Erich Topf

Erich Günther Topf (born September 27, 1904 in Magdeburg ; † November 6, 1983 in Braunschweig ) was a German lawyer. During the Nazi era, he worked in the judiciary and as a price commissioner for the Province of Saxony . From 1952, Topf was a senior public prosecutor a. a. worked for the special department "Political Criminal Matters" at the Regional Court of Celle , where West German communists were prosecuted under the criminal law of convictions .

Life

After studying law at the Universities of Berlin and Göttingen, he was awarded a doctorate in the 1920s. jur. PhD . From 1930 to 1935 he was a court assessor at the public prosecutor's offices in Erfurt , Torgau , Magdeburg , Naumburg , Halle , Kiel and Königsberg (Prussia) and until 1939 at the public prosecutor's office in Kiel. Topf joined the NSDAP in 1938 and had been a member of the Reich Association of German Officials, the NSV and the Reich Air Protection Association from the mid-1930s . From 1936 to 1939 he was first a storm man and then a Rottenführer of the SA . In the 1940s he was a senior councilor for the price commissioner and the state government of Saxony-Anhalt.

After the end of the war , he was classified as exonerated in the denazification process in 1947 . In 1947 his appointment as public prosecutor in Kiel was revoked and from April 1948 he was first public prosecutor in Kiel. From March 1, 1949, he was senior public prosecutor in Braunschweig, despite the initially negative attitude of the Zonal Office of the Legal Adviser in Herford and the Regional Commissioner of Lower Saxony . However, after the Attorney General in Kiel had advocated Topf's reinstatement at the Central Justice Office, he also received advocacy from the Schleswig-Holstein Ministry of Justice and he had auditioned at the Central Justice Office in Hamburg and declared there that the party membership was purely nominal, On February 16, 1949, Topf was finally appointed senior public prosecutor in Braunschweig.

Legal investigations

When doubts arose in November 1950 about the statements made by Topf in relation to his party membership and his activities during the National Socialist era, his superior, the incumbent Attorney General in Braunschweig, Fritz Bauer , initiated preliminary investigations. After only a few months, Bauer complained to the Lower Saxony Ministry of Justice that files urgently needed for the investigation could not be viewed. The Braunschweig Public Prosecutor General was refused access to important police files from the area of ​​responsibility of the Police President of Kiel, as the police processes were intended exclusively for internal use and the Schleswig-Holstein Ministry of the Interior had prohibited the transfer of such files to the judicial authorities. In November 1951, after he had been transferred to the responsible authorities in Lüneburg , Bauer handed over the official investigations against Topf and asked for a further investigation into the question of Topf's membership of the NSDAP and his work as a public prosecutor or judge in the context of the National Socialist military jurisdiction during the war. In April 1952 the proceedings were discontinued by the responsible investigating chief public prosecutor in Stade and the general public prosecutor in Celle .

Public Prosecutor at the Lüneburg Regional Court

On May 1, 1952, Erich Günther Topf was appointed senior public prosecutor in Lüneburg. In Lüneburg, Erich Topf was subordinate to a senior public prosecutor. a. the special department “Political Criminal Matters”, which in the 1950s and 1960s “led the judicial persecution of communists” ( Helmut Kramer ) in West Germany. The increasing criminalization of the left-wing political opposition in the Federal Republic since the beginning of the 1950s resulted in the KPD ban in 1956 . In their environment, the ban also threatened the VVN , which was now banned at the federal level and in individual federal states. Where it still existed, its publications were subject to state censorship, since after 1956 they were widely regarded as substitute organs of the banned KPD. It was not uncommon for people to be convicted who had no connection to the KPD, who only shared certain characteristics of their convictions or who had connections to the GDR. As a rule, the convicts were deprived of their civil rights ; in individual cases, people were convicted for their work in the KPD when it was not yet banned, which violated the rule of law prohibition of retroactivity, according to which only acts can be punished if they were at the time of their Commission were already defined as a criminal offense. It is no coincidence that there was a conspicuous continuity of enemy images that were also valid during the National Socialist era, as former Nazi judicial lawyers who were politically burdened, such as the former judge at the Poznan Special Court , were officiating in Lüneburg due to their previous work in the Nazi judicature . Dr. Liebau, and Public Prosecutor Karl-Heinz Ottersbach , who acted as a prosecutor at the Katowice Special Court from 1941 to 1945, particularly against the political opponents of National Socialism and was responsible for a large number of death sentences.

