Schenk, Dieter

Dieter Schenk (born March 14, 1937) is a German author, former high police officer of the Bundeskriminalamt, and a member of Amnesty International. He is best known for his work and activism which led the German court in Lübeck to overturn a 1939 verdict from World War II, regarding the defenders of the Polish Post Office in Danzig (Gdańsk),"Dieter Schenk", profile a
Web page of the city of Gdańsk
last accessed 3/29/2011 as well as his books on the widespread influence of ex-Nazis in post World War II Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA).

Schenk is a former '' Kriminaldirektor'' of Federal Criminal Police Office (''Bundeskriminalamt''), located in Wiesbaden, where he was the agency's contact with Interpol. He left the agency in 1989 because of what he describes as "the ignorance of the BKA concerning the violation of human rights in torturing regimes".

Work on the defense of Gdańsk post office

During the Nazi invasion of Poland, the Germans also carried out attacks on Polish controlled building in the Free City of Danzig (Wolne Miasto Gdańsk), including the post office, which constituted extraterritorial Polish property. The Polish defense of the building, carried out by 55 lightly armed postmen against more than 200 German SS (''Schutzstaffel''), SA (''Sturmabteilung'') and police troops, lasted for 15 hours. The Poles surrendered after the German forces used automatic pumps, gasoline tanks and flamethrowers to set the building on fire. Polish casualties were 6 killed during the fighting and 2 more killed while they were trying to surrender with a white flag. Four of the defenders managed to escape and six died in a Gestapo hospital. The rest were imprisoned, tortured, tried (with a single Wehrmacht officer as defense lawyer) by a Wehrmacht court-martial and sentenced to death. 28 of the judgements were countersigned, and thus became legally valid, by General Hans Günther von Kluge, another 10 by Colonel Eduard Wagner
A clemency appeal was rejected by Walther von Brauchitsch (who was to be charged after the war with crimes against humanity, but died while in custody) and carried out on September 8 and 30.

Schenk began researching the events in 1993 and published a book, ''Die Post von Danzig: Geschichte eines deutschen Justizmords'' ("The Post Office of Gdańsk: History of a German judicial murder"), which led to the revision of the verdict. He figured out that the German forces were Danzig police-, SS- and SA-men, commanded by a Danzig police officer, and only at a subsequent stage regular Wehrmacht forces did take part in the fighting. Thus a Wehrmacht court martial was not competent to convict the defenders. Instead, the Free City of Danzig's penal law would have been applicable, without the alternative of a death penalty. As a result, the judgements were nullified and the Polish defenders were "rehabilitated" by the Lübeck court. A symbolic reparation was made to the victims' families. On their initiative, Schenk was declared an honorary citizen of Gdańsk in 2003.

Honors and awards

Schenk is also an honorary professor of University of Łódź where he has taught classes as a lecturer, and a recipient of the Fritz Bauer Prize from the Humanist Union (2003), named after Fritz Bauer the German prosecutor and judge who strove to obtain justice and compensation for victims of the Nazi regime, and contributed to the capture of Adolf Eichmann