Karl Tollkuehn (b. 1912), a Nazi German from Riga

Source: Jewish Telegraphic Agency

Some members of the German branch of the Tolkien (Tollkühn) family became Nazi during the last war...

Jews arriving in Riga

[News from May 10, 1983]

BONN (May. 9)

Karl Tollkuehn, a Latvian-born former petty officer in the Nazi-controlled Latvian security police, was sentenced to 3 1/2 years’imprisonment by a Hamburg district court today for complicity in the mass murders of Jews during World War II.

Tollkuehn, 70, admitted his guilt but insisted that although a Nazi by conviction, he was not anti-Semitic. According to the charges he aided and abetted the shooting of 700 Jewish women and children deported from Germany to Latvia in 1942 and was similarly involved in the shooting of 30 other Jews near Riga the same year. A court spokesman said the light sentence was imposed because Tollkuehn made a statement of confession.

In 1995 rev. John F.R. Tolkien, son of J.R.R. Tolkien, during Patrick Hobson Memorial Lecture said:

In 1939, when Germany invaded Poland, the first Gauleiter of Danzig was a Tollkühn (...)

There was not such a Gauleiter, but Father John Tolkien said probably about this Karl Tollkühn born in Riga (1912-1986) who before the second world war was a merchant, who took part in the Olympic Games 1936 in gymnastics (see here), but during the war was the officer responsible for the cruel death of many German Jews. 

 

Added:

 

 

Znalazłem genealogiczne ślady Carla Tollkuehna, który był niemieckim zbrodniarzem nazistowskim.  

 

Urodził się w Rydze, ale jego ojciec urodził się w Bärwalde w Prusach Wschodnich (czyli wywodził się od Tolkienów z Sambii, nie od naszych natangijskich)