Klaus Croissant

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Klaus Croissant, 1977

Klaus Croissant (born May 24, 1931 in Kirchheim unter Teck , † March 28, 2002 in Berlin ) was a German criminal defense attorney. He gained notoriety as the defender of Andreas Baader in the Stammheim trial against the leaders of the Red Army faction . Croissant was convicted in 1979 of supporting a terrorist organization . He was later politically active for the West Berlin Alternative List and then for the PDS .

Life

Croissant was the defense attorney Andreas Baaders in the Stammheim trial . On December 4, 1974, he arranged a visit by the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre to his client in Stammheim, which received much media attention. As a result, Croissant and Kurt Groenewold founded the International Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners in Western Europe (IKV). While the proceedings were still pending, Croissant was expelled from the court on March 12, 1975, arrested on June 23 and charged with supporting a terrorist organization . Just like Hans-Christian Ströbele and Kurt Groenewold, Croissant was accused of helping to maintain the communication system between the imprisoned RAF terrorists by forwarding cellular circulars . On August 8, 1975, the conditional arrest warrant was suspended. Croissant subsequently became the executor of Ulrike Meinhof's will and played a leading role in the "International Commission of Inquiry" to investigate the circumstances of death. This questioned Meinhof's suicide and, in her final report, argued that Meinhof had been murdered in her cell. On July 11, 1977, Croissant fled to France from the threat of arrest and applied for political asylum there . However, he was arrested there on September 30th during the German Autumn .

In a declaration signed by over 200 French personalities, including the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre , the writers Simone de Beauvoir and Françoise Sagan , and Régis Debray , the French judicial authorities were asked not to extradite Klaus Croissant to the Federal Republic of Germany, since it would be a political process. The joint statement stated: "The German authorities attack Croissant's person because he had the courage to defend political prisoners whom they do not consider to be worth defending"

On November 17, 1977, Klaus Croissant was extradited to the Federal Republic. On February 16, 1979, he was sentenced to two and a half years in prison for supporting a terrorist organization . He was also banned from the profession for four years.

According to the lawyer Oliver Tolmein , Croissant was “a lawyer who saw justice as something political and for whom the line between defense of his clients and political engagement was never sharply drawn.” The historian Michael März sees Croissant as the embodiment of the “type of the self-sacrificing, quasi-fighting lawyer ”. Der Spiegel wrote in its obituary for Klaus Croissant in April 2002: "At the beginning of the seventies one of the defenders of Ulrike Meinhof and Baader, his law firm became a recruiting office for the left-wing extremist RAF and the interface between imprisoned terrorists and their helpers outside."

After his release from prison, Croissant regained his license to practice law and worked again as a criminal defense lawyer in Berlin. During this time he began to work for the Ministry for State Security of the GDR , which hired him in 1981 as an unofficial employee "IM Thaler". He also recruited his partner, Brigitte Heinrich , the taz editor and later MEP for the Greens , and led her as an instructor and courier until her death in 1987.

Croissant was a member of the West Berlin Alternative List and, together with the Green Dirk Schneider , also Stasi-IM, tried to find political comrades there. Croissant's candidacy for the office of district mayor of Kreuzberg (for the alternative list) was unsuccessful. In 1990 he joined the PDS . In 1992, when his spying for East Germany was known, he came under the charge of the secret service agents working in custody and lost most of his contacts and friends in the scene. He said in an interview in October 1992: “It wasn't about betraying any leftists. The people I spoke to were not enemies of these people. The goal was to improve the GDR side's level of knowledge about the left outside the West German SED brother party DKP , and East Berlin had a legitimate interest in that. "

In April 1993, Croissant was sentenced to a suspended sentence of 21 months for acting as a secret service agent . According to Oliver Tolmein, he was unable to see until the very end "that the cooperation with the state, which he had always considered the better Germany, was a mistake."

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Christopher Tenfelde: The Red Army faction and the criminal justice. Anti-terror laws and their implementation using the example of the Stammheim process . Jonscher Verlag, Osnabrück 2009, ISBN 978-3-9811399-3-8 , pp. 163, 204
  2. ↑ Pieter Bakker Schut : Political Defense in Criminal Matters: A Case Study of the Criminal Proceedings from 1972 to 1977 against Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, Ulrike Meinhof, Holger Meins and Jan Carl Raspe . Kiel 1986, p. 211 ff.
  3. ↑ Oliver Tolmein : Insistence . In: Friday , April 19, 2002
  4. ↑ Janneke Martens: “The police and the judiciary are completely crazy.” The Red Army faction in the Dutch media. In: Nicole Colin (ed.): The “German Autumn” and the RAF in politics, media and art: national and international perspectives . Bielefeld 2008, p. 99
  5. ↑ " Croissants in foil . In: Der Spiegel . No. 43 , 1977 ( online ).
  6. ↑ Michael März: Left Protest after the German Autumn: A History of the Left Spectrum in the Shadow of the “Strong State” , 1977–1979. transcript Verlag, 2014, p. 158 ff.
  7. ↑ a b Oliver Tolmein : Perseverance. Klaus Croissant's commitment to the GDR remains controversial among his political friends . Friday April 19, 2002; Retrieved November 30, 2014
  8. ↑ Michael März: Left Protest after the German Autumn: A History of the Left Spectrum in the Shadow of the “Strong State” , 1977–1979. transcript Verlag, 2014, p. 162
  9. ^ Died - Klaus Croissant . In: Der Spiegel . No. 15 , 2002, p. 232 ( online ).
  10. ↑ Portrait of Klaus Croissant. SWR; Retrieved January 8, 2013
  11. ↑ focus.de
  12. ↑ Then the tears come to me . In: Der Spiegel . No. 43 , 1992 ( online ).
  13. ↑ Croissants at large: The Ex-IM should prove itself. In: taz . March 5, 1993, Retrieved March 8, 2018 .
personal data
SURNAME Croissant, Klaus
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German defense attorney
DATE OF BIRTH May 24, 1931
PLACE OF BIRTH Kirchheim unter Teck
DATE OF DEATH March 28, 2002
Place of death Berlin