Viktor Bruns

This article deals with the lawyer. For the surgeon see Victor von Bruns , for the musician see Victor Bruns .

Viktor Bruns (born December 30, 1884 in Tübingen ; † September 18, 1943 in Königsberg ) was a German lawyer and university professor .

Life

He is the grandson of the surgeon Victor von Bruns . His father was the Tübingen surgeon Paul von Bruns , his mother was a daughter of the university chancellor and theologian Carl Heinrich Weizsäcker , whose brother Karl von Weizsäcker was Prime Minister in Württemberg. Bruns was married on June 26, 1915 to Marie Bode, Wilhelm von Bode's eldest daughter ; they had two daughters together.

Viktor Bruns studied law in Tübingen and Leipzig , passed the state examination in Tübingen in 1908 and his doctorate in 1910. In the same year he became an associate professor at the University of Geneva , where he became fluent in French. In 1912 he accepted an appointment as associate professor in Berlin , where he in 1920 as Full Professor of heads of state and international law rose at the Law Faculty of the University of Berlin. During the First World War he worked from 1914 to 1917 in the Württemberg war press office in Stuttgart and in 1917 and 1918 also in Stuttgart as civil clerk to the deputy general commander of the XIII. Army Corps of Württemberg.

From 1924 he was director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Foreign Public Law and International Law, which he founded . In 1925 he took over the chairmanship of the Academic Exchange Service (AAD) from Alfred Weber . One of his employees at the institute was Carlo Schmid, who wrote about this in his "Memoirs": "On leave from the Württemberg Ministry of Justice, I joined the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Berlin, founded by Professor Viktor Bruns, in autumn 1927 as a full-time employee . I became a consultant for the international law department and a close associate of the institute's director from the start. " Another employee was Gerhard Leibholz, whose wife Sabine Leibholz-Bonhoeffer, the twin sister of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, remembered as follows: "My husband was now a judge at the Amtsgerich-Mitte, but Professor Bruns soon offered him at the Institute for Foreign Public Law and International Law ', and he took over the Italian report. Here, this report gave the impetus for the third book that my husband published in 1928,' On the Problems of Fascist Constitutional Law '. He also gave his inaugural lecture on this at the university. "

After the " seizure of power " by the National Socialists , he did not become a member of the NSDAP, but joined the Association of National Socialist German Jurists (BNSDJ). In May 1934 he was co-founder and then chairman of the committee for international law within the Academy for German Law founded by Hans Frank . Furthermore, Bruns was a founding member of the committee for legal philosophy in this academy, whose chairman was Hans Frank personally. In this context, Kaveh Nassirin states: “No racist statements at all are known from the international lawyer Viktor Bruns. On the contrary, as director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Foreign Public Law and International Law, he ensured that ethnic and anti-Semitic tones were kept out of legal research. "

Viktor Bruns was a member of international arbitration or court courts or state representative in international litigation for the German Reich. He was on the list of members of the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague . From 1927 to 1931 he was a German judge at the German-Polish and German-Czechoslovak mixed arbitration tribunals, in 1928, 1931 and 1932 national judge in legal disputes in the Free City of Danzig at the Permanent International Court of Justice in The Hague. Carlo Schmid writes about this in his memoirs: "My assistant work for Viktor Bruns at the trials before the International Court of Justice in The Hague was also a good apprenticeship. Professor Bruns was national for two trials between Germany and Poland and the Free City of Danzig and Poland `Appointed to the Tribunal." The Reich government repeatedly entrusted him with its representation before the Cour permanente de justice international in Haag: 1931 in the proceedings because of the German-Austrian customs union , in 1933 because of the application of the Polish agrarian reform to the German minority, in 1937 in the German-Lithuanian arbitration process over the nationality of Memel German . Since the beginning of the Second World War he was a judge at the Berlin Oberprisenhof . From 1933 until his death, Bruns was a member of the Senate of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society .

In 1934 Viktor Bruns appointed his colleague Berthold Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg as deputy head of the international law department, and in 1935 as his deputy as editor of the journal for foreign public law and international law (ZaöRV) . In his will, Bruns named him as a possible successor as institute director in his successor. Berthold Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg was executed as a member of the assassin group on July 20, 1944 against Hitler.

After Bruns died in 1943, Carl Bilfinger was appointed to the chair at Berlin University and director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. Carlo Schmid later remembered Viktor Bruns with the following words: "I have retained my gratitude to this noble man, without whom I would not have been introduced into the world of politics."

Fonts

• (Ed.): Württemberg under the government of King Wilhelm II. Stuttgart 1916.
• International law as a legal system. Berlin 1929–1934, 3rd edition, Darmstadt 1962.
• The international judge. Berlin 1934.
• International law and politics. Berlin 1934.

Magazines and series works

• Journal of Foreign Public Law and International Law , 1927 ff.
• Contributions to foreign public law and international law , vol. 1–26.
• Fontes Juris Gentium , 1931 ff.
• Political Treaties , 1926–1942.

literature

• Edwin Borchard: Death of Dr. Viktor Bruns , in: American Journal of International Law 37, No. 4, October 1943, pp. 658-660.
• Carl Bilfinger:  Bruns, Viktor. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 2, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1955, ISBN 3-428-00183-4 , p. 687 ( digitized version ).
• Anna-Maria Countess von Lösch: The naked ghost. The law faculty of the Berlin University in upheaval in 1933 . Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 1999, ISBN 3-16-147245-4 .
• Rainer Noltenius (Ed.): I don't want to swap with a man. A painting of the times in letters and diaries of Marie Bruns-Bode (1885–1952) , Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-7861-2799-4 . [Herein especially during the Nazi era: pp. 115-136, pp. 230-232, pp. 290-294, pp. 317-320].

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} 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, p. 79.
2. ↑ Thomas Kampen: 90 Years of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) , in: SHAN Newsletter , June 2015, No. 83.
3. ^ Carlo Schmid : Memories , S. Hirzel, Stuttgart 2008, p. 119.
4. ↑ Sabine Leibholz-Bonhoeffer : Past, experienced, overcome: Fates of the Bonhoeffer family , Gütersloher Verlagshaus Gerd Mohn, 2nd edition, Gütersloh 1977, p. 81.
5. ↑ Juristische Wochenschrift , 1934, p. 1551.
6. ↑ Víctor Farías : Heidegger and National Socialism , S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1989, pp. 277–280.
7. ↑ Kaveh Nassirin : Working against the genocides , in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , July 11, 2019, No. 158, p. N3; Rainer Noltenius (Ed.): I don't want to swap with a man. A painting of the times in letters and diaries of Marie Bruns-Bode (1885–1952) , Berlin 2018, especially during the Nazi era: pp. 115–136, 230–232, 290–294, 317–320.
8. ^ Carlo Schmid : Memories , S. Hirzel, Stuttgart 2008, p. 131.
9. ↑ Obituary 1943 by Heinrich Triepel : Viktor Bruns † , in: Journal for foreign public law and international law, Vol. 11, 1942/43, pp. 324a - 324d Link to obituary: Journal for foreign public law and international law .
10. ^ Carlo Schmid : Memories , S. Hirzel, Stuttgart 2008, p. 142.