Proceedings After The War
After the fall of the Nazi régime, the chairman of the drumhead court, Otto Thorbeck, and the prosecutor, Walter Huppenkothen, were accused in West Germany of being accessories to murder. After the Bundesgerichtshof (BGH) had at first quashed a lower court's two acquittals, it changed its mind in 1956 during the third revision of the case, quashed Thorbeck's and Huppenkothen's sentences, and acquitted them of the charges of being accessories to murder by their participation in the drumhead trial on grounds that the court had been duly constituted and the sentence had been imposed according to the law then in force, without either of the accused having perverted justice. It was particularly incomprehensible that the ruling approved the accused's involvement in carrying out the drumhead court's sentence, since they had failed to secure the approval of the highest legal official (that is, Hitler) of the sentence before they executed Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Wilhelm Canaris and Karl Sack. Huppenkothen was acquitted of carrying out the sentence of execution against von Dohnanyi, as there was a reasonable doubt as to whether Hitler did not approve the sentence.
On the occasion of Hans von Dohnanyi's hundredth birthday in 2002, Günter Hirsch, president of the BGH, called those who had sentenced Dohnanyi to death "criminals calling themselves judges". Hirsch said the 1956 ruling was shameful because as a result, not a single one of the Nazi-era judges who sentenced 50,000 Nazi opponents to their deaths were themselves found guilty after the war.
On October 23, 2003, Israel honoured Hans von Dohnanyi by recognizing him as one of the Righteous Among the Nations for saving the Arnold and Fliess families, at risk to his own life. His name has been inscribed in the walls at the Holocaust remembrance centre Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.
His grandson Justus von Dohnányi starred as Wilhelm Burgdorf in 2004 film Downfall, which was about the fall of the Nazi regime, where Burgdorf was a central part in SS.
Read more about this topic: Hans Von Dohnanyi
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“From his proceedings in Congress, he appears demented, and his actings and doings inspire my pity more than anger.”
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