Curt Rothenberger

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Curt Rothenberger during the Nuremberg Trials

Curt Ferdinand Rothenberger (born June 30, 1896 in Cuxhaven , † September 1, 1959 in Hamburg ) was a German lawyer and National Socialist politician . He was successively Hamburg Senator for Justice, President of the Hanseatic Higher Regional Court in Hamburg and State Secretary in the Reich Ministry of Justice . After the Second World War he was indicted and convicted in the Nuremberg legal process.

Life until 1933

Rothenberger grew up in Cuxhaven for the first few years of his life, where his father was a Hamburg customs officer . In 1901 the family moved to Hamburg. From 1905 Rothenberger attended the Wilhelm Gymnasium there , which he graduated from high school in August 1914. Since he was initially not allowed to participate in the First World War as a volunteer , Rothenberger began studying law in Berlin . In the summer of 1915, Rothenberger, who had moved to Kiel in April 1915 , received his draft notice. He was employed as a field artilleryman on the Western Front until 1918 and was promoted to lieutenant in the reserve when he was discharged .

After the war, Rothenberger returned to Hamburg to enroll at the newly established University of Hamburg in a course specially set up for those involved in the war. In 1919 he volunteered for the Bahrenfeld Freikorps . After only five semesters, Rothenberger passed the 1st state examination in March 1920 , as discounts were available for those involved in the war. After a shortened legal clerkship, a doctoral thesis and a very good second state examination, Rothenberger became assistant judge at the district court in June 1922. He also worked as a tutor .

In January 1925, Rothenberger became a Hamburg civil servant with a judge's position at the regional court, in 1927 he became an examining magistrate and in 1928 he was promoted to government councilor in the regional justice administration. In this position there were serious disputes with the then head of the prison administration, Christian Koch , so that Rothenberger was promoted to the health administration in mid-1929 and worked there as a senior government councilor. In January 1931 Rothenberger returned to the administration of justice.

At the end of 1931 there was a scandal. Rothenberger became a Hamburg candidate for a position as assistant judge at the Reichsgericht in Leipzig , as no other Hamburg judge had agreed to take the position. As his appeal was considered certain, he was promoted to district court director. However, Rothenberger was not appointed because of his comparatively young age - at this point he was almost 35 years old. In Hamburg he did not enjoy a great reputation among colleagues because of his steep and incomprehensible career. Rothenberger moved to the criminal senate in 1932.

Especially after this incident, Rothenberger finally turned away from the Weimar Republic and contacted Wilhelm von Allwörden from the NSDAP . It is not known when he met with Gauleiter Karl Kaufmann . For tactical reasons, Rothenberger was not yet allowed to join the party; from then on he worked undercover for the National Socialists . His information helped the National Socialists a lot, so shortly before the change of power, Rothenberger was offered by Kaufmann to become Hamburg's First Mayor . Rothenberger refused.

time of the nationalsocialism

August 26, 1942: from left to right: the President of the People's Court Roland Freisler , State Secretary Franz Schlegelberger , who previously managed the business of the Reich Minister of Justice, Reich Minister of Justice Otto Georg Thierack and the State Secretary in the Reich Ministry of Justice Curt Rothenberger.

On March 8, 1933, Rothenberger was elected as Justice Senator by the Hamburg city council and belonged to the Senate under the First Mayor Carl Vincent Krogmann . Since Rothenberger's cooperation with the NSDAP was still unknown to the public and Rothenberger was considered apolitical, the actual political change in the judiciary was initially not clear. There were no protests. Unlike in other parts of the empire, Rothenberger acted covertly during his purges. He dismissed the total of 31 judges and public prosecutors, who were considered Jewish, unobtrusively and at a certain interval. By means of so-called rejuvenation cures , he mainly dismissed veteran liberal judges and replaced them with lawyers with Nazi attitudes. Rothenberger succeeded in a quick and smooth "cleansing" of the Hamburg judiciary, in which Christian Koch also had to vacate his office. Overall, around 30 percent of Hamburg's judicial lawyers lost their offices.

