Karl Josef Ferber

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Karl Josef Ferber on the witness stand during the Nuremberg legal process, April 1, 1947

Karl Josef Ferber , also Karl Ferber , (born September 26, 1901 in Landau in the Palatinate ; † after 1971 ) was a German lawyer who worked as a judge at the Nuremberg Special Court during the “ Third Reich ” .

Life

Youth, training and work

Karl Josef Ferber's father was the Russian textile merchant Peter Juljewitsch Ferber, his mother Dorothea was a housewife.

Ferber received a classical-humanistic high school education. After graduating from a humanistic grammar school, he studied law in Würzburg , Heidelberg and Munich . He first worked as a legal advisor for an insurance company in Ludwigshafen . In 1934 he was promoted to Dr. jur. PhD. In 1935 he moved to the Nuremberg Public Prosecutor's Office, where he joined the political department in 1937. In Nuremberg he was appointed regional judge, later he became regional court director . In 1942 he became chairman of the fourth criminal chamber of the Nuremberg-Fürth regional court , which also negotiated political criminal cases.

Ferber had been a sponsoring member of the SS since 1934 . In May 1937, Ferber joined the NSDAP, following a request to all officials . In his residential area in Nuremberg, he worked for the NSDAP as a "block administrator" and block warden and collected donations for the National Socialist People's Welfare (NSV). As a sideline, he worked for the NSDAP 's Office of Racial Policy and checked the pedigree certificates of those willing to marry.

In March 1942 Ferber acted as a reporter and associate judge at the Nuremberg Special Court in the show trial, chaired by Oswald Rothaug , of the Jewish Nuremberg businessman Leo Katzenberger and the photographer Irene Seiler , who violated the “ Blood Protection Act ” in the case of Leo Katzenberger a violation of the " People's Pest Ordinance " were charged with. The prosecutor in these proceedings was the Nuremberg public prosecutor Hermann Markl . Initial concerns Ferber against an accusation Katzenbergers pointed Rothaug with the words back: "The justice sector has here a task that can only be solved politically." Katzenberger was established in March 1942 by Rothaug and the two assessors Karl Josef Ferber and Heinz Hugo Hoffmann for Sentenced to death. The deliberations of the court were unusually brief; it only lasted 20 minutes. Ferber later stated: "In the present case there was nothing to advise" for the court. In the process, Ferber was convinced that the sexual intercourse between Katzenberger and Irene Seiler had " come to an end". For him, Irene Seiler embodied the “type of barmaid” because of her “fluttery, lively nature”, who “could be trusted to do all kinds of things when it came to sexuality ”. Together with Rothaug, he was of the opinion that only the death penalty could be considered for Katzenberger . As a justification, Ferber later explained that in view of the ongoing deportations of Jewish residents, the death penalty for Katzenberger was "the only legal aid against the arbitrariness of the SS". Ferber also drafted and wrote the judgment and wrote the reasons for the judgment. Rothaug's notes served as the basis for this. Due to his "servile" attitude towards Rothaug, he was derisively called "Rothaug's office director" in Nuremberg judges' circles.

After Rothaug's move to the People's Court in 1943, Ferber briefly became chairman of the Nuremberg Special Court, where he was replaced after a while.

post war period

After the end of World War II , Ferber was dismissed from the civil service. He found a job as an export merchant at a Nuremberg company , which he lost at the beginning of 1968, according to the Nuremberg jury court in the grounds for the judgment of April 1968, and then worked as a legal advisor in the industry.

As part of the “ Nuremberg Legal Trial ” in 1947, Ferber offered himself up to the accusing US military court as a “ key witness ” against Rothaug. He explained his behavior during the Nazi dictatorship by stating that he “succumbed to the zeitgeist at that time”. From February 1947, Ferber was employed by Henry Einstein , an employee of the US Prosecution, in the Nuremberg Palace of Justice , and worked as an expert assistant to the US Prosecution during the interrogation and interrogation of former judges, public prosecutors and ministerial officials. From March to October 1947, with his own office in the judicial building, he worked full-time for a fee on litigation in the Nuremberg legal process.

In 1947 Ferber and the defendant Irene Seiler met again in the Nuremberg witness house , a villa confiscated by the US military administration on the outskirts of Nuremberg in the Erlenstegen district . Ferber now told Seiler that the verdict was "pulled by the hair" at the time. In response to Seiler's direct inquiry as to why he then participated in such a judgment, Ferber replied, as Seiler recalled, that he “had nothing to do with it”. He also withheld from Irene Seiler his involvement in drawing up the judgment. Ferber continued to declare again and again later that he had only agreed to the death sentence under pressure from Rothaug.

In 1948, Ferber initially stated in his denazification proceedings that he had voted against the Katzenberger judgment. In the appeal hearing in May 1951, he corrected his statement with the words: “In the deliberation I gave in after the end, I spoke against it, I did n't vote !” Ferber's denazification process ended with a classification in Group II (incriminated).

