Edmund Mezger

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Edmund Mezger (born October 15, 1883 in Basel , † March 24, 1962 in Göppingen ) was a German criminal lawyer and criminologist . Despite his involvement in the Nazi regime, he was able to continue his career almost uninterrupted after 1945.

Live and act

Mezger passed his Abitur in Esslingen in 1902 and then studied law at the universities of Tübingen , Berlin and Leipzig . After taking the first and second state law exams, he completed his doctorate in 1908. He first worked in the justice service of Württemberg . In 1918 he submitted his habilitation thesis at the University of Tübingen and in 1922 was appointed associate professor in Marburg. In 1925 he became a professor and chair holder in Marburg , and since 1932 he has taught in Munich .

During the Nazi era , Mezger was a member of the Academy for German Law . As a member with the number 55, he was one of the first hundred members of Hans Frank's National Socialist Academy for German Law in September 1933 . Also in 1933 he called for a racially oriented Nazi enemy criminal law. In 1935 he wrote the treatise The criminal law protection of state, party and people as a contribution to Hans Frank's National Socialist Handbook . During the criminal law teachers conference in 1935, Mezger defined illegal activity as "acting against the German National Socialist worldview"

In 1937 Mezger became a member of the NSDAP and in 1938 a member of the SS .

During the Second World War he was part of the Criminal Law Commission under Reich Justice Minister Franz Gürtner and Roland Freisler . In 1944, in an article on criminal policy and its criminological foundations , he wrote about the allegedly high crime rate of the Jews: “Especially with the special crime rate of the Jews, the older investigations suffer from an insufficient distinction between race and denomination ... the new breed itself is now given sufficient consideration ”. In the same work he called for "racial hygiene measures to exterminate criminal tribes" and the " extermination of sections of the population that are harmful to the people and race".

From 1943 to 1945 he worked for the Reichsführer SS and head of the German police, Heinrich Himmler, on a draft law for a "Community Foreigners Act" . Mezger gave a lecture on the draft at a meeting of the Criminal Law Committee of the Academy for German Law on February 28, 1944 in Bad Salzungen as an already "established law". It was planned to put the draft version from March 17, 1944 into force on January 1, 1945. After July 20, 1944, this was not done. The expression “community strangers”, coined by Mezger, was intended to designate people who were Aryans, but nonetheless biologically degenerate. In the discussion, expressions such as “parasite”, “good-for-nothing”, “failure”, “work shy” were used. Homosexuals were also considered alien to the community. Sterilization also belonged to the judiciary-free, exclusively police and unlimited "safeguarding" of certain non-members of the community without legal remedies. The police, whose chief employer was Heinrich Himmler, would have been the executive of these legal provisions.

It was also Himmler who obtained Mezger special permission to visit a concentration camp in 1944. The deputy head of Department V Criminal Police of the Reich Main Security Office , Colonel Paul Werner , supported Edmund Mezger's wish to visit a concentration camp in a letter dated March 8, 1944 to the head of the concentration camp administration, SS-General Richard Glücks , as follows:

“The Reich Criminal Police have been working with Professor Dr. Mezger, Munich, one of the most famous criminal law teachers of the present day and excellent forensic biologists. Prof. Mezger recently asked me to give him certain material about serious criminals and the like from time to time, which I of course willingly agreed to. On this occasion, Prof. Mezger also expressed the wish to occasionally be able to see certain types of people in the concentration camps - practically only Dachau comes into question - on the spot. "

These and other sources on Edmund Mezger's activities in favor of realizing National Socialism in 1943 and 1944 were published by Francisco Muñoz Conde in 2007.

Nothing is known about his denazification after the end of the war. At the Nuremberg trial of the main war criminals in 1946, he worked for the defense attorney Otto Freiherr von Lüdinghausen , who defended Konstantin Freiherr von Neurath . However, he was himself suspected and interned in the Nuremberg witness prison for a few weeks.

Mezger was able to return to his chair in Munich as early as 1948, where he stayed until his retirement in 1952. He belonged to the editorial board of the border areas of medicine and became deputy chairman of the large criminal law commission in the Federal Ministry of Justice . Mezger's textbooks on the general and special sections of the penal code were standard works for legal training in the 1950s and 1960s. An extensive commemorative publication dedicated to him was published as early as 1953/1954, in which his connection to the Nazi state was not mentioned, nor was it otherwise discussed in public.

