Arthur Brandt (Lawyer)

Arthur Brandt (born June 21, 1893 in Züllichau , died January 24, 1989 in Lugano , Switzerland ) was a German lawyer and criminal defense attorney .

Life

Career, legal work and emigration in 1933

Brandt was founded in 1916 at the University of Erlangen with a thesis on the limits of indirect perpetration in present and future criminal to Dr. jur. PhD . From 1921 he worked as a lawyer in Berlin . His legal activities covered a broad spectrum. As the editor of the Autorechtliche Rundschau , he influenced questions of traffic law. In addition, he led the training course for the Berlin court trainees in criminal law.

Brandt became known in the Cheka trial in 1925, where he, together with Kurt Rosenfeld and others, took on the defense of the accused communists and published a "memorandum of defense" which primarily addressed the serious interventions of the negotiating state court in the rights of the defenders. Under the influence of Rosenfeld, Brandt, who had been a member of the DDP until this trial , now joined the SPD . After the Reichstag burned down on the night of February 27-28, 1933 , Brandt fled Germany the following day because he feared he would be arrested. Indeed , according to the American historian Benjamin Carter Hett , the Reichstag Fire Ordinance passed on February 28, as a new stage in the Nazi seizure of power , "for Brandt, as for many left-wing Jewish lawyers, was in mortal danger." Brandt fled via Switzerland and France to London, where in the summer of 1933 he received news that his lawyer license had been withdrawn because of “communist activities”. Brandt further emigrated to the United States in 1938 , received American citizenship and became a member of the New York and Massachusetts Bar Associations. He then worked as a lawyer in the United States and was admitted to the Massachusetts Supreme Court and the New York Federal Appeals Court.

Brandt contributed significantly to the processing of the Jakubowski case, which is considered one of the great legal errors of the Weimar Republic. Josef Jakubowski, who was captured by Germany as a Russian soldier in the First World War and later made his way as a farm worker in Mecklenburg, was sentenced to death by the Neustrelitz district court in 1925 for alleged murder of his three-year-old son and beheaded in 1926. As a representative of the German League for Human Rights, Brandt participated in a criminal complaint against prosecutor Müller and district court president Johannes von Buchka for perversion of the law, which was rejected but subsequently provided arguments for the abolition of the death penalty. It was not until 1929 that the real perpetrator was convicted of the act by the Neustrelitz district court in a procedure in which Brandt was a joint plaintiff, under a new public prosecutor and a new district court president, and sentenced to death. The death penalty was not carried out. Brandt had spoken out against this punishment here too. As a result of this process and the discovery of the miscarriage of justice, hardly any executions were carried out in the German Reich until 1933.

Returned in 1955 and became a rehabilitation lawyer, Marinus van der Lubbe

In 1954 Brandt decided to return to Berlin as a lawyer. His declared aim was to fight for reparations for victims of National Socialism. In 1955 he opened a law firm in Berlin. One of his first cases, with which he was entrusted as a lawyer for many years, was the attempt to rehabilitate the Dutchman Marinus van der Lubbe, who was sentenced to death in the Reichstag fire trial at the end of 1933 . Brandt was commissioned by Johannes Marcus van der Lubbe, the older brother of the man who was executed in January 1934 . With the help of the 1951 " Law for the Reparation of National Socialist Injustices in the Field of Criminal Law ", the aim was to overturn the judgment. After all, the law on the basis of which van der Lubbe was sentenced to death, the so-called Lex van der Lubbe , was passed specifically after the Reichstag fire in order to be able to try the alleged perpetrator against the rule of law nulla poena sine lege . In his written pleadings, Brandt asserted that the death sentence “served to consolidate National Socialism” and that it was passed for “political reasons”. He also argued that the National Socialists had van der Lubbe executed for a crime for which he was not to blame.

In addition to his legal efforts, Brandt succeeded in getting the writer Curt Riess to write articles in the Stern magazine . He published the three-part series Feuer über Deutschland under his pseudonym Peter Brandes , according to which the Reichstag had been set alight by SA activists.

