Hermann Cuhorst

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Hermann Cuhorst during the Nuremberg Trials

Hermann Albert Cuhorst (born July 22, 1899 in Ellwangen ; † August 5, 1991 in Kressbronn on Lake Constance ) was a lawyer and in the National Socialist German Reich chairman of the special court in Stuttgart .

Life

Cuhorst studied law in Tübingen and in 1919 became a member of the student association AV Igel Tübingen , from which he left in 1950. From 1926 to 1929 Cuhorst worked in the Württemberg judicial service and then acted as a district judge in Stuttgart. Since 1930 he was a member of the NSDAP , since 1931 a circle speaker , from January 1, 1933 a Gauredner . In 1933 Cuhorst was appointed senior councilor in the Württemberg Ministry of Justice . Since 1934 he was a supporting member of the SS .

In the same year he was promoted to President of the Senate of the Higher Regional Court in Stuttgart . On October 1, 1937, he was also appointed head of the Stuttgart special court established in April 1933 , an institution that had already existed in the Weimar Republic (since 1931), but only took on a significant share of the judiciary in the Third Reich. As chairman of the special court, Cuhorst led several lawsuits against members of the Scholl family.

After he himself had requested to be relieved of his post for a long time, Cuhorst was resigned on November 20, 1944 because of his “z. Sometimes unbearably mild judgments that are far below the Reich standard ”were removed from office by the Reich Minister of Justice and drafted into the Wehrmacht . He was deployed in Norway until the end of the war in April 1945 and then came as a French prisoner of war in Mulsanne near Le Mans .

On the basis of information from the future Lord Mayor of Stuttgart, Arnulf Klett , he was transferred to Nuremberg in November 1946 and indicted in the Nuremberg legal process. On December 4, 1947, he was acquitted on all charges and given safe conduct into the French occupation zone. Thereupon the Minister for Political Liberation of the State of Württemberg-Baden, Gottlob Kamm , threatened to resign from his office; the members of various ruling chambers and the employees of the Liberation Ministry went on strike. A few days later Cuhorst was arrested again and interned in Ludwigsburg . In the denazification proceedings in October 1948, the Spruchkammer  V of Stuttgart- Bad Cannstatt classified him in the group of "main culprits" and sentenced him to four years and three months in a labor camp, extensive confiscation of property and imposed occupational restrictions on him. Cuhorst went into revision before the Central Appeals Chamber of Northern Württemberg . This not only confirmed the verdict, but also extended his sentence to six years, of which he only had to serve five and a half years, taking into account the duration of prisoner-of-war and pre-trial detention . He was released early on December 20, 1950.

For 20 years, Cuhorst tried to revise the consequences of the judgment chamber. He made a total of seven requests for clemency and complained about pension payments until the 1960s. On May 21, 1968, the Baden-Wuerttemberg Council of Ministers finally rejected a pardon and he only received a disability pension. According to Stefan Baur, Cuhorst was not primarily concerned with material things; he wanted the formal blame to end.

Legal activity during the National Socialist era

Cuhorst's judicial activity during the Nazi era is judged controversially. More recent journalistic works sometimes come to very critical results: "He was in no way inferior to Freisler in his criminal activities." Historical and directly contemporary judgments are much more cautious. Since the case files of the Stuttgart courts were burned in the bombing war in 1944 , there are only relatively few trial documents and judgments left.

Critical points of criticism are often the short duration of the proceedings , obstruction of the defense as well as inappropriate verbal statements. Court assessors and neighbors reported how Cuhorst called them to trial with the words “Voilà, gentlemen, off to the slaughter!” Or “Well, today we have three cases, that must be at least two heads”. In the proceedings against Cuhorst after the war, such and similar testimonies were collected in large numbers. Furthermore, the accusation of positivism is raised because he applied the then applicable law without hesitation. Of a total of 2,600 cases before the Stuttgart special court, around 1,200 were chaired by Cuhorst; between 120 and 50 of the approx. 200 death sentences are attributed to Cuhorst. Of these, however, only seven related to political offenses in seven years, the rest to general crime .

On the other hand, Cuhorst's personal integrity is highlighted, his insistence on judicial independence - e.g. For example, he punished corrupt Nazi functionaries particularly harshly - and his efforts to achieve an objective clarification of the facts. According to Baur, the special court did not judge sentences any harsher than other special courts . The reasons for Cuhorst's relatively harsh punishment by the ruling chamber compared to other special judges are more "to be found in his personal behavior and hatefulness and not in the concrete judgments, which of course does not give good testimony to the coming to terms with the Nazi judiciary after 1945."

Cuhorst was chairman of three legal proceedings against members of the Scholl family: 1938 against Hans Scholl , 1942 against his father Robert Scholl and 1943 against the married couple Robert and Magdalene Scholl and daughter Inge . Magdalene Scholl certified that Cuhorst conducted negotiations correctly after the war. When Hans Scholl was accused of having offended those who were under protection , Magdalene Scholl described Cuhorst's dealings with her son as "kind and comradely" and "very tender".

