Flick process

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Friedrich Flick delivering the verdict on December 22, 1947

The Flick Trial was the fifth of twelve Nuremberg follow-up trials against managers of the German Empire to the Nazi era , in the Nuremberg Palace of Justice before a US American military court were carried out and the first of three trials of leading industrialists of Nazi Germany. The other two trials were the IG Farben trial and the Krupp trial .

The trial was directed against the industrialist Friedrich Flick and five of his leaders. Flick was sentenced to seven years in prison in late 1947 and released early in 1950.

prehistory

During the Second World War, the allies USA and USSR had jointly regarded the economic imperialism of Nazi Germany as one of the reasons for the war. Large industrialists were assigned a key role in planning and carrying out this criminal war. The American point of view was influenced by the IG Farben report by the Kilgore Commission and the political scientist Franz Neumann's description of Germany as Behemoth , and the aim was to bring big industrialists to justice and to smash their cartels.

According to the Potsdam Agreement of August 1945, Germany was to be democratized , denazified , demilitarized and de-cartelized in order to fund the moral and economic reconstruction through a change of elite. In the Nuremberg trial of the main war criminals , important legal policy decisions were made on the use of forced labor (as a criminal “slave labor” program) and the SS as a criminal organization. But no industrialist had been convicted, as the only private industrialist accused was, due to a mistake, the seriously ill Gustav Krupp , who was unable to negotiate . A second major international war crimes trial focused on the economy was discarded for financial reasons and because the Soviets did not want to offer the Soviets an opportunity for a tribunal against the capitalist system. By turning to the reintegration of Germany as a bulwark against communism within the framework of the Marshall Plan , the funds for the industrial trials were reduced and only the trials against members of Flick, IG Farben and Krupp before a National Military Tribunal (NMT) of the Americans as well as before a French court of the Röchling Group .

The process

The trial of Friedrich Flick et al. took place from April 19 to December 22, 1947 before the National American Nuremberg Military Tribunal IV under Control Council Act No. 10 in the Nuremberg Palace of Justice .

The judge
Telford Taylor, chief prosecutor

The prosecution

  • Brigadier General Telford Taylor , Chief Prosecutor
  • Thomas E. Ervin, assistant chief prosecutor
  • Rawlings Ragland, assistant chief prosecutor
  • Charles S. Lyon, Chief of the Prosecution Team

The defendants

Five of the six attorneys had previous experience as defense attorneys before the IMT :

Overview of the defendants
image Surname defender Charges Sentence Discharge
I. II III IV V
Friedrich Flick Nuremberg.JPG Friedrich Flick Rudolf Dix ,
Fritz Streese 		S. S. U S. 7 years imprisonment August 25, 1950
Otto Steinbrinck.jpg Otto Steinbrinck Hans Flaechsner ,
Franz von Papen jr. 		U U U S. S. 5 years imprisonment Died August 16, 1949
Bernhard Weiss.jpg Bernhard Weiss Walter Siemers ,
Agnes Nath-Schreiber,
and with the assistance of Wolfgang Pohle . 		S. U       2½ years imprisonment December 7, 1948
Odilo Burkart.jpg Odilo Burkart Otto Kranzbühler ,
Wolfgang Pohle 		U U       acquittal -
Konrad Kaletsch.png Konrad Kaletsch Herbert Nath ,
Günther Geißler 		U U U     acquittal -
Hermann Terberger Horst Pelkmann ,
Fritz Wecker 		U         acquittal -

S - guilty verdict;  U - Innocent as charged

Defense strategy

As early as the end of the war, the company management conducted an investigation into any domestic political war profiteer allegations, in which it was stated that the increase in wealth was smaller than the decrease in wealth during the war. In order to save personal honor, the managers collected notarized declarations of assistance to Jewish acquaintances and of their political integrity. The Flick managers systematically portrayed an omnipotent terrorist state to which every possible resistance would have been offered. Flick would have postponed his accession to the NSDAP and the takeover of the Rombacher Hüttenwerke would have been a heroic act to prevent a monopoly of the Hermann-Göring-Werke . The victorious powers were accused of failing to recognize the extent of the powerlessness and the threats faced by the entrepreneurs and thereby making them victims a second time in court.