After initial friction and disputes over competence between Rothenberger and Kaufmann, their relationship improved over time. From 1935, Rothenberger and Kaufmann worked closely together for the rest of the Nazi era. Rothenberger, who had been Gauführer in the Association of National Socialist German Jurists since 1934 , switched to the Hanseatic Higher Regional Court as President on April 1, 1935 ; from May 16, 1935 he was also president of the Hamburg Higher Administrative Court . In addition, he held a few other offices.

Rothenberger introduced its own monitoring system in all courts. Starting in May 1942, weekly preliminary discussions were held in which individual judges presented their most important cases for the next week. Rothenberger made it clear how the proceedings should be decided. In debriefings, the judgments of the past week were also criticized. As this system was expanded more and more over time, Rothenberger later decided on almost every case personally. In addition, he had mood reports prepared; in individual cases Rothenberger intervened "directly to steer". He always prevented charges against men of the SA or SS.

Since 1938 he was also an honorary professor.

After the beginning of the Second World War , the field of justice was increasingly curtailed. Since Reich Justice Minister Franz Gürtner died in January 1941 and the ministry was only provisionally administered by Franz Schlegelberger , Rothenberger saw the possibility of a career in Berlin. On April 23 and 24, 1941, he took part in the conference of the highest lawyers of the Nazi state in Berlin , where the euthanasia murders of Operation T4 were reported and a pseudo-legalization of the murders of the sick was sought. In the same year he inspected the Neuengamme concentration camp and the Mauthausen concentration camp the following year .

In April 1942 Rothenberger sent a memorandum to Adolf Hitler on judicial reform. On August 20, 1942, Hitler appointed him State Secretary in the Reich Ministry of Justice . His superior was Minister Otto Georg Thierack, appointed on the same day . Rothenberger, who had been appointed Vice President of the Academy for German Law in November 1942 , was only able to implement his ideas to a limited extent. Together with Thierack, he was responsible for the so-called 'anti-social action', in which over 20,000 prisoners of justice were extradited to the SS for “ extermination through work ”. From December 1942 at the latest, Thierack tried to get rid of the State Secretary he did not like. However, it was not until December 21, 1943 that he found an allegation of plagiarism as a reason to be able to remove Rothenberger from his office. Rothenberger returned to Hamburg disappointed. There he was appointed by Gauleiter Karl Kaufmann as "Commissioner for the total war effort in Hamburg". As a sideline, Rothenberger began working as a notary in September 1944 .

After the war

In May 1945 Rothenberger was arrested and interned in Neumünster . On January 4, 1947, the Nuremberg legal process began , in which Rothenberger was sentenced to seven years in prison on December 4 of the same year.

In the grounds of the judgment it said:

“The Defendant Rothenberger helped and encouraged the program of racial persecution, and despite his many assertions to the contrary, he made a significant contribution to the degradation of the Ministry of Justice and the courts and to their submission to the arbitrariness of Hitler, the party charges and the police. He took part in the corruption and infraction of the legal system. "

In August 1950 Rothenberger was released early from prison in the Landsberg War Crimes Prison . He settled in Schleswig-Holstein and drew a pension as President of the Higher Regional Court . D. In 1954 Rothenberger returned to Hamburg. There he began to work successfully as a tutor again. The request to adjust his pension payments to that of a state secretary was rejected by the city of Hamburg. In 1959 a report was published on Rothenberger's activities during the Nazi era. This became a scandal. Rothenberger committed shortly after suicide .

literature

Web links

Commons : Curt Rothenberger  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. All data from Schott: Curt Rothenberger (see literature list).
  2. ^ Susanne Schott: Curt Rothenberger , p. 64.
  3. see Schott: Curt Rothenberger, p. 70.
  4. a b c d e f Ernst Klee : The personal dictionary for the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945 . Second updated edition. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 978-3-596-16048-8 , pp. 510-511.
  5. ^ Special court discussion of May 1942 as a document printed by Helga Grabitz, Werner Johe: Die unFreie Stadt Hamburg 1933–1945. 2nd ext. On. Hamburg 1995, ISBN 3-929728-18-4 , pp. 167f.
  6. ^ Rolf Lamprecht : Unwanted, despised, murdered. A monumental research project examines the fate of Hamburg's Jews in the Nazi state . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung of August 22, 2016, p. 15.
  7. see Schott: Curt Rothenberger, p. 172.