A well-founded comparison of the judgment practice of the Stuttgart special court with that of other contemporary courts at home and abroad is still pending.

Aftermath

  • The plot of the American film The Judgment of Nuremberg (original title: Judgment at Nuremberg ) from 1961 is based on the Nuremberg legal process. Hermann Cuhorst is likely to have served as a model for the accused Stuttgart judge Friedrich Hofstetter.
  • According to the editor of the current issue, Cuhorst was a real role model for the public prosecutor “Dr. Frey ”in the novel“ Das Schafott ”(1979) by Curt Letsche .

Trivia

When the communities of Hemigkofen and Nonnenbach were merged in 1934, the entire community was named ' Kressbronn ' on Cuhorst's initiative .

literature

  • Stefan Baur: Jurisprudence in the National Socialist spirit. Hermann Albert Cuhorst, President of the Senate and Chairman of the Stuttgart Special Court. In: Michael Kißener , Joachim Scholtyseck (ed.): The leaders of the province. Nazi biographies from Baden and Württemberg. Universitätsverlag Konstanz, Konstanz 1997, ISBN 3-87940-566-2 ( Karlsruhe Contributions to the History of National Socialism 2), pp. 111–142.
  • Fritz Endemann: Hermann Cuhorst and other special judges. Justice of Terror and Eradication . In: Hermann G. Abmayer (ed.): Stuttgart Nazi perpetrators. From fellow travelers to mass murderers . Butterfly Verlag, Stuttgart, 2nd edition 2009, ISBN 978-3-89657-136-6 , pp. 332-345.
  • Wolfgang Proske (Ed.): Perpetrators - helpers - free riders. Nazi victims from the Ostalb (=  perpetrators - helpers - free riders . Band 1 ). 2nd revised edition (licensed edition). Kugelberg, Gerstetten 2016, ISBN 978-3-945893-05-0 , pp. 53 ff .

Web links

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. 98.
  2. ↑ Herrmann, Ulrich: From the Hitler Youth to the White Rose. Weinheim and Basel: Beltz, 2012, p. 83
  3. ↑ Baur, p. 132f.
  4. ^ Volkmar von Zühlsdorf: A rubble monument for Klett . In: Die Zeit , No. 14/1954, p. 2.
  5. ↑ The Liberated Minister . In: Der Spiegel . No. 6 , 1948, pp. 7 ( online ).
  6. ↑ Benigna Schönhagen : "Up, gentlemen, to the slaughter!" The Stuttgart special court under Hermann Cuhorst . In: MP Miller (ed.): Stuttgart in the Second World War . Catalog for the exhibition from September 1, 1989 to July 22, 1990. Gierlingen 1990, p. 227.
  7. ^ Sindelfinger Zeitung , March 11, 2005.
  8. ↑ Stuttgarter Zeitung , July 18, 2005.
  9. ↑ Baur, pp. 120f.
  10. ^ Fritz Endemann: Hermann Cuhorst and other special judges . In: Hermann G. Abmayr (Ed.): Stuttgarter NS-Täter . Stuttgart 2009, p. 340.
  11. ^ Forms of resistance in the southwest 1933–1945 . Published by the State Center for Civic Education Baden-Württemberg, Ulm 1994, p. 257.
  12. ↑ Munzinger Archive International Biographical Archive 30/49. Schwäbische Zeitung , December 20, 1947.
  13. ↑ Paul Sauer: Württemberg at the time of National Socialism . Süddeutsche Verlagsgesellschaft, Ulm 1975, p. 323.
  14. ↑ Baur, p. 126f.
  15. ↑ Baur, p. 131.
  16. ↑ Baur, pp. 130f.
  17. ↑ Baur, p. 126.
  18. ↑ Baur, p. 125f.
  19. ↑ Armin Ziegler: It was about freedom! The history of the resistance group " White Rose " . Schönaich 2005.
  20. ^ Sönke Zankel : With leaflets against Hitler . Cologne, Weimar, Vienna: Böhlau, 2008, p. 56, see also p. 53.
  21. ^ Francisco Muñoz Conde, Marta Muñoz Aunión: " The Judgment of Nuremberg ". Legal and cinematic commentary on the film by Stanley Kramer (1961) . (Contemporary legal history; Section 6, Volume 21). Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, Berlin 2006, p. 10.
  22. ^ Elmar L. Kuhn : From Hemigkofen and Nonnenbach to the community of Kressbronn. In: Kressbronner Jahrbuch 2001, pp. 34–39. http://elmarlkuhn.de/aufsaetze-im-volltext/bodenseekreis/von-hemigkofen-u-nonnenbach-zur-gemeinde-kressbronn/namenspolitik-eines-blutrichters-und-werftdirektors/
personal data
SURNAME Cuhorst, Hermann
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Cuhorst, Hermann Albert (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German lawyer
DATE OF BIRTH July 22, 1899
PLACE OF BIRTH Ellwangen
DATE OF DEATH 5th August 1991
Place of death Kressbronn on Lake Constance