régime, the chairman of the drumhead court, Otto Thorbeck, and the prosecutor, Walter Huppenkothen, were accused in West Germany of being accessories to murder. After the Bundesgerichtshof (BGH) had at first quashed a lower court's two acquittals, it changed its mind in 1956 during the third revision of the case, quashed Thorbeck's and Huppenkothen's sentences, and acquitted them of the charges of being accessories to murder by their participation in the drumhead trial on grounds that the court had been duly constituted and the sentence had been imposed according to the law then in force, without either of the accused having perverted justice. On the centenary of Dohnányi's birth in 2002, Günter Hirsch, president of the BGH, called those who had sentenced Dohnányi to death "criminals calling themselves judges". Hirsch said the 1956 ruling was shameful because as a result, not a single one of the Nazi-era judges who sentenced 50,000 Nazi opponents to their deaths was found guilty after the war. On 23 October 2003, Israel honoured Dohnányi by recognizing him as one of the Righteous Among the Nations for saving the Arnold and Fliess families, at risk to his own life. His name has been inscribed in the walls at the Holocaust remembrance centre Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. His own grandson, Justus von Dohnányi, starred as Wilhelm Burgdorf in the 2004 film, Downfall. See also List of members of the 20 July plot Widerstand Bonhoeffer Family Pius XII and the German Resistance References Bibliography Smid, Marikje: Hans Dohnányi - Christine Bonhoeffer - Eine Ehe im Widerstand gegen Hitler. Gütersloher Verlagshaus, Gütersloh 2002; Elisabeth Sifton and Fritz Stern, No Ordinary Men, NYRB (2013). (Bonhoeffer and von Dohnányi) External links German Historical Museum official website Hans von Dohnányi – his activity to save Jews' lives during the Holocaust, at Yad Vashem website 1902 births 1945 deaths Jurists from Berlin People condemned by Nazi courts German resistance members Hans German Righteous Among the Nations Humboldt University of Berlin alumni People who died in Sachsenhausen concentration camp Resistance members who died in Nazi concentration camps People executed by Nazi Germany by hanging Resistance members killed by Nazi Germany Austrian people executed in Nazi concentration camps Dietrich Bonhoeffer 20th-century German lawyers Civilians who were court-martialed Executed members of the 20 July plot Nazi-era German officials who resisted the Holocaust Austro-Hungarian emigrants to Germany