Josef Jakubowski

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Josef Jakubowski (born September 8, 1895 in Utena , Lithuania ; † February 15, 1926 in Strelitz ) was sentenced to death and beheaded for a murder he had not committed . His case is one of the most significant legal errors in German legal history of the 20th century and has not been formally corrected to this day.

Life until 1924

Josef Jakubowski was born in what was then the Lithuania province of the Russian Empire , but was of Polish nationality . In the literature he is sometimes referred to as “ Russian ” - in the strict sense of the word . As a soldier in the Russian army , he fell in the First World War in German captivity and spent two years in a prison camp . After the end of the war he stayed in Germany and hired himself out as a farm worker in the Mecklenburg village of Palingen . There he met Ina Nogens, who already had an illegitimate son named Ewald. Jakubowski gave her daughter Anna. The couple wanted to get married, but Ina Nogens died. The children were then taken in by Ina Nogen's widowed mother and Jakubowski paid child support for both children, which he stopped when he noticed that the children were neglected by their grandmother.

Murder, Trial and Execution

The three-year-old Ewald disappeared on November 9, 1924, and was found strangled near Palingen on November 24, 1924 . Following information from the Nogens family, Josef Jakubowski was arrested the next day as a suspect. In March 1925, the murder trial against him began before the Neustrelitz district court . The defendant just had no alibi for the time between 5:45 and 6:15 on the day of the incident. The main witness was a mentally handicapped adolescent who claimed to have seen Jakubowski on his way to the crime scene at the time. On the one hand, the court refrained from taking an oath because of the mental state of the witness, on the other hand, his testimony was given enough weight to seriously incriminate Jakubowski. One witness said she heard the child scream at 5:45 a.m. At this point, if Jakubowski had gone to the crime scene, he could not have been there yet. The public prosecutor's office said without further ado that the witness must have made a mistake about her time and that in reality she heard the screams shortly after six o'clock. August and Fritz Nogens, Ina Nogens' brothers, cast Josef Jakubowski in a bad light. In response to their statements, the court assumed the motive for the crime was a lack of willingness to pay maintenance.

Jakubowski always called himself innocent. Although he understood German poorly and was unable to follow the negotiation adequately, he was refused an interpreter. A suspicion he expressed against the Nogens family was dismissed by the presiding judge Johannes von Buchka (1865–1938) as a brazen lie without review and rather made his situation worse. On March 26, 1925, guilty verdict and death sentence followed, despite scant evidence . A ministerial councilor, who was present as a trial observer, described the judgment as unsatisfactory and expected it to be overturned or pardoned .

A revision was rejected, however, and the First Minister of State Roderich Hustaedt , head of government of the Free State of Mecklenburg-Strelitz , refused the pardon. On February 15, 1926, Josef Jakubowski was executed with a hand ax by the executioner Carl Gröpler in the Neustrelitz-Strelitz state institution . Two days earlier, his defense attorney had written to Hustaedt appealing to suspend enforcement, as he was convinced of the innocence of his client.

Later developments

After further investigations by a detective, the widow Nogens and her two sons August and Fritz confessed to having forged a murder plot against little Ewald Nogens and blamed Jakubowski for the crime. So they wanted to get rid of the unwanted child in one go, as did Josef Jakubowski as the only foreigner in the village. August Nogens was initially sentenced to death in July 1929 for the murder of his nephew and perjury, but was later pardoned to lifelong imprisonment by the then incumbent First Minister of State Kurt Freiherr von Reibnitz . His brother and mother received temporary prison sentences for inciting and aiding and abetting murder. A criminal complaint filed by the German League for Human Rights with the participation of Arthur Brandt against prosecutor Müller and district court president Johannes von Buchka for perversion of the law was dismissed. Likewise, a retrial initiated by Jakubowski's parents regarding the subsequent acquittal of their son was discontinued. The guilty verdict against Josef Jakubowski has not yet been formally overturned, although others have confessed to the act and have been convicted for it.

The Jakubowski case made the judiciary of the Weimar Republic so insecure that from the summer of 1929 until Hitler came to power in January 1933 only a few death sentences were carried out.

Even contemporary journalists such as Rudolf Olden and Max Barth saw the xenophobic bias of the judicial authorities and the court as the main reason for the unfair trial. Barth quoted two prison chaplains in the Sonntags-Zeitung in 1928, No. 3, who were convinced that this execution would never have taken place had the accused been German.

The Jakubowski case has been treated in numerous books and articles and filmed three times for television and cinema. There is Josef-Jakubowski-Straße in Neustrelitz .

Film adaptations

literature

  • Rudolf Olden ; Josef Bornstein : The judicial murder of Jakubowski. Diary publisher, Berlin 1928.
  • Eleonore Kalkowska : Josef. A time tragedy in 22 pictures. Berlin 1929.
  • Friedrich Karl Kaul : Justice becomes a crime. The Pitaval of the Weimar Republic. The New Berlin, Berlin 1953.
  • Theo Harych : In the name of the people? The Jakubowski case. Verlag Volk und Welt, Berlin 1958. 3rd edition, 1962.
  • Hermann Mostar : convicted innocently! From the chronicle of the judiciary murders. Ullstein, Frankfurt 1961. Unabridged reprint 1990. ISBN 3-548-34670-7
  • Gerhart Hermann Mostar; Robert Adolf Stemmle [ed.]: Death sentence. Nine criminal cases: Anna Böckler, Charley Ross, Madame Steinheil, Hugo Schenk, Helene Gillet, Franz Salesius Riembauer, Peter Kürten, Josef Jakubowski, Wilhelmine Krautz. Desch, Munich 1964.
  • Arthur Brandt : Convicted innocently. Judges are not infallible. Econ, Düsseldorf 1982. ISBN 3-430-11509-4 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j Information and links on the Jakubowski murder case on the Palingen website
  2. ^ University of Rostock: Matriculation of Johannes Buchka. Retrieved June 21, 2018 .
  3. ^ Matthias Blazek: Executioners in Prussia and in the German Empire 1866-1945 . Ibidem-Verlag, Stuttgart 2010, ISBN 3-8382-0107-8 , p. 71 .
  4. ↑ erich-schairer.de . Retrieved December 7, 2007.
personal data
SURNAME Jakubowski, Josef
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Justice victim in the German Reich
DATE OF BIRTH September 8, 1895
PLACE OF BIRTH Utena , Lithuania
DATE OF DEATH February 15, 1926
Place of death Strelitz