Bernhard Lösener (27 December 1890 – 28 August 1952) was a lawyer and Jewish expert in the Reich Ministry of the Interior. Along with

Wilhelm Stuckart Wilhelm Stuckart (16 November 1902 – 15 November 1953) was a German Nazi Party lawyer, official, and a State Secretary in the Reich Interior Ministry during the Nazi era. He was a co-author of the notorious Nuremberg Laws and was a participan ...

, he helped draft the

Nuremberg Laws The Nuremberg Laws (german: link=no, Nürnberger Gesetze, ) were antisemitic and racist laws that were enacted in Nazi Germany on 15 September 1935, at a special meeting of the Reichstag convened during the annual Nuremberg Rally of ...

, among other legislation that deprived German Jews of their rights and ultimately led to their deportation to concentration camps. In his memoirs, ''Legislating the Holocaust'', Lösener described his discovery of the

Rumbula massacre The Rumbula massacre is a collective term for incidents on November 30 and December 8, 1941, in which about 25,000 Jews were murdered in or on the way to Rumbula forest near Riga, Latvia, during the Holocaust. Except for the Babi Yar massacre in ...

, in which approximately 1,000 recently deported German Jews were transported by train to Rumbula Forest in Riga, Latvia, and there summarily executed along with 25,000 Latvian Jews. Lösener wrote he had not been aware of any orders to execute the German Jews and was disturbed by the executions. He discussed the incident with Stuckart which caused tension between them. Three years later in 1944, according to Lösener's Reich Ministry records, he was arrested for expressing sympathy for the German Jews. Lösener supported the exemption of the ''

mischling (; " mix-ling"; plural: ) was a pejorative legal term used in Nazi Germany to denote persons of mixed "Aryan" and non-Aryan, such as Jewish, ancestry as codified in the Nuremberg racial laws of 1935. In German, the word has the general denota ...

'', which is the term used in Nazi Germany to represent individuals classified with both Aryan and Jewish ancestry. Lösener surmised that having one or two Jewish grandparents was clear classification of being Jewish. He successfully argued that classifying such persons as Jewish would strengthen the Jewish gene pool by infusing Aryan blood. In addition, the exemption would enhance the Army by 45,000 soldiers. Since most ''mischling'' were not deported during the war, the classification may have saved up to 107,000 Germans of some Jewish ancestry from the Holocaust.Nelson, Robert, "Revolution and Genocide, University of Chicago Press, 1992, p. 324 At the

Nuremberg Trials The Nuremberg trials were held by the Allies against representatives of the defeated Nazi Germany, for plotting and carrying out invasions of other countries, and other crimes, in World War II. Between 1939 and 1945, Nazi Germany invaded m ...

, Lösener gave testimony on his discussion with Stuckart regarding the Rumbula massacre in 1941. This testimony countered Stuckart's claim he had been unaware of the execution of Jews prior to the Wannsee Conference in 1942.

References

External links

Minutes of Wannsee ConferenceSteven Spielberg/United States Holocaust MuseumInternational Military Tribunal, Nuremberg trials transcripts and documentary evidence of German medical experiments in the commission of war crimes and crimes against humanity 1946-1947
{{DEFAULTSORT:Losener, Bernhard 1890 births 1952 deaths Lawyers in the Nazi Party International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg Holocaust perpetrators in Germany