Legal processing

In April 1960, shortly before the expiry of the limitation period (15 years), the Nuremberg Public Prosecutor's Office initiated an investigation against Rothaug, Ferber and Hoffmann for " perversion of justice , willful homicide and aiding and abetting ". At the end of 1967, the Nuremberg public prosecutors finally presented the indictment in which Ferber and Hoffmann were named as suspects; Rothaug died in early December 1967. In the spring of 1968 the trial against Ferber and Hoffmann was opened before the Nuremberg jury court . Ferber declared that in 1942 he had consoled himself with the fact that the judge's verdict against Katzenberger "wasn't that bad, because Himmler's final solution finally came ". In contrast, the death sentence was "still a simple execution". In April 1968 Ferber and Hoffmann were convicted of manslaughter in a less serious case. Ferber received three years in prison, Hoffmann was sentenced to two years in prison; an arrest warrant but not fared. The court justified the different sentences with the fact that Ferber, as the reporter, “was informed of the course of events” long before, whereas Hoffmann only participated as a “silent” assessor. Ferber's protective claims were clearly and "harshly" rejected by the jury in his judgment. After the prosecution that a conviction for murder sought because the judges had acted out of base motives, and also the defense auditors had inserted, the raised Bundesgerichtshof (BGH), the Nuremberg Ersturteil on in August 1970 and remitted the case to the circuit court. A revision procedure no longer took place due to a medically attested inability to stand trial due to "decay of age". Ferber had found calcifications in the brain and severe joint changes in the spine .

Nothing is publicly known about Ferber's further life after 1971.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The presentation of Ferber's biography essentially follows the presentations by Ernst Klee and Christiane Kohl given in the “Literature” section . In addition, several internet sources were consulted.
    Publicly available information about Ferber ends with the termination decision from 1971. It can be assumed that Ferber probably died in the 1970s.
  2. ↑ a b c d e f g h Kohl 2002, p. 304.
  3. ↑ a b c d e Christiane Kohl : "You Jew man, I will help you" . In: Der Spiegel 41/1997, October 6, 1997, pp. 150–162, accessed on February 10, 2018.
  4. ↑ Nuremberg Special Court . Entry with overview. In: Inventory of archival sources of the Nazi state , part 1: Central Reich authorities, regional authorities and scientific universities for the ten West German states and Berlin. De Gruyter Saur, Berlin / Boston, reprint 1991, ISBN 978-3-11-095039-7 , p. 233; Retrieved from De Gruyter Online .
  5. ↑ a b c d e f g Gerhard Mauz: "A young lady with an easy way of life" . In: Der Spiegel 4/1973, January 22, 1973, pp. 51–52, accessed on February 10, 2018.
  6. ^ Ernst Klee: The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich . Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 391
  7. ↑ Bavaria: The film brought it to light . In: Die Zeit 15/1962, April 13, 1962, accessed on February 10, 2018.
  8. ^ The Katzenberger affair: An "attack on the purity of German blood": judgment of the Nuremberg Special Court of March 23, 1942 in full . In: Nazi Archive: Documents on National Socialism , accessed on February 10, 2018.
  9. ↑ a b Kohl 2002, p. 259.
  10. ↑ Kohl 2002, p. 256.
  11. ↑ a b c d e Kohl 2002, pp. 305/306.
  12. ^ The Nuremberg jurist judgment . Website of the Humboldt University Berlin, Gerhard Werle , Chair for German and International Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure Law and Contemporary Legal History, March 29, 2006, p. 140, accessed on February 10, 2018 (pdf; 896 kB).
  13. ↑ a b c d Eberhard Nitschke: The jury decides: manslaughter. Judge sentenced to prison . ( Memento of the original from February 11, 2018 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: Die Welt , April 5, 1968, accessed on February 10, 2018 (pdf; 911 kB). @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.medienarchiv1968.de
  14. ↑ Kohl 2002, p. 305.
  15. ^ A b Jörg Friedrich : acquittal for the Nazi judiciary: the verdicts against Nazi judges since 1948. A documentation. Ullstein Verlag 1998, pp. 354 f., ISBN 978-3-54826-532-2 (with detailed biography).
  16. ↑ Kohl 2002, p. 318.
  17. ↑ Kohl 2002, pp. 326/327.
  18. ↑ a b c d Kohl 2002, p. 327.
  19. ↑ a b Kohl 2002, p. 328.
  20. ↑ Willi Jasper: Lexicon: The assistants of mass murder . Review in: Die Zeit 44/2003, October 23, 2003, accessed on March 28, 2018.
personal data
SURNAME Ferber, Karl Josef
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Ferber, Karl
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German lawyer
DATE OF BIRTH September 26, 1901
PLACE OF BIRTH Landau in the Palatinate
DATE OF DEATH after 1971