Berthold Wehmeyer

Berthold Wehmeyer (* 1925 in Berlin ; † May 11, 1949 ibid) was the only criminal who was sentenced to death in Berlin and executed in West Berlin .

Life

The trained locksmith Wehmeyer set out on April 22, 1947 with his companion, who was not known by name, on a so-called hamster trip to the Prignitz . The next day in Wusterhausen they met 61-year-old Eva Kusserow from Berlin-Weißensee , who was also on a hamster ride. The three met again that same evening in Wusterhausen. While Wehmeyer's friends and Kusserow were able to successfully exchange their barter goods for potatoes , Wehmeyer was unsuccessful. In order to get possession of Eva Kusserow's 20 kg potatoes, Wehmeyer and his friend strangled the woman. In addition, she was raped . The two convicts hid the woman's body in a field near Wusterhausen, where it was found on April 28, 1947.

A few days later, Wehmeyer and his acquaintance were identified as suspects by the Berlin criminal police and arrested. With the forensic technology of the time, however, it was not possible to clearly assign the guilt for the murder to one of the two suspects, especially since the two accused each other. Wehmeyer's acquaintance later revoked his confessions and, together with his wife, incriminated the suspected Berthold Wehmeyer as the main perpetrator. In a psychiatric report , Wehmeyer was also attested that he was a "gross criminal" with an "unusual sex drive". At the age of sixteen he had already been convicted of robbery in another case. His acquaintance, on the other hand, was certified as having normal sexuality.

In the trial before the jury court in Berlin on July 5, 1948, Berthold Wehmeyer was sentenced as the main perpetrator on the basis of the Reich Criminal Code of 1871, which continued to apply after the end of the war with the exception of its state protection provisions, to death on the scaffold for murder and to five years in prison for rape . The co-defendant was sentenced to six years in prison for complicity in murder. The revision of the judgment submitted by Wehmeyer's defense lawyer was rejected. Wehmeyer's petition for clemency was also unsuccessful. A first date of execution on May 10, 1949 was postponed because Wehmeyer's attorney named a new alleged witness and requested that the trial be reopened. That application was rejected immediately and Berthold Wehmeyer was in the early morning hours of May 11, 1949 in the execution chamber of the Berlin prison in Lehrterstraße with the guillotine beheaded.

On May 8, 1949, the Basic Law was passed for the three western occupation zones of Germany (excluding Berlin) and the death penalty was abolished, but it was only approved by the Western Allies on May 12, 1949 and came into effect on May 23, 1949 in force. In West Berlin, the Basic Law was only valid until German reunification in 1990 insofar as the measures of the occupying powers did not restrict its application. Their reservations made it impossible for federal bodies to exercise direct state power over Berlin. Thus the death penalty was only partially abolished by decision of the West Berlin Senate in consultation with the Western Allies on January 20, 1951. By then, death sentences were commuted to life imprisonment. In the case of particularly serious violations of the Allied War Weapons Control Council Act and in the case of sabotage against institutions and members of the Allies, the jurisdiction of the Allies remained in force, which also provided for the imposition of the death penalty in West Berlin. Only with the end of the Allied occupation of Berlin after reunification was this punishment abolished.

literature

• Ernst Reuß : Millionaires don't ride bicycles. Everyday justice in post-war Berlin. Past Publishing, Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-86408-092-0 , p. 28 ff.
• Peter Jacobs: For four years after the war, heads were still rolling in Moabit. The guillotine is now in a Swabian museum: Berlin's last guillotine. In: Berliner Zeitung . May 25, 2002 . 
• Kai Posmik: The last death sentence was carried out in West Berlin in May 1949 - twelve days before the death penalty was abolished by the Basic Law: Murder on the hamster ride. In: Berliner Zeitung. May 9, 2009 . 
• Sebastian Leber : The story: Merciless. In: Der Tagesspiegel . May 10, 2009 .