Since the exemplary character of the process also affected the reputation, future validity and claim to social leadership of German entrepreneurs, the accused were able to mobilize material, logistical and ideal support. Hermann Reusch from Gutehoffnungshütte solicited support services from Mannesmann , Klöckner , Vereinigte Stahlwerke and Krupp for a joint fund for legal defense in order to fend off allegations against the industry in general in advance.

The individual charges and the verdict

The indictment of March 18, 1947 comprised the following charges:

In the Nuremberg trial against the main war criminals, the forced deployment and mistreatment of foreign workers had already been condemned as so-called slave labor . In the companies of the Flick Group, as in all companies in the coal and steel industry, forced laborers were used under inhumane conditions. The defense argued that the Flick Group was a decentralized holding company, so that the top management would have been generally spared social and labor issues and that regardless of this, all opportunities to improve the lot of the foreign employees would have been used. The prosecution failed because of the rift to prove a general joint responsibility of the industry and the need to prove the individual guilt of the accused. The judges largely followed the defense, and only condemned Flick and Weiss, because in the case of Linke-Hofmann they had expanded production with the corresponding assignment of slave labor. The use of forced labor was understood as a state program from which the industrialists could not escape due to the omnipotent pressure of the regime and the accused were expressly granted a general state of emergency. In treating the forced laborers, the defendants did what they could, under the restrictive orders of the Party, Wehrmacht and SS.

  • II: War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity: Looting in Occupied Territories

During the course of the Second World War , the Flick concern had expanded through trusts to Lorraine, Latvia and the Ukraine, and Flick held a mandate on the administrative advisory board of the Berg- und Hüttenwerkgesellschaft Ost . The prosecution saw it as steps towards the acquisition of foreign assets. In the case of the Rombacher Hüttenwerke in Lorraine, the court condemned the illegal withholding of property. The trusteeship at the Latvian wagon construction company Vairogs and the Dnieper Steel , operated jointly with the Hermann-Göring-Werke as part of the Iwan program , were acquitted, as they were not private property but assets under state administration.

  • III: Crimes against humanity: Aryanizations

Due to the takeover of formerly Jewish property, namely the blast furnace plant Lübeck AG , Rawack and Grünfeld AG, the Saxon cast steel works Döhlen and above all the central German companies of the Julius Petschek Group and the Ignatz Petschek Group , Flick was one of the largest industrial aryanization profiteers had actively and actively influenced government measures. According to the prosecution, the acquisition of these companies under extortionate pressure was nothing more than "highway robbery". The ostensibly liberal understanding of capitalism of the German private sector, which did business at Himmler's evening parties, was opposed - also against the background of the Soviet system alternative - to a liberal economic image without state and corporate coercion. The defendants claimed to have helped the previous Jewish owners. In the case of Julius Petschek, the representative of the American seller's holding company was still referred to as a Jewish straw man during the takeover negotiations, the defendants now, reversing their earlier argument, attached importance to the fact that it had been a conventional private-sector purchase from an American holding company. In the case of Ignatz Petschek, it was a forced negative deal to the detriment of Flick, as Flick had to take over this unprofitable stake in the Hermann Göring Works under political pressure . Formally, it was pointed out that these aryanization transactions are not to be negotiated under Control Council Act 10 because they took place before 1939. The judges determined that the Tribunal was not responsible for the Aryanization under the Control Council Act and pointed out in an auxiliary opinion that the deprivation of property could hardly have been treated as a crime against humanity.

  • IV: Membership in Himmler's Circle of Friends

Based on information from the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and Office of Military Government for Germany (OMGUS) , the American prosecutors considered Flick to be "probably the largest industrial puller in Nazi Germany". Flick and Steinbrinck were accused of promoting the rise of the National Socialists through the Kepplerkreis and later through the Freundeskreis Reichsführer SS Himmler and close contacts to Hermann Göring to have promoted the military and National Socialist goals and to have pursued the Aryanization of Jewish assets through state coercion.

Steinbrinck was the only one of the accused to be an SS member and was charged and convicted of membership in this criminal organization. In the Nuremberg trial of the main war criminals, the SS had previously been classified as a criminal organization.

The Flick judgment pointed the way for the decisions in the IG Farben trial and in the Krupp trial and, to a lesser extent, in the Wilhelmstrasse trial . In these subsequent proceedings, the lack of jurisdiction in the case of aryanization offenses and the recognition of the need for orders were taken into account in the judgments and led to mild penalties.

