17 Facts About Hans Hinkel

Johann Heinrich "Hans" Hinkel was a journalist, Nazi Party official and politician in Nazi Germany.

Hans Hinkel mainly worked in the Reich Chamber of Culture and the Reich Ministry of Propaganda.

Hans Hinkel was involved in executing the policy of excluding Jews from German cultural life, and headed the Ministry's film division.

Hans Hinkel was an SS-Gruppenfuhrer, and was imprisoned in Poland for several years after the end of the Second World War.

In September 1926, Hans Hinkel became the business manager of Gau Hesse-Nassau in Kassel.

Hans Hinkel formally was re-approved for membership in the Party on 20 December 1926, after the ban on it had been lifted.

Hans Hinkel was active in the volkisch and antisemitic Militant League for German Culture, founded by Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg, and would go one to become its Organisationsleiter.

Hans Hinkel was give oversight of the Judischer Kulturbund which was composed of eight-thousand Jewish artists, musicians, performers and writers.

Hans Hinkel set about separating Jewish cultural life from that of the nation as a whole.

Hans Hinkel banned the Federation from performing plays by German playwrights and music by German composers.

Hans Hinkel was involved in this action, reporting that they had already worked out a removal plan with the police and that all could be deported within four weeks of the anticipated end of the war.

Hans Hinkel was given responsibility as Goebbels' Sonderbeauftragter for cultural personalities, in charge of keeping such individuals under observation.

On 20 April 1943, Hans Hinkel attained his last SS promotion to the rank of SS-Gruppenfuhrer.

Hans Hinkel organized test screenings of films before propaganda experts, institutions, and authorities.

Hans Hinkel had to ensure that during the final phase of the war more than half of the members of the German film industry fulfilled their duty to serve as soldiers in the Wehrmacht or in the Volkssturm, the Nazi Party militia.

In 1949, a denazification procedure was opened in absentia by the Munich Hauptkammer against Hans Hinkel, who was still incarcerated in Mokotow Prison in Warsaw.

Hans Hinkel was finally able to return from Poland to the Federal Republic of Germany in 1952 where, in a new trial by the Hildesheim denazification tribunal, he was re-classified as a "lesser offender" and he served no prison time in Germany.