John, Otto

Resistance fighter, President of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution

Born: 19.03.1909 in Marburg

died: 26.03.1997 in Innsbruck

John attended the Realgymnasium Luisenplatz and studied law in Frankfurt am Main. He first completed his legal clerkship there, then at the district court in Wehen. He received his doctorate in 1935.

Because of his rejection of the Nazi regime, John did not choose a career in the state, but eventually became an in-house lawyer at Lufthansa. His superior was Dr. Klaus Bonhoeffer, the brother of the theologian and resistance fighter Dr. Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Through this contact, John came into circles of the gradually forming opposition and took part in the preparations for the attempted coup of July 20, 1944. After the failure of "Valkyrie", his brother Hans John was sentenced to death for high treason and shot on April 23, 1945. John managed to escape to England on July 24, 1944, where he was first imprisoned as an "enemy alien". In 1946/47 he looked after German prisoners of war. In spring 1948, he married the Jewish emigrant Margarete Mainzer.

In 1951, the couple returned to Germany at the suggestion of Federal President Theodor Heuss, where John took over as head of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution in Cologne thanks to British intervention against the wishes of Federal Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. John was one of the very few returning emigrants who was able to take up a leading position in the newly founded Federal Republic. Right-wing circles defamed John as a "traitor to the country". After the July 20th celebrations, John disappeared from West Berlin in 1954 under circumstances that have not been fully clarified to this day and reappeared in East Berlin, where he explained that he had come to the GDR voluntarily to campaign for reunification, against the remilitarization of the FRG and the growing influence of old National Socialists. After further interrogation by the Soviet secret service, the KGB, John fled back to the West in December 1955, where he was arrested and "... sentenced to four years in prison for treason on the rabulistic circumstantial evidence of judges who had made their careers in Nazi justice before and during the war." (Otto John). Thus began his fight for rehabilitation. In 1986, Federal President Richard von Weizsäcker granted him a special pension.

In his legal dissertation "The Trial of Otto John", for which the author Klaus Schaefer also researched archives that were not accessible before the fall of communism in 1989, he concluded that, according to the current legal situation, it could be assumed that John would have had to be acquitted if the trial had been reopened.