People's Judge

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

As people's judges and -staatsanwälte were in the Soviet-occupied zone of Germany (SBZ) and the GDR those lawyers referred to their professional training not to the universities initially, but in the 1946 built Volksrichter School and Central School of Magistrates of the East German judicial authorities at the country level in several months, later extended courses took place. Over 80 percent of the German judges and public prosecutors belonged to the NSDAP or one of its sub-organizations. The training of people's judges was an instrument to counter the shortage of personnel in the state administrative apparatus caused by the denazification measures of the Soviet occupation zone in 1945 . In the Soviet Zone, in contrast to the other zones, on the orders of the SMAD in September 1945, all judicial employees close to the NSDAP were dismissed.

Central judges' school

At the beginning of the 1950s, there were facilities of the Central Judicial School of the five former states of the GDR / SBZ in:

A Volksrichterschule was also planned for Berlin in 1948, but its establishment was delayed, so that a judges' school with 70 places in Berlin-Mitte was only opened in April 1949 for the President of the German Central Administration of Justice (DJV) Max Fechner . A total of five courses were held at state level between 1946 and 1950, the duration of which was gradually extended from initially six months to two years at the central judges' school. At the same time, the training of lawyers at the universities continued, but it was not until the beginning of the 1950s that the transformation of the law faculties in the sense of the SED was completed that a significant number of judges and public prosecutors were recruited again. At the same time, this meant the completion of the People's Judge Program; a fundamental de-academization of legal training, which had meanwhile been demanded by prominent SED representatives, was not able to prevail.

In practice, the new type of legal training took place right from the start in the field of tension between diverging professional and political ambitions. While the German judicial administration authorities, after initial hesitation, soon began to change and expand the people's judge program in accordance with their own professional ideas, the KPD / SED intended to undermine the traditionally conservative, autonomous corps spirit of the judiciary by employing politicized and non-academically trained lawyers to create a form of socialist legality based on the Soviet model.

Since the Soviet Military Administration in Germany (SMAD) hardly supported the KPD / SED in judicial matters as part of its German policy, which was reserved until 1947, the first training courses clearly focused on the professional qualification of the participants. Only in the course of 1947 was the SED leadership - now supported by the SMAD - able to enforce a stronger politicization of the teaching content.

In retrospect, it cannot be denied that the people's judges as a whole represented an important instrument for the unified socialist rulers to penetrate the East German judicial system and to enforce their claim to power (e.g. in the Waldheim trials ). In addition, it can also be stated that, especially in the early phase, many participants - employees of the justice administration, lecturers and not a few participants in the courses - placed the non - partisan, anti-fascist reform approach of the people's judge program in the center. This is evidenced not least by the course of numerous careers of the people's judges, which ended after just a few years in a dispute with the new rulers - and sometimes a subsequent “ flight from the West ”.

literature

  • Hans Hattenhauer: About careers of people's judges . Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, Göttingen 1995, ISBN 3-525-86287-3 .
  • Julia Pfannkuch: Training for people's judges in Saxony 1945–1950 . Lang, Frankfurt am Main a. a. 1993, ISBN 3-631-46320-0 .
  • Hermann Wentker: People's Judge in the Soviet Zone-GDR 1945 to 1952: a documentation . Oldenbourg, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-486-64574-9 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Benz Democratization through denazification and education Publications of the Federal Agency for Political Education , accessed on August 9, 2013
  2. ^ First Berlin judges' school opened in: Daily New Germany of April 2, 1950, No. 78, page 4.