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.

Life

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.

Considered a pacifist by many, Morgen published the book War Propaganda and the Prevention of War in 1936, a year after first meeting Adolf Hitler, arguing against the militarization of Germany. It was published by the Reich.

As a Sturmbannführer (Major), he was ordered to serve in the Wiking Division on the Eastern Front as punishment for insubordination. In 1943, now a Judge-Advocate in the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) while retaining his military rank, Morgen was sent to investigate other SS members on charges of corruption. He had no difficulty gaining acess to the concentration camps in eastern Germany, which held primarily anti-Nazi Germans and other political prisoners, but during a mid-1943 attempt to enter the Jewish extermination camp at Treblinka in central Poland, he and his associates were thrown out bodily. During October–November 1943, Morgan looked into rumors that SS-General Odilo Globocnik, former commandant of Jewish labor camps in the Lublin district of eastern Poland, had assembled an enormous personal trove of valuables confiscated from the inmates. Though unable to bring charges, he became in the course of this investigation an accidental eyewitness to part of Operation Harvest Festival: the liquidation of three large (at Majdanek, Poniatowa, and Trawniki) and several smaller Jewish labor camps in the Lublin district. The operation, a pre-emptive security measure, was ordered by Reichsfuehrer-SS Heinrich Himmler after the RSHA learned that the Jewish inmates were in contact with communist partisans and stockpiling weapons; during the mass executions, which took place on the spot, some 43,000 male and female prisoners were shot. At Poniatowa, on November 4, Morgen witnessed the entire drama, as the camp inmates - "6,000 Jews and 9,500 Jewesses" - reported to the execution site, surrendered their personal effects and clothing, then went naked to self-prepared trenches in order to be shot one-by-one: "the men went first, 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." When Walter Toebbens, owner of the factories at Poniatowa, arrived during the liquidation and attempted to protest the annihilation of his workforce, he was "stopped by Morgen and ordered not to interfere", and the executions continued without interruption.

Though he advanced no legal objections to centrally-authorized anti-Jewish operations like Harvest Festival, and discovered early on that the overall Final Solution of the Jewish problem through physical extermination was outside his formal jurisdiction, Morgen went on to prosecute so many Nazi officers for individual violations that by the following April, Himmler personally ordered him to restrain his cases. Nonetheless, he went on to investigate Auschwitz camp commandant Rudolf Hoess on charges of having "unlawful relations" with a Jewish woman prisoner, Eleanor Hodys; Hoess was, for a time, removed from his command and these proceedings incidentally saved Hodys's life. During the same period, though, Morgen's assistant Gerhard Putsch disappeared, never to be heard from again. Some theorized that this was another warning for Morgen to ease up on his activities, and his headquarters was shortly thereafter burned down. Among others he investigated was the commandant of Buchenwald and Majdanek, Karl-Otto Koch, husband of Ilse Koch, as well as the Buchenwald concentration camp's doctor Waldemar Hoven, who was accused of murdering both inmates and camp guards who threatened to testify against Koch. He later testified at the Nuremberg trials where he claimed the stories of Koch's fetish with lampshades made of human skin were merely a legend. Indeed, he kept denouncing this while being threatened with beatings and while actually being beaten twice by his Allied investigators after the war. Later Morgen stated that he fought for justice during the Nazi era, and cited his long list of 800 investigations into criminal activity at concentration camps during his two years of activity.

Indicted

• Karl-Otto Koch – Commandant of Buchenwald and Majdanek – executed for the murder of two hospital orderlies who had treated him for syphilis
• Martin Sommer – Buchenwald officer, indicted along with Koch. Transferred to the Russian Front.
• Hauptscharfuehrer Blanck – Buchenwald officer, indicted along with Koch. Unknown.
• Hermann Florstedt – Commandant of Majdanek – executed for murder
• Hermann Hackmann – in charge of protective custody in Majdanek – condemned to death for murder but eventually posted to a penal unit
• Hans Loritz – Commandant of Oranienburg – proceedings initiated on suspicion of arbitrary killing
• Adam Grünewald – Commandant of Herzogenbusch concentration camp – found guilty of maltreatment of prisoners and posted to a penal unit
• Karl Kuenstler – Commandant of Flossenbürg concentration camp – dismissed for drunkenness and debauchery
• Alex Piorkowski – Commandant of the Dachau concentration camp – accused of murder but not sentenced
• Maximilian Grabner – Head of Political Section in Auschwitz – accused of murder but not sentenced.
• Gerhard Palitzsch – Sentenced to prison
• Amon Göth – Sentenced to death and executed by the Polish government after the war.
• Hans Aumeier – Tried, convicted and executed in 1948 by the Polish government.

After the war, Morgen continued his legal career in Frankfurt. He died on 4 February 1982.

References

• Morgen's testimony at the Nuremberg Trial of German Major War Criminals, Day 197, Aug 7 1946. From the Nizkor Project website.
• facsimile of Morgen's testimony from Special Collections of the Institute of Documentation in Israel (German)