literature

• Claudia Fröhlich: "Against the tabooing of disobedience": Fritz Bauer's concept of resistance and the coming to terms with Nazi crimes. Frankfurt / M., New York 2006.
• Irmtrud Wojak: Fritz Bauer 1903–1968. A biography . Beck, Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-406-58154-0 .
• Martin Will: Ephoral Constitution. The party ban of the right-wing extremist SRP from 1952, Thomas Dehlers Rosenburg and the constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany. Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2017, ISBN 978-3-16-155893-1 (on Topf: p. 290 ff.).

Individual evidence

1. ^ Irmtrud Wojak: Fritz Bauer 1903–1968. A biography . Beck, Munich 2009, p. 266
2. ↑ iS the criminal punishment of a conviction close to the KPD resp. Sentiment after it was banned in 1956, but without being a member of the banned party, advocating for this party or its branches, or having anything to do with the party organizationally. Further in the running text section “Public Prosecutor's Office at the Regional Court of Lüneburg” Further also Jürgen Rath: Gesinnungsstrafrecht - On the criticism of the destruction of the concept of criminal injustice in the case law of the Federal Court of Justice. Hamburg 2002, ISBN 3-8300-0843-0 .
3. ↑ Jürgen Rath Conciliation law. On the criticism of the destruction of the concept of criminal injustice in the case law of the Federal Court of Justice. Hamburg 2002. ISBN 978-3-8300-0843-9
4. ↑ Christoph Seils : Geist der Zeit Die Zeit online from August 17, 2006
5. ↑ Christoph Seils: The ghost no longer haunts Der Tagesspiegel online, from August 19, 2006
6. ↑ In the consultation of the Bundestag legal committee on the first criminal law amendment law in 1951, FDP spokesman Ludwig Schneider admitted: "Yes [... we create a criminal law of convictions in a certain way." Quoted from Wolfgang Malanowski: The dog recognized its enemy immediately] Der Spiegel, from 1. June 1987
7. ↑ Claudia Fröhlich: "Against the tabooing of disobedience": Fritz Bauer's concept of resistance and the reappraisal of Nazi crimes . Frankfurt / M., New York 2006, pp. 60ff. Irmtrud Wojak: Fritz Bauer 1903–1968. A biography. Munich 2009, p. 256.
8. ↑ Helmut Kramer: Relief as a system. For the criminal investigation of the judicial and administrative crimes of the Third Reich. In: Martin Benhold (Ed.): Traces of injustice. Law and National Socialism. Contributions to historical continuity. Pahl-Rugenstein Verlag, Cologne 1989, pp. 101–130, here p. 108.
9. ↑ On the KPD ban, see: Wolfgang Abendroth, Helmut Ridder, Otto Schönfeldt (eds.), KPD ban, or: Living with Communists? Reinbek near Hamburg 1968.
10. ↑ Stephen Rehmke with reference to the KPD ban: "This conversion of criminal offense law into convincing criminal law not only contradicts the idea of ​​the rule of law and the freedom of opinion and conscience guaranteed in the Basic Law, but also establishes political persecution by the state disguised as criminal prosecution" Stephen Rehmke: Political Justice. In: Forum Recht Online 2002/2003
11. ↑ Habbo Knoch: The act as a picture. Photographs of the Holocaust in the German culture of remembrance. Hamburger Edition, Hamburg 2001, p. 540.
12. ↑ Rolf Gössner: The forgotten justice victims of the Cold War. Structure Verlag, Berlin 2000, p. 118.
13. ↑ Alexander von Brünneck: Political Justice against Communists in the Federal Republic. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt / Main 1978, p. 158
14. ↑ Falco Werketin: The political and legal handling of system opponents in the GDR and in the Federal Republic in the fifties. In: German Pasts - A Common Challenge. Ch.links, Berlin 1999, p. 260
15. ↑ Archived copy ( Memento of the original from April 2, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.