Emil Hahn was a German public prosecutor from Nuremberg who served under the Nazi regime. In 1935, he served as the prosecutor at the infamous "Feldenstein trial", in which the elderly Jewish businessman Lehman Feldenstein was sentenced to death for allegedly engaging in "blood defilement" (a sexual affair) with a 16-year-old gentile girl, Irene Hoffmann. Hahn was found guilty of crimes against humanity at the 1948 Nuremberg Trials.
Biography[]
Emil Hahn was born in Nuremberg, Bavaria, Germany. After serving in the Imperial German Army during World War I, he worked as a public prosecutor and became an ardent Nazi during the Weimar era. In 1935, Hahn served as the prosecutor at the trial of Jewish businessman Lehman Feldenstein, who was wrongly accused of having a sexual affair with his much younger acquaintance, the 16-year-old Irene Hoffmann. Hahn privately threatened Hoffmann with charges of perjury if she did not side with the prosecution in convicting Feldenstein, as the trial was heavily attended by Nazi leadership and anti-Semitic crowds alike. Hoffmann refused, and she was sentenced to two years in prison for perjury, while Feldenstein was convicted and executed.
After World War II, Hahn was arrested by the Allies and was tried for crimes against humanity at the Nuremberg Trials. In 1948, he stood trial alongside Ernst Janning, Werner Lampe, and Friedrich Hofstetter, and he accused Janning of treason when he admitted his guilt before the court. In his closing statement before the courtroom, Hahn said that he did not evade the responsibility for his actions, and instead stood by them before the entire world. Hahn said that he would not say of the Nazis' policy that it was wrong when, yesterday, he had said it was right. Hahn professed his belief that Germany was fighting for its life, and that certain measures were needed to protect it for its enemies; Hahn refused to apologize for those measures. Hahn claimed that Nazi Germany was "a bulwark against Bolshevism, a pillar of Western culture; a bulwark and a pillar the West may have wished to retain." Hahn and his co-defendants were ultimately given life sentences by Chief Judge Dan Haywood. Within five years, all four of the convicted men were released from prison as a means of building German-American relations as the Cold War escalated.