the war. He worked as a freelance sales representative in Frankfurt (…)
In the political and social climate of the young Federal Republic, no one was interested in Callsen and the members of the SS-Sonderkommando 4a. By the mid-1950s, Nazi perpetrators no longer had to fear being prosecuted by a court. What was later aptly called a “standstill” occurred in the judiciary. “
It is to the credit of the Hessian Attorney General Fritz Bauer that, with the help of increasing public pressure, an investigation was started against Callsen.
“Mr. Döpp skilfully and convincingly works out the political, legal, reception and media-historical contexts of his topic.” He shows “how a picture of the crimes gradually emerged in the course of the preliminary judicial investigations, but also what efforts were made and had to be undertaken in order to even be able to bring Callsen and his accomplices to trial.
(…) The so-called accomplice jurisprudence, according to which responsibility for the crimes lay solely with Hitler and his entourage and all other perpetrators were considered mere “assistants”, was a decisive obstacle to countering Nazi crimes with legal means. In the Darmstadt trial, the defense pleaded for an acquittal because, as it was said, the defendants were only “accidental figures” in the murder and the mass crimes would have taken place even without them. (…)
The verdict in the trial of Callsen and the other defendants came 27 years after the crimes. That was extremely late. Only eleven of probably a total of 60 to 80 members of Sonderkommando 4a were on trial. The verdict was also strikingly lenient. The defendants were only convicted of aiding and abetting murder, three of them acquitted, even though it was clear that all of the defendants were involved in the mass shootings. (…)
Callsen received the longest sentence, 15 years. He took up the position in 1975 after an appeal process, but was released again five and a half years later. With his release, all convicts still alive were released. Callsen still enjoyed a long life; he died in 2001 at the age of 90. (…)
The investigative performance of the public prosecutors” – said the laudator – “as Mr. Döpp clearly shows, can hardly be overestimated. Since there were only a few historical studies on Nazi crimes in the 1960s, it is thanks to the lawyers that they compiled the material about the actions of Sonderkommando 4a, especially about the Babyn Yar massacre. They did this under the difficult conditions of the Cold War, when legal assistance transactions with the Eastern Bloc countries were hardly possible. And they did it at a time when it was not yet decided whether the statute of limitations would expire for murder. (…)
CID President Dominique Boueilh presents the award winner 2023 Joscha Döpp M.A. with the certificate
The result is an outstanding scientific work that addresses the social and (legal) political handling of the Nazi crimes in the Federal Republic of Germany and, which is unusual for a master's thesis, opens up new scientific territory.
Ms. Prof. Dr. Steinbacher announced that the Fritz Bauer Institute will publish the study in autumn 2024 in the “Small series on the history and impact of the Holocaust” under the title “From Babyn Jar to Darmstadt. The SS special commando leader Kuno Callsen in court "will be published.
In his acceptance speech, the prize winner revealed his motives and thanked everyone involved for supporting his work and the CID for the prize.
Report by Klaus Mai.
Thankword of the award winner Joscha Döpp M.A.
(...)
The CID asked me beforehand to explain in a few words what motivated me to actually carry out my research.
So what motivates a budding German historian, born almost exactly 50 years after the end of World War II, to research the history and aftermath of the Holocaust? – On closer inspection, this is of course a complex issue. I thought the best way to answer this question would be, if I may, to give you some insight into what particularly moved me in the process of creating the work:
At the Fritz Bauer Institute, where I had already obtained my bachelor's degree in history, I received a reference to the name "Kuno Callsen" at the beginning of 2022, when I was looking for a topic for my master's thesis. Kuno Callsen was an SS leader in an operational group and was convicted of violent Nazi crimes in Darmstadt in 1968. There is a body of relevant sources in the archives of the Fritz Bauers Institute - that's all I knew at the time. beginning.
In the institute's archives, I then found the papers of a certain Hans Fertig, a lawyer from Frankfurt who had represented Callsen as a lawyer in the 1960s. In this inventory, from the beginning of my research , I came across the judgment of the Darmstadt judges from 1968. On 700 typed pages, the dimensions of the crimes of the Einsatzgruppe in the Soviet Union that were tried here in court were revealed to me in detail:
- I read that Sonderkommando 4a, with 60 to 80 men, had murdered 80,000 Jews in a few months since the summer of 1941.
- 24 cities in central and northern Ukraine have become crime scenes.
- Unlike the Nazi concentration and extermination camps, here people were pillaged, shot and buried in the immediate vicinity of their homes, in broad daylight, often poorly protected from the gaze of their neighbors.
- The most famous crime scene in the verdict was the Babyn Yar ravine near kyiv. More than 33,000 people were murdered there in just 2 days at the end of September 1941.
Reading all this, I was overcome with horror by these dimensions; and the legal proceedings themselves irritated me:
- In 1968, more than 25 years later, only eleven men from the responsible command were tried, the main accused being Kuno Callsen.
