Walter Huppenkothen

Walter Huppenkothen was a German lawyer, Sicherheitsdienst (SD) leader, and Schutzstaffel (SS) prosecutor in the SS Court Main Office. He is best known for leading the Gestapo investigation that followed the September 1944 discovery of the Zossen documents, which implicated Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, General Hans Oster, Hans von Dohnanyi, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer in the broader conspiracy against Adolf Hitler, and for presiding as prosecutor over the SS drumhead court-martial at Flossenbürg concentration camp on 8 April 1945 that condemned them to death. After the war, he worked for the Counterintelligence Corps of the US Army until 1949 on account of his expertise on Communist networks, before being tried for his wartime conduct in proceedings that became a notable case study in the early Federal Republic's reluctance to hold the Nazi judicial apparatus criminally accountable.