Pardon and post-war transfiguration

Through targeted lobbying and public relations work, the ground was prepared for a comprehensive pardon for the convicted. Flanked by German politics and business, the Nuremberg defense attorneys supported continuously increasing demands for amnesty, supported by the Heidelberg legal circle and prominent church representatives of both denominations. This gained momentum through the identification of the German public with the so-called prisoners of war and victims of collective allegations . The two major people's parties joined in the demand for a reduction in prison terms, which was described as a condition for the West German integration , and on August 25, 1950, Flick was released early for good conduct. The German public did not regard the remission of punishment as mild, but as an admission of formal and substantive errors in the judgment.

In the opinion of Kim Christian Priemel, the central elements of the apology and falsification of truth were drawn up on behalf of the German industrial elite in the test case against Flick. The private sector was characterized as a victim of state violence, Aryanization and occupation appropriations as non-political professionalism and forced labor as a legitimate employment relationship. This manifested itself not least in the hagiographies and festschriften of industrial historiography.

See also

literature

  • Grietje Baars: Capitalism's Victor's Justice? The Hidden Stories Behind the Prosecution of Industrialists Post-WWII . In: The Hidden Histories of War Crime Trials . Ed .: Heller and Simpson, Oxford University Press 2013, ISBN 978-0-19-967114-4 , p. 163 ff.
  • Axel Drecoll: The beginning of the industrial processes: Case 5 against the managers of the Flick Group . In: NMT - The Nuremberg Military Tribunals between History, Justice and Righteousness . Ed .: Priemel and Stiller, Hamburger Edition 2013, ISBN 978-3-86854-577-7 , p. 376 ff.
  • Kevin Jon Heller : The Nuremberg Military Tribunals and the Origins of International Criminal Law. Oxford University Press, 2011, ISBN 978-0-19-955431-7 .
  • Frei, Ahrens, Österloh and Schanetzky: Flick . Blessing Verlag 2009, ISBN 978-3-89667-400-5 .
  • Susanne Jung: The legal problems of the Nuremberg trials. Represented in the proceedings against Friedrich Flick (= contributions to the legal history of the 20th century. Vol. 8). Mohr, Tübingen 1992, ISBN 3-16-145941-5 (Simultaneously: Frankfurt am Main, Univ., Diss., 1991), see also e-book at books.google.de .
  • Kim Christian Priemel : Flick - A corporate history from the German Empire to the Federal Republic . Wallstein 2007. ISBN 978-3-8353-0219-8 .

Web links

Commons : Flick process  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Grietje Baars: Capitalism's Victor's Justice? The Hidden Stories Behind the Prosecution of Industrialists Post-WWII . In: The Hidden Histories of War Crime Trials . Ed .: Heller and Simpson, Oxford University Press 2013, ISBN 978-0-19-967114-4 , pp. 163, 169 f.
  2. ↑ Kim Christian Priemel: Flick . P. 616 ff.
  3. ↑ Priemel and Stiller (eds.): NMT - The Nuremberg Military Tribunals between History, Justice and Righteousness , p. 772.
  4. ↑ see: Johannes Bähr et al .: The Flick Group in the Third Reich. Published by the Institute for Contemporary History Munich / Berlin on behalf of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation. Oldenbourger Wissenschaftsverlag, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-486-58683-1 , p. 924, online .
  5. ↑ Kim Christian Priemel: Flick . P. 626 ff.
  6. ↑ Kim Christian Priemel: Flick . P. 632 f.
  7. ↑ Kim Christian Priemel: Flick . P. 623.
  8. ↑ Kim Christian Priemel: Flick . P. 642 f.
  9. ↑ Kim Christian Priemel: Flick . P. 623.
  10. ↑ Kim Christian Priemel: Flick . P. 643.
  11. ↑ Kim Christian Priemel: Flick . Pp. 376, 389, 430 f., 622.
  12. ↑ Kim Christian Priemel: Flick . P. 624.
  13. ↑ Kim Christian Priemel: Flick . Pp. 628 f., 637.
  14. ↑ Kim Christian Priemel: Flick . P. 643.
  15. ↑ Kim Christian Priemel: Flick . P. 620 ff.
  16. ↑ Axel Drecoll: The beginning of the industrial processes: The case 5 against the managers of the Flick group . P. 390.
  17. ↑ Kim Christian Priemel: Flick . P. 645.
  18. ↑ Kim Christian Priemel: Flick . P. 646 f.
  19. ↑ Kim Christian Priemel: Flick . P. 648 f.