Fonts (selection)

The later Emigrant and painter Fred Uhlman was at Mezger with a dissertation on the mass murderer 1925 Ernst Wagner Ph.D.
  • To be and should be in law , Tübingen 1920.
  • On the meaning of criminal offenses , in: Festschriftträger , Berlin 1926, pp. 187–230.
  • Criminal Law, a textbook , Munich / Leipzig 1931 (2nd edition 1933, 3rd edition 1949).
  • Criminal policy on a criminological basis , Stuttgart 1934 (2nd edition 1942, 3rd edition, criminal policy and its criminological basis , 1944).
  • The material illegality in the coming criminal law , in: Journal for the entire criminal law science 55 (1936), pp. 1–17.
  • Problems of criminal psychology in criminal law (lecture from June 5 , 1943 ) , Munich 1943.
  • Paths and wrong ways in the doctrine of the offender type , in: Deutsche Justiz , 12th year, issue 12, July 21, 1944, pp. 215-216.
  • Criminal law. 2 parts, Beck, Munich / Berlin 1949 (numerous new editions), part 1, 14th edition 1970, ISBN 3-406-01865-3 ; Part 2, 9th edition 1966.

literature

  • Hermann Blei :  Mezger, Edmund. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 17, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1994, ISBN 3-428-00198-2 , p. 412 f. ( Digitized version ).
  • Kurt von Jan: Edmund Mezger . In: A portrait of lawyers. Publisher and authors in four decades. Festschrift for the 225 year anniversary of the CH Beck publishing house . Beck, Munich 1988, ISBN 3-406-33196-3 , pp. 561-569.
  • Francisco Muñoz Conde: Edmund Mezger - Contributions to a legal life. Berliner Wissenschaftsverlag, Berlin 2007.
  • Karl Engisch , Reinhart Maurach (ed.): Festschrift for Edmund Mezger on his 70th birthday. October 15 , 1953 , Beck, Munich 1954.
  • Hubert Seliger: Political lawyers? The defenders of the Nuremberg trials . Nomos, Baden-Baden 2016, ISBN 978-3-8487-2360-7 , p. 547.
  • Jan Telp: Weeding and Treason. For the discussion of punitive purposes and terms of crime in the Third Reich (= legal historical series , vol. 192). Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1999, ISBN 3-631-34170-9 (at the same time: Munich, Univ., Diss., 1998), in particular pp. 161-206.
  • Gerit Thulfaut: Criminal policy and criminal law theory with Edmund Mezger (1883–1962) . Nomos, Baden-Baden 2000.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e 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, ISBN 978-3-596-16048-8 , pp. 409-410.
  2. ↑ Prussian Justice , No. 41 of September 28, 1933, p. 479.
  3. ↑ a b c Bernd Rüthers: Falsified historical images of German lawyers? On the “cultures of remembrance” in jurisprudence and justice , in: NJW 2016, pp. 1068, 1071 f.
  4. ↑ Edmund Mezger: The material illegality in the coming criminal law , in: ZStW 55 (1936), p. 1 ff., Here p. 9.
  5. ^ Francisco Muñoz Conde: Edmund Mezger - Contributions to a legal life. Berliner Wissenschaftsverlag, Berlin 2007, p. 114.
  6. ^ Quoted from Ernst Klee: Das Personenlexikon zum Third Reich , Fischer Taschenbuch 2005, p. 410 with reference to Klaus Rehbein in: Marburger Universitätszeitung , No. 230/1992.
  7. ↑ Edmund Mezger: Kriminalpolitik und their criminological foundations , 3rd edition, Stuttgart 1944, p. 26.
  8. ↑ On the drafts for a community alien law cf. Wolfgang Ayaß (edit.): “Community strangers”. Sources on the persecution of "anti-social" 1933–1945 , Koblenz 1998.
  9. ^ Francisco Muñoz Conde: Edmund Mezger - Contributions to a legal life. Berliner Wissenschaftsverlag, Berlin 2007, p. 100.
  10. ^ Francisco Muñoz Conde: Edmund Mezger - Contributions to a legal life. Berliner Wissenschaftsverlag, Berlin 2007, p. 24.
  11. ^ Francisco Muñoz Conde: Edmund Mezger - Contributions to a legal life. Berliner Wissenschaftsverlag, Berlin 2007, p. 52 f.
  12. ^ Francisco Muñoz Conde: Edmund Mezger - Contributions to a legal life. Berliner Wissenschaftsverlag, Berlin 2007, p. 96.
  13. ^ Francisco Muñoz Conde: Edmund Mezger - Contributions to a legal life. Berliner Wissenschaftsverlag, Berlin 2007, p. 96.
  14. ^ Francisco Muñoz Conde: Edmund Mezger - Contributions to a legal life. Berliner Wissenschaftsverlag, Berlin 2007, p. 103.


personal data
SURNAME Mezger, Edmund
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Criminal lawyer and criminologist
DATE OF BIRTH October 15, 1883
PLACE OF BIRTH Basel
DATE OF DEATH March 24, 1962
Place of death Goeppingen