Rudolf Lehmann (military judge)

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Rudolf Lehmann in 1947 as a witness at the Nuremberg legal process

Rudolf Lehmann (born December 11, 1890 in Posen , † July 26, 1955 in Bonn ) was a German lawyer. As head of the legal department of the High Command and General senior staff judge he was the highest military judge in the era of National Socialism . At the Nuremberg General Trial in 1948 he was convicted as a war criminal.

Life

Lehmann, son of a professor of law , grew up in Breslau and Hanau and studied 1909-1912 jurisprudence in Munich , Freiburg , Leipzig and Marburg . During his studies he became a member of the Association of German Students in Marburg . He started the traineeship in Hesse and enlisted at the outbreak of World War I as a volunteer . As a front officer he was awarded the Iron Cross .

After the second state examination and his doctorate , he initially worked in the Hessian judiciary and temporarily in the Reich Ministry of Post and from 1922 as a district judge in Berlin. In 1925 he moved to the Reich Ministry of Justice , where he was promoted to ministerial council until the National Socialists came to power.

Since 1933 he was involved in the drafting of the new criminal procedure code in the Small and Large Criminal Procedure Commission. In 1937 he was transferred to the Reich Court Martial as President of the Senate and from 1938 to 1945 he headed the Wehrmacht Law Department of the OKW as Ministerial Director.

In 1938 he was involved as an assessor in the court of honor proceedings against the Commander-in-Chief of the Army , Colonel General Werner von Fritsch . The War Criminal Law Ordinance (KSSVO) and the War Criminal Procedure Ordinance ( KStVO) of 1938 were drawn up under his responsibility. Before the German attack on the Soviet Union , he participated in the drafting of the "Guidelines on special areas of instruction no. 21 " and " Military Jurisdiction Decree " with. He advocated the elimination of Wehrmacht jurisdiction over Soviet residents and "contributed decisively to the brutalization and intensified ideologization of warfare by the Wehrmacht".

Together with the SS lawyers Wilhelm Stuckart , Gerhard Klopfer , Werner Best and Reinhard Höhn , he published the magazine Reich - Volksordnung - Lebensraum. Magazine for national constitution and administration . This administrative and geopolitical SS organ appeared between 1941 and 1943 in six volumes and was aimed at an elitist, legally educated readership, particularly within the SS.

On April 23 and 24, 1941, he took part in the meeting of the highest judges, in which they were informed by Reich Justice Minister Franz Schlegelberger about the “ destruction of life unworthy of life ” in “ Action T4 ”. In the same year Lehmann was involved in the drafting of the Night and Fog Decree , which came into force in December 1941 and dealt with the intended disappearance of resistance fighters from the occupied territories. In 1944 Lehmann was appointed chief staff judge because of his “merits”.

He was the only military judge to be indicted by the United States in Nuremberg in the so-called General Trial after the Second War . The Judgment Points: Committing War Crimes and Committing Crimes Against Humanity . The sentence was passed on October 27, 1948: 7 years imprisonment, of which three years were considered to have been served due to pre-trial detention. Lehmann was convicted primarily because of his responsible participation "as Chief Staff Judge [and] the highest-ranking military lawyer of the 'Third Reich'" in the German military law provisions of the Wehrmacht for the Russian campaign, which are incompatible with international law. As a result of the “Barbarossa Jurisdiction Decree”, attacks by German soldiers against the civilian population in the Soviet Union could go unpunished, and the commissioner order expressly ordered the killing of Soviet commissioners. As in other cases, the defense relied on Adolf Hitler's orders .

On August 16, 1950, Lehmann was released early from prison in the Landsberg am Lech war crimes prison . He then lived in Bad Godesberg , where he was the managing director of the mining association. At his grave, his former subordinate and Chief Justice Werner envelope , who had been promoted to judge at the Federal Court of Justice in the Federal Republic , spoke .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945 . Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, second updated edition, Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 978-3-596-16048-8 , pp. 362–363.
  2. ↑ Louis Lange (Ed.): Kyffhäuser Association of German Student Associations. Address book 1931. Berlin 1931, p. 131.
  3. ^ Norbert Haase: Chief Staff Judge Dr. Rudolf Lehmann ; in: Gerd R. Ueberschär (Ed.): Hitler's military elite vol. 1, Primus Verlag, Darmstadt 1998, p. 157; see also Manfred Messerschmidt / Fritz Wüllner: The Wehrmacht Justice in the Service of National Socialism. Destroying a legend . Nomos Verlag, Baden-Baden 1987, p. 208.
  4. ^ Michael Stolleis : History of Public Law in Germany. Weimar Republic and National Socialism (special edition, formerly known as History of Public Law in Germany , Vol. 3), Beck, Munich 2002, p. 308 f . ISBN 3-406-48960-5 .
  5. ^ Norbert Haase: Chief Staff Judge Dr. Rudolf Lehmann , p. 158
  6. ↑ on Werner envelope see entry in Klee, Das Personenlexikon zum Third Reich , edition 2003, p. 273f
  7. ^ Norbert Haase: Chief Staff Judge Dr. Rudolf Lehmann , p. 154
personal data
SURNAME Lehmann, Rudolf
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German lawyer
DATE OF BIRTH December 11, 1890
PLACE OF BIRTH Poses
DATE OF DEATH July 26, 1955
Place of death Bonn