As part of the investigation of the process there were statements by Paul Vogt , the 1933 coroner the Reichstag fire was the first Gestapo boss Rudolf Diels and Diels''s then employees Alois Eugene Becker. While Becker stated that immediately after the Reichstag fire, the Gestapo assumed that van der Lubbe could not have started the fire on his own, his boss Diels stated that van der Lubbe's sole perpetrator was likely. Vogt did not want to see any political influence on the process, according to the former examining judge in the Reichstag fire, it was completely in accordance with the law. After a lengthy procedure, the Berlin Regional Court refused to overturn the judgment because of a procedural error, missing a deadline for filing an application in 1958. In 1965, following a change in the law and with the support of the public prosecutor, the case was retried. Van der Lubbe has now been acquitted of the charges of treason and seditious arson brought up in the 1933 trial, but has been convicted of arson and the death sentence was commuted to an eight-year prison sentence . It was not until many years later, on December 6, 2007, that the Federal Prosecutor's Office finally determined, on the basis of a new legal basis, “that the judgment against Marinus van der Lubbe, who was convicted in the 'Reichstag fire trial', has been overturned”.

From 1970 Arthur Brandt chose his retirement home in Lugano / Switzerland, where he died in 1989.

Fonts

• Limits of indirect perpetration in current and future criminal law . Greifswald 1916 (= University of Erlangen, Jur. Diss., 1916).
• The Cheka Trial. Defense memorandum . New German publishing house, Berlin 1925.
• The Cheka Trial. Defense memorandum . Attica-Verlag, Hamburg 1979, ISBN 3-88235-007-5 .
• Convicted innocently. Judges are not infallible . Econ, Düsseldorf 1982, ISBN 3-430-11509-4 .

literature

• Tillmann Krach: Jewish lawyers in Prussia. About the importance of the free lawyer and its destruction by National Socialism . CH Beck, Munich 1991, ISBN 3-406-35078-X .
• Benjamin Carter Hett: The Reichstag Fire. Retrial . Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 2016, ISBN 978-3-498-03029-2 .

Web links

• Forum Legal History: Dr. Arthur Brandt (1893-1989)

Remarks

1. ↑ Ismar Lachmann: The greats of the Berlin law firm. In: Das Kriminal-Magazin , vol. 1 (1929), no. 9, pp. 24–29, here p. 27, online at Illustrierte Magazine der Klassischen Moderne ; Arthur Brandt: Convicted innocently. Judges are not infallible . Econ, Düsseldorf 1982 (publisher's information on the author)
2. ↑ Arthur Brandt: The Cheka Trial. Defense memorandum . Attica-Verlag, Hamburg 1979, p. 12 f.
3. ↑ Benjamin Carter Hett: The Reichstag fire. Retrial . Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 2016, p. 403.
4. ^ Tillmann Krach: Jewish lawyers in Prussia. About the importance of the free lawyer and its destruction by National Socialism . CH Beck, Munich 1991, p. 168 and P. 431.
5. ↑ Benjamin Carter Hett: The Reichstag fire. Retrial . Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 2016, p. 403 f .; Arthur Brandt: The Cheka Trial. Defense memorandum . Attica-Verlag, Hamburg 1979, p. 12 f.
6. ↑ Ismar Lachmann: The greats of the Berlin law firm. In: Das Kriminal-Magazin , vol. 1 (1929), no. 9, pp. 24–29, here p. 27, online at Illustrierte Magazine der Klassischen Moderne ; Arthur Brandt: Convicted innocently. Judges are not infallible . Econ, Düsseldorf 1982, pp. 15-23; p. 23 erroneously states that “no” executions were carried out. - On the other hand, Claudia Schöningh proves in her study Controls the Justice. The crisis of confidence in the Weimar judiciary as reflected in court reports from Weltbühne, Tagebuch and Vossischer Zeitung . Fink, Munich 2000, ISBN 3-7705-3471-9 , p. 205, that although there were no more executions in 1929, a total of eight death sentences were carried out between 1930 and 1932.
7. ↑ Benjamin Carter Hett: The Reichstag fire. Retrial . Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 2016, pp. 404–406.
8. ↑ Benjamin Carter Hett: The Reichstag fire. Retrial . Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 2016, p. 409 a. P. 594; the series appeared in the following issues of Stern : November 9, 1957, November 16, 1957 and November 30, 1957.
9. ↑ Benjamin Carter Hett: The Reichstag fire. Retrial . Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 2016, pp. 407–409.
10. ↑ The basis for the determination was the National Socialist Law on the Repeal of Unjust Judgments from 1998, according to which judgments from the period between 1933 and 1945 are to be overturned ex officio if they are based on specific National Socialist injustices, see Federal Prosecutor's Office: Repeal of the judgment against Marinus van der Lubbe detected
11. ^ Tillmann Krach: Jewish lawyers in Prussia. About the importance of the free lawyer and its destruction by National Socialism . CH Beck, Munich 1991, p. 168 and P. 431.