Walter Huppenkothen

Who was Walter Huppenkothen?

Walter Huppenkothen was a German lawyer and Nazi SS prosecutor.

Huppenkothen attended school in Opladen and studied Law and Political Science at the University of Cologne and University of Düsseldorf and then qualified as a lawyer. On May 1, 1933, he joined the Nazi Party and the Allgemeine SS. Unable to find employment in government service he joined the SD in Düsseldorf. After the invasion of Poland he was commander of the Security Police and the SD in Kraków, then in February 1940 he was posted Lublin as head of the Gestapo. From July 1941 he was appointed to the Reich Security Main Office in Berlin with the rank of Sturmbannführer in charge of a Gestapo Unit dealing with reactionaries and liberals, as the successor to Walter Schellenberg. After the dismissal of Wilhelm Canaris he attended a meeting in March 1944 that established a unified intelligence service.

As an SS Standartenführer he was appointed the prosecutor of the SS and police court in Munich. On April 6, 1945, he prosecuted Hans von Dohnanyi in Sachsenhausen concentration camp while the defendant lay semi-conscious on a stretcher having contracted a serious infection and the proceedings ended with him being condemned to death by Sturmbannführer Otto Thorbeck.