Otto Thorbeck

Sturmbannführer Otto Thorbeck was an SS judge during World War II. He was appointed chief judge at the police court in Munich in 1941. He is known for condemning Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer and four other men who conspired against the Nazi Party to death without evidence or the provision of a defence lawyer under direct instructions from Ernst Kaltenbrunner. As a result of this, he was convicted of assistance to murder in 1955 and sentenced to four years in prison. He was released the next year on the grounds that it had been Nazi Germany and he had not been breaking the law. This decision was rescinded in 1996, several years after Thorbeck's death in 1976.