Curt Becker (lawyer)

Curt Franz Hugo Wilhelm Becker , often wrongly also Kurt Becker , (born March 30, 1902 in Stolp † after 1970) was a German lawyer .

Life

Origin and education

After attending school, Becker studied law . It is not clear whether Becker received his doctorate . In various sources, Becker is assigned the doctoral degree, but there is no evidence of a dissertation that was timely. From around 1931 Becker practiced as a lawyer in Berlin (law firm Uhlandstrasse 28).

Political and legal activity in the environment of Walther Stennes and Otto Strasser in 1931 and 1932

Although Becker was formally close to the NSDAP in the early 1930s, he worked against it in practice: In the Edenpalast trial of May 1931, he represented four SA men from SA-Sturm 33 ("Mördersturm") before the court in Charlottenburg were charged as defense counsel for participating in an attack on a group of communists in the Edenpalast dance hall. Although he was thus the legal advisor to the accused National Socialists, Becker worked behind the scenes with the communist lawyer Hans Litten , who was involved in the trial as a co-plaintiff for the attacked communists: As a supporter of Stennes, Becker supported the political objective that the Litten im This process pursued, namely to use the process to discredit Hitler, the Berlin Gauleiter Goebbels and the entire political leadership of the party. Litten wanted to achieve this, favored by Becker, who countered him with the nature of his defense, by exposing the tactics of the party leadership of the NSDAP to incite the SA - despite the official legality of the NSDAP - systematically to incite acts of violence that disrupted public order .

The bourgeois Vossische Zeitung labeled Becker, given his role in the Eden Palast trial in May 1931, as a sympathizer of "the revolutionary group of the Hitler party" and as an "opponent of Hitler". Before 1931 to Becker, an article from the New World Stage in 1933, according to a shared office with the later as a defender of Ernst Torgler during the Reichstag Fire Trial become known Alfons Sack have formed. Otto Strasser later described Becker as a “Stennes supporter” who “joined” him, Strasser, ([Dr. Becker was] a follower of Stennes and had then joined my ranks) .

Becker gained fame throughout Germany when, as a lawyer for the former Berlin SA chief Walther Stennes , he filed charges against Adolf Hitler for insult and brought him to court. The background was the events of the so-called Stennes revolt of April 1931.

At the beginning of 1931, conflicts between Hitler and Walter Stennes - who as OSAF-Ost had headed the SA , the NSDAP's street fighting association , in Berlin and East Germany - had been simmering for a long time, and they essentially revolved around the question of which one So one would be able to take power in the state with the greatest chances of success: At that time Hitler pleaded for a strictly legal procedure in which one would win a majority of the Reichstag mandates through electoral victories and in this way take over government power in a constitutionally compliant way in order to subsequently revoke the constitution to eliminate the power position of the legislative and executive branches, so to speak "from within"; The much more activist Stennes, on the other hand, advocated bringing state power to the NSDAP and SA leadership in a violent, revolutionary way through a coup of the SA. In March 1931, these differences of opinion led to a final break between Hitler and Stennes: When Stennes was dismissed as Berlin SA chief by Hitler's newly appointed chief of staff Ernst Röhm at the end of the month and transferred to the staff of the SA leadership in Munich, he resisted the order and terminated Hitler's obedience. In order to enforce his own course, he tried to break the Berlin SA out of the NSDAP and to establish it as an independent organization independent of the party. He hoped to pull the SA in the rest of the Reich with him. Despite some initial successes, the mutiny of the Berlin SA against Hitler, led by Stennes, and the Berlin NSDAP leadership around Joseph Goebbels ultimately failed. After a few weeks, the party functionaries Paul Schulz and Edmund Heines, appointed by Hitler as special commissioners, were able to persuade the majority of the Berlin SA members to renew their loyalty to Hitler. Stennes and a number of followers, who were expelled from the party and the SA or who left them of their own accord, then founded their own organization, which from then on stood in sharp opposition to the NSDAP.

During the competition between Stennes and Hitler for the loyalty of the Berlin SA people in April 1931, in an effort to discredit Stennes and thus prevent as many SA members as possible from joining him, Hitler repeatedly publicly accused Stennes of that he had sneaked into the NSDAP as a police spy; B. The attack on April 4, 1931 ( "Who is Mr. Stennes? Police captain out of or in the service ??") or Nationalist observers from the 5th, 6th and April 7th, 1931 ( "Stennes employee Grzesinskis !" [ = Berlin Police President]). Thereupon Stennes, with the support of Becker, brought the aforementioned lawsuit against Hitler, also against the editor-in-chief of the attack, Julius Lippert . The proceedings were finally heard on January 16, 1932 before the district court in Berlin-Mitte and ended with Hitler's acquittal. Lippert was sentenced to 300 RM for defamation . Hans Frank acted as Hitler's lawyer and Becker's counterpart .

Becker was also involved in the affair surrounding the so-called Heimsoth letters: Between 1928 and 1930, Ernst Röhm had written letters to Becker's client Karl-Günther Heimsoth , from which Röhm's homosexual disposition emerged in a compromising way. Heimsoth had placed these letters in Becker's care by 1931 at the latest, who kept them in his office. During a house search of Becker's business premises carried out on July 13, 1931 by the Prussian Political Police's department IA on the order of the Munich Criminal Court , the Heimsoth letters were confiscated, handed over to Regional Court I in Munich and subsequently in criminal proceedings against Röhm for homosexual activity according to § 175 StGB used. In the course of the presidential election campaign of 1932, the letters were published in a large edition brochure (Three Letters from Ernst Röhm to Dr. Heimsoth) .