- They all got off with short prison sentences, three men were even acquitted despite being involved in the murders.
I also recognized many place names in the headlines of our time: for more than two years now, this time under the auspices of Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine, the bombs have finally fallen again on these places, livelihoods and lives were destroyed. I think that this circumstance, this feeling of "historical immediacy" also motivated me to continue to deal with the fate of Ukrainian Jews and the conduct of the Callsen trial. And in general, it is often these moments of what I call “historical immediacy” that move me in my research:
Kuno Callsen moved with his family to the Hessian town of Neu-Isenburg in the 1950s. He established himself professionally as a businessman in Frankfurt and even published a book in 1957 on "Increasing Sales of vending machines” in a Stuttgart series, the “Practical Books for Business Success”. The fact that Callsen lived in Neu-Isenburg meant that the proceedings against him were subsequently taken over by the Darmstadt public prosecutor's office.
Anyway, my grandmother and her family ended up in Neu-Isenburg in the late 1950s as high school graduates after fleeing the GDR. I discovered that she had lived there a few blocks from Callsen: perhaps they had greeted each other in the street, perhaps they had taken the same train to Frankfurt in the morning - Nazi criminals like Callsen who believed in civic security, existed everywhere in Germany in the 1950s. In any case, such thoughts make me understand that as a German historian I inevitably have a personal connection to these crimes and therefore bear historical responsibility particular.
Of course, I also searched for the voices of survivors in the 226 trial files that I found in the Hessian State Archives in Darmstadt. Out of 171 witnesses, I only found two surviving witnesses – I mentioned this largely blank space at the beginning. Two women, Dina Proničeva and Vera Bogucka, survived the Babyn Yar massacre in 1941. They were located by the prosecution and testified before the Darmstadt court. Recovering their rare testimonies from the archives and evaluating them in my work was a particular concern for me.
In the files of the Hessian Attorney General in Wiesbaden, I discovered that the Callsen trial was the last major trial conducted under the leadership of Hessian Attorney General Fritz Bauer, who died in 1968, the namesake of the institute where I studied.
This circumstance also inspired me: Bauer, who as a social democrat and a Jew had himself been persecuted by the National Socialists, always considered the processes he initiated as “learning processes”. Gathering accurate historical knowledge about the crimes of the National Socialists and thus educating Germans was one of his main stated concerns. Thus, during my research I quickly realized that, from today's point of view, the fundamental research carried out during the investigation of Sonderkommando 4a in particular should be considered one of the main historical achievements of the Callsen trial:
Although the conviction of the Sk 4a men seems scandalous from a moral point of view, the prosecutor's meticulous research into the crimes was nothing short of revolutionary. In the 1960s, one might add, Holocaust research was not yet established in the field of history. There have been virtually no individual studies of these crimes and I would like to think that some of the investigators' findings - even if they were prefigured by the interest in legal knowledge - are difficult to surpass by current research.
In my work, I dare to doubt whether the Callsen trial actually resulted in a "learning process" among the German public: in fact, in his case, precise knowledge was transmitted to the Germans through media reporting. However, the way this knowledge was presented did not trigger a thought process. The legal emphasis on excesses was reflected here too strongly, almost nothing was commented on or even classified historically. The Germans hardly wanted to consider themselves responsible for such excesses.
And yet, and this brings me to the end, I can still draw much today from Fritz Bauer's fundamental hope regarding "learning processes" through confrontation with history. I believe we can learn from history and, despite all the challenges, we must not stop producing historical knowledge guaranteed by scientific methods, in our field: source criticism.
It is also an important motivation for me to conduct research on the Holocaust. Today, we are witnessing a continuous change of discourse and radicalization in our society. Anti-Semitism, racism, and anti-queer sentiments have always existed, but the voices propagating them are quickly becoming louder and more aggressive, amplified by social media. In an age where expressions of opinion are presented as fact, it is precisely expertise in science like this that is important. The story is in demand. This knowledge alone will not resolve conflicts and an intact moral compass is certainly still part of it, and yet I think we must not stop appealing to the fact that this methodically acquired knowledge must remain the basis of all discussions and attitudes in our democracy. Although I can only contribute in a very small way, I hope to be able to do so with my future research. In any case, it remains an important motivation for me.
The fact that my work has received the Stanislav Zámečník Study Prize today is – I would like to repeat – a great honor and I would like to warmly thank the CID.
Thank you for your attention!.
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Joscha Döpp, born in 1996, studied history, German studies, political science and art history in Frankfurt am Main and Toronto. After graduating, he worked on a project on Frankfurt's savings banks under National Socialism at the Fritz Bauer Institute in Frankfurt am Main. He has been a doctoral student there since 2024 with a research project on the lawyer Henry Ormond.
The CID would like to thank all those who have participated in the organization and development of this SZ 2024 award because with their help this event has been carried out. We also thank those who attended the event for their presence. To Klaus Mai for writing the news on the CID website and to Robert Burkhardt for the administrative efforts
