Herbert Hagen

Herbert Hagen
Herbert Hagen, on 1 May 1943 in Paris
Born	20 September 1913(1913-09-20) Neumünster,German Empire
Died	1 August 1999(1999-08-01)(aged 85) Rüthen,Germany
Conviction(s)	War crimes
Criminal penalty	Life hard labour(1955) (in absentia) imprisonment12 years (1980) (released after 4 years)
SS service
Allegiance	Nazi Germany
Service/branch	Schutzstaffel
Years of service	1933–1945
Rank	SS-Sturmbannführer

Herbert Martin Hagen(20 September 1913 – August 1999) was a German SS-SturmbannführerofNaziGermanyand a convictedwar criminal.Hagen served as personal assistant to theSS police chiefin ParisCarl Oberg,heading theGestapodepartment. Hagen was captured in 1945, but released in 1948. In 1955 he was sentenced to life imprisonmentin absentiain France, after he was found guilty of being instrumental in the deportation of the Jews from France; nonetheless, he managed to avoid going to prison, and became a prominentWest Germanindustrialist. In 1980 after a change in the law to allow retrial of cases handled abroad, he was sentenced to 12 years in prison by aColognecourt, for his key role in the deportation of 73,000 Jews to theAuschwitz death camp.Hagen was released after serving only four years of prison, he died inRüthenin 1999.

Biography

Herbert Hagen (In the middle, standing) in Vienna, withAdolf Eichmannon the right andJosef Löwenherzon the left, March 1938

Herbert Hagen was born on 20 September 1913, inNeumünster,Schleswig-Holstein,he joined the SS in October 1933 inKiel.

From 1940 Hagen held positions in the Security Police in France, based in Bordeaux. He instituted measures to deport Jews; in December 1941, Hagen set up aninternment camp for Jews in Mérignac.On 24 October 1941, in the Souges internment camp, Hagen was directly responsible for the execution by hanging of 50 hostages,thirty-five of them came from the Mérignac camp. On 5 May 1942, Hagen, who had previously served as a Nazi police official in Poland, was appointed to the position of political assistant ofCarl Oberg,who commanded the SS and police forces in France, overseeing anti-Jewish matters as well as security under SS-ObersturmbannführerHelmut Knochen.Fluent in French, he was able to communicate Nazi demands directly toVichyabout the deportation of Jews and the fight against the resistance.In September 1944, he was transferred toCarinthia,Austriawhere he commanded anEinsatzkommandomobiledeath squadon theYugoslavborder.

Capture, trials, sentence and death

On 13 May 1945, Hagen was captured by the British inKlagenfurt,he was handed by the British to the French occupation forces in November 1946, but was released on 4 March 1948. Because he belonged to the SS and SD, Hagen was sentenced to one and a half years in prison on 5 May 1948, which was considered served due to his time in internment. He managed to convince the court that he had only been active in intelligence analysis and espionage and denied knowing what was happening to those deported. The Law on Exemption from Punishment (amnesty law) of 1954 allowed him to find employment at a Cologne company and start a new career in industry. On 18 March 1955, in light of new evidence, a military court in Paris found him guilty of being instrumental in the deportation of the Jews from France, he was sentenced (in absentia) to lifelong forced labour.In 1964 he became managing director of a respected apparatus, equipment and service company inWarstein.

French lawyer andNazi hunterSerge Klarsfeld,whose own father had been an Auschwitz victim, managed to track him down, alongside two other Nazi war criminals, after years of investigation. In 1980, after 15 months of trial, Herbert Hagen was tried and convicted by the 15th criminal chamber of theCologneHigher Regional Courtand sentenced to twelve years in prison on charges of ordering and administrating the deportation of Jews. During the trial, Klarsfeld, who had amassed thirteen volumes of documents linking the defendants to individual deportations, represented the French victims.The court learned that Hagen knew about the Nazi program to exterminate the Jews, was a central figure in its implementation and was heavily involved in the deportation of Jews from Occupied France.It was concluded that during his period in command, 70,790 Jews were sent to concentration camps where at least 35,000 were murdered in the gas chamber.

Herbert Hagen served only four years of his twelve years sentence in prison before being set free,he died on 7 August 1999, in Rüthen.

References

Sources

• Akens (n.d.)."Akens Informationen 33/34, Paul:" Von Judenangelegenheiten hatte er bis dahin keine Ahnung ".Akens(in German).
• Bartrop, P.R.; Grimm, E.E. (2019).Perpetrating the Holocaust: Leaders, Enablers, and Collaborators.ABC-CLIO.ISBN978-1-4408-5897-0.
• Graham, Bradley (1980-02-12)."West German Court Sentences three who Sent Jews to Death Camps".Washington Post.
• Megargee, G.P.; White, J. (2018).The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945, Volume III: Camps and Ghettos under European Regimes Aligned with Nazi Germany.Indiana University Press.ISBN978-0-253-02386-5.
• Stover, E.; Peskin, V.; Koenig, A. (2016).Hiding in Plain Sight: The Pursuit of War Criminals from Nuremberg to the War on Terror.University of California Press.ISBN978-0-520-27805-9.
• Wistrich, R.S. (2013).Who's Who in Nazi Germany.Who's Who. Taylor & Francis.ISBN978-1-136-41381-0.