Nazi era, World War II and the post-war period

After the National Socialists came to power in 1933, Becker was arrested for five months on charges of "high treason" before he was released and allowed to continue practicing as a lawyer.

In 1936 Becker was sent to a National Socialist concentration camp for homosexuality . But the imprisonment could not have lasted too long: in 1937 he was released again. That year he received a warning that he was again in danger. He then fled to Czechoslovakia, from where he went to Shanghai. In 1938 Becker got a job there as an accountant for the company Krawyer & Co., the representatives of Lurgi in Japan. In December 1939 he was replaced in this position by a NSDAP member named Noltenius and then marginalized as a Nazi opponent in the German colony. In April 1942, the German police attaché in Japan, Josef Meisinger , applied for Becker to withdraw his German citizenship. According to a book, this was actually withdrawn from him.

Otto Strasser wrote mistake in a book published in 1943 that Becker in the "concentration camp Koenigstein , a converted fortress" (Koenigstein concentration camp, a coverted fortress) had been taken.

After the Second World War, Becker was heard as a witness by the American occupation authorities in Japan.

In the 1950s and 1960s Becker can be traced back to Tokyo , where he ran a law firm. In the Directory of Foreign Residents for 1967 he is listed as "Curt W. Becker" with residence in Tsurumaki 2-chome in the Setagaya-ku district of Tokyo. Becker is also included in the Japan Directory 1972 , Vol. 3, p. 17 with this address and his office in the Fukoku Building in Tokyo.

Archival tradition

In the Brandenburg State Main Archives there is a personnel file on Becker (4A KG Pers 7118) in Rep. 4A (Kammergericht Berlin, Personalia).

Web links

• Report on Stennes and comrades (PDF; 6.6 MB) from 1933, with information about Becker in the archive of the Institute for Contemporary History (here p. 15 ff.)

Individual evidence

1. ^ IfZ: Adolf Hitler. Speeches, writings, orders: February 1925 to January 1933 . Vol. IV, p. 47 erroneously states 1884 as the year of Becke's birth. The correct date of birth can be found in the entry for Becker's personal file in the database of the Brandenburg State Main Archives and in the Federal Archives: R 3001/51075 (Becker's personal file).
2. ↑ Newsweek , vol. 45, 1955, p. 20 notes that Becker at that time (1955) had a prosperous legal practice in Tokyo (" Curt Becker, the aggressive young Berlin attorney who prosecuted Adolf Hitler for leading a revolutionary movement in 1931 , has a comfortable law practice here and in his spare time he and his wife, Irma, are camera addicts. " ); In The Japanese Annual of International Law , vol. 1973, p. 294, Becker is still listed as a lawyer with a practice in Tokyo.
3. ↑ Berlin address book. Edition 1931. Part IV, p. 1037 .
4. ↑ Knut Bergbauer / Sabine Fröhlich / Stefanie Schüler-Springorum : Monument figure. Biographical approach to Hans Litten, 1903–1938 . Göttingen 2008, p. 147 f .; Benjamin Carter Hett: Crossing Hitler. The Man Who Put the Nazis on the Witness Stand . New York 2008, pp. 83f.
5. ↑ Knut Bergbauer / Sabine Fröhlich / Stefanie Schüler-Springorum: Monument figure. Biographical approach to Hans Litten, 1903–1938 . Göttingen 2008, p. 148. With reference to the Vossische Zeitung of May 8, 1931.
6. ↑ Anonymus (“from a Berlin lawyer”): “Doctor Sack, Torglers Defender”, in: Die neue Weltbühne from September 14, 1933 (= Issue No. 37/1933), p. 1140.
7. ^ Otto Strasser: Flight from Terror . New York 1943, p. 220.
8. ↑ Bernhard Sauer: Goebbels "Rabauken". On the history of the SA in Berlin-Brandenburg . In: Uwe Scharper (Hrsg.): Berlin in past and present. Yearbook of the Berlin State Archives . Berlin 2006, p. 127 f .; Heinz Höhne: Mordache Röhm. Hitler's breakthrough to total power . Reinbek near Hamburg 1984, pp. 105-107.
9. ^ Christian Hartmann (ed.): Adolf Hitler. Speeches, writings, orders: February 1925 to January 1933 . Vol. IV / 3, Munich 1997, p. 47.
10. ↑ Herbert Linder: From the NSDAP to the SPD. The political life of Dr. Helmuth Klotz (1894-1943) . Konstanz 1998, p. 170.
11. ↑ Herbert Linder: From the NSDAP to the SPD. The political life of Dr. Helmuth Klotz (1894-1943) . Konstanz 1998, p. 168. On the scandal that arose from the publication of the Heimsoth letters and its consequences cf. Susanne zur Nieden: The rise and fall of the virile male hero. The Ernst Röhm scandal and his murder . In: Dies (Ed.): Homosexuality and reasons of state, masculinity, homophobia and politics in Germany 1900–1945 . Campus, Frankfurt am Main 2005, here: pp. 171–174.
12. ↑ Hett: Crossing Hitler . P. 169.
13. ↑ John Chapman: Ultranationalism in German-Japanese Relations, 1930-1945 , pp. 75f.
14. ↑ Thomas Pekar: Escape and Rescue: Exile in the Japanese Territory (1933-1945) , 2011, p. 61.
15. ^ Otto Strasser: Flight from Terror, New York 1943 . P. 220.
16. ^ John Chapman: Ultranationalism in German-Japanese Relations, 1930-1945 , 2011, p. 257.