‘Silent Help’

The organization ‘Stille Hilfe für Kriegsgefangene und Internierte e.V.’ (Silent Help for POWs and Internees) was entered into the register of associations on November 15, 1951 following an inaugural meeting in Munich on October 7, 1951. The association, which was classified as a non-profit organization until 1994 and initially also enjoyed the support of prominent Catholic and Protestant clergy such as Auxiliary Bishop Johannes Neuhäusler and Bishop Emeritus Theophil Wurm, was presided over by Princess Helene Elisabeth von Isenburg. According to its statute, its purpose was to provide welfare services for POWs and internees. In actual fact, however, it increasingly became a bastion of revisionism working for war criminals tried by the Allies at the main Nuremberg trial, the subsequent Nuremberg trials, and the Dachau trials , besides opposing ‘victor’s justice’ and generally attempting to exculpate the Third Reich. The association’s public campaigns portrayed the Nazis and war criminals incarcerated in War Criminal Prison Number 1 in Landsberg am Lech in particular as innocent victims of ‘Allied victors’ justice’, while the chairwoman styled herself ‘mother of the Landsbergers’.

Rudolf Aschenauer, who acted as defense counsel in dozens of war trials and whose clients included Otto Ohlendorf (American trials of mobile killing squads) and Wilhelm Boger (Auschwitz trial), was particularly active as a legal advocate and organizer of ‘Silent Help’. This objective ceased to apply when the war criminal prison in Landsberg was dissolved in 1958, and the high-ranking church representatives who had espoused the cause of the imprisoned war criminals withdrew from the association.

From then on, the association mainly consisted of former Nazis and Nazi sympathizers. Its task now was to support defendants in the German, Italian, and French war trials, including defendants at the Majdanek trial as well as Josef Schwammberger, who in 1992 was sentenced to lifelong imprisonment for murder and being an accessory to the murder of Polish-Jewish forced laborers. The association drafted petitions for clemency, paid attorneys to act in their defense, helped suspects flee abroad, assisted prisoners after their release, supported their families, and cooperated with Auschwitz deniers. For a long time, the total funding available to the association from donations amounted to a six-figure sum every year. Notorious supporters of the association included Gudrun Burwitz, Heinrich Himmler’s daughter, and Gerhard Frey, founder and chairman of the right-wing extremist German People’s Union (DVU).