The 1951 Verdict Against Rudolf Seck, Kommandant of SS-Gut Jungfernhof
Richards Plavnieks, Ph.D.
The 1951 trial and conviction of Rudolf Seck was
a precociously early case of West German justice meted out, and it was complete
with many of the telltale shortcomings of that judiciary familiar to observers from later cases.
Rudolf Joachim Seck was born on 15 July 1908 in a tiny town called Bunsoh, home to only several hundred people, in the state of Schleswig-Holstein, north of the city of Hamburg, Germany, and quite near the Danish border.[1] Rudolf’s father owned a farm of 15 hectares (about 38 acres), which is where Rudolf grew up. Like most of Germany’s other rural areas, this northern German locale voted disproportionately for the Nazis.
Rudolf Seck joined the Nazi Party and the SS in 1931 – two years before Hitler became Chancellor. In 1933 he became a member of the special, newly-created Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler unit with the rank of SS-Unterscharführer (Sergeant). This unit, which was based on elements of Hitler’s SS bodyguard detail, was the main instrument with which Hitler murdered his enemies within the Nazi Party during the June-July 1934 purge of the SA and others called “the Night of the Long Knives” during which between 85 and 170 people were killed. There is no evidence that Seck participated in the nationwide series of state-directed assassinations, and he explicitly denied involvement after the war.[2] On 1 August 1934 – several weeks after the purge had concluded – Seck left the Leibstandarte and returned home to the farm. He married in 1935. His wife died in 1937 giving birth to their only child, a daughter. The same year, Seck took over the management of the farm from his father.
When the war began in September 1939, Seck was called back to his SS service. He participated in the 1940 invasion of France working in logistics. After the successful conclusion of that campaign, he was released from service by dint of his importance to Germany’s war economy as an agriculturalist in August 1940 and again returned home.
On 20 January 1941 Seck was ordered by the SS to take part in a monthslong agricultural training program in Schmiedeburg, south of Dresden in Saxony. After the first dramatically successful weeks that followed the German invasion of the Soviet Union, which began on 22 June 1941, Seck, having completed the agriculture course, was sent to Nazi-occupied Latvia, arriving in early August. There, he was subordinated to Dr. Rudolf Lange, the leader of the Einsatzkommando 2 death squad and Commander of the Security Police in Latvia. Seck was placed in charge of the newly-conceptualized SS enterprise [“Gut”] Jungfernhof near Riga, where as an agricultural specialist, he would oversee its function of supplying food to the SS
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[1] The number given by the court was 3,500. Subsequent research reveals that the number of Jews taken from Jungfernhof at this time was actually about 1,800, in addition to about 3,000 taken from the Riga Ghetto on 15 March as part of the same culling operation. The court was also uncertain about the number of Jewish deportees who died of exposure, illness, and maltreatment during the winter of 1941-42 at Jungfernhof. “Lfd.Nr.307. NS-Gewaltverbrechen in Lagern: Ghetto Riga, AEL Salaspils, Abkdo. Olai, Abkdo. Schlock, AL Gut Jungfernhof (Lettland). Anfang 1942-Sommer 1943. LG Hamburg, 29.12.1951 (50) 14/51,” in Justiz und NS-Verbrechen. Sammlung deutscher Strafurteil wegen Nationalsozialistischer Tötungsverbrechen, 1945-1966. Band IX. Amsterdam: University Press Amsterdam, 1972, p. 183.
[1] A recent article about the political conflicts behind the scenes that undermined the prospects of the British completing the case can be found here: Samuel Miner. “‘Appeasement Gone Mad’: The Riga Ghetto Case and the Politics of British War Crimes Trials,” in The Journal of Contemporary History, Vol.57, Issue 3. April 2022. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00220094221087856?icid=int.sj-abstract.similar-articles.2
[1] Seck’s biographical information, unless otherwise noted, comes from “Lfd.Nr.307. NS-Gewaltverbrechen in Lagern: Ghetto Riga, AEL Salaspils, Abkdo. Olai, Abkdo. Schlock, AL Gut Jungfernhof (Lettland). Anfang 1942-Sommer 1943. LG Hamburg, 29.12.1951 (50) 14/51,” in Justiz und NS-Verbrechen. Sammlung deutscher Strafurteil wegen Nationalsozialistischer Tötungsverbrechen, 1945-1966. Band IX. Amsterdam: University Press Amsterdam, 1972, pp. 179-180. The document, which is quoted extensively elsewhere in this essay, may be found here: https://junsv.nl/westdeutsche-gerichtsentscheidungen.
[2] Staatsarchiv Hamburg. 213-12. Staatsanwaltschaft Landgericht - NSG. 0041. Band 1, p. 312. “Vernehmung des Angeschuldigten Seck.” 17 December 1949.
using Jewish slave labor deported from the Third Reich. He would be the Kommandant, and the sole German overseer.
For his activities in this place he was subsequently investigated, tried, convicted, and imprisoned.
Seck lived on site and oversaw operations at Jungfernhof as Kommandant from the arrival of Jewish deportee transports from the Reich in late 1941 and early 1942 until, on 30 July 1944, he was injured there by a bull. He spent the rest of the war recuperating in a series of hospitals in Germany, finding himself released from care in May 1945 in Neumünster, a town a mere 70 kilometers driving distance from his family home. This could have been no coincidence. It is tempting to infer from this information that Seck used his injury to evade combat service in a hopelessly lost war, and contrived to ride it out until Germany’s defeat, safely close to home.
The British, in whose Occupation Zone of Germany Seck found himself after the capitulation of the Third Reich, arrested him on 27 May 1945, weeks after the end of the war in Europe. He became one of the many figures implicated in the crimes of the Holocaust in Latvia who were the targets of the Riga Ghetto Case that the British had begun putting together. Evidence was offered in the form of sworn testimony by numerous survivors, while survivor groups lobbied for the case to go forward. The case was to establish the breadth of the crimes committed by the Nazis and their Latvian collaborators in that occupied country while punishing all of the available perpetrators and establishing the record for contemporary society and for posterity. More than seventy accused German and Latvian perpetrators – including Rudolf Seck – were in British custody, but the whole process was halted in 1949.[1] Instead of prosecuting the case as a complex that would tie the complete story together, the British washed their hands of it and instead turned over their documentary materials and in some, but notoriously not all, cases, their prisoners, to the newly-created Federal Republic of Germany where the accused would be tried individually to no greater educational benefit to the public.
Seck was actually released by the British on 28 January 1949 and returned home. In May of that same year, he was arrested again, this time by West German authorities. The denazification court [“Spruchgericht”] in Bergedorf, a suburb in the southeast of Hamburg, convicted Seck of SS membership on 8 July 1949 and sentenced him to ten years in prison. His farm was confiscated by the state of Schleswig-Holstein, and his father and daughter continued to live there as leaseholders.
But this conviction turned out to only be preliminary: while Seck was serving his sentence, new charges were being prepared by the West German judiciary concerning his activities at Jungfernhof. On the basis of evidence amassed during the abortive Riga Ghetto Case, which was handed over to the District Court [“Landgericht”] of Hamburg, and in view of the tireless survivors who were ready to continue giving their testimony as witnesses, Seck was charged.
The charges were murder and accessory to murder.
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[1] A recent article about the political conflicts behind the scenes that undermined the prospects of the British completing the case can be found here: Samuel Miner. “‘Appeasement Gone Mad’: The Riga Ghetto Case and the Politics of British War Crimes Trials,” in The Journal of Contemporary History, Vol.57, Issue 3. April 2022. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00220094221087856?icid=int.sj-abstract.similar-articles.2