Ernst Hegewisch

Ernst Hegewisch (born November 23, 1881 in Hanover , † December 28, 1963 in Rheinbach ) was a German lawyer. He worked as a lawyer for the Red Aid Germany and the KPD was assessor at the State Court of the German Reich , he was in Nazism with disbarment and protective custody beaten and later in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp detained. After the war he worked as a district court director in Saxony-Anhalt .

Life

As the son of a wealthy factory owner, Hegewisch was able to start studying after high school . He studied in Heidelberg , Leipzig , Kiel and Berlin Law and as an auditor history and economics . While still a student, he joined the SPD . He passed his state examination in 1905 and this was followed by several years of training as a trainee lawyer and assessor . Since he had to complete his training in the civil service and members of the SPD could be banned from training, he resigned from the SPD.

In 1912 he was admitted to the bar and opened a law firm in Celle . At that time he mainly worked in the field of civil and commercial law. He mainly had high net worth clients and companies in the potash industry . He was released from military service in World War I for health reasons.

He experienced his further politicization during the First World War. In 1918 he was one of the founders of the Spartakusbund in Celle and in 1919 he joined the KPD. As a result of the suppression of the November Revolution, there were numerous lawsuits for which the KPD had only a few lawyers. He switched from commercial law to criminal law . In 1921 he worked in Halle for six months to defend participants in the Central German uprising who had been accused in special courts. In the same year Hegewisch was one of the defense lawyers of Max Hoelz , who was charged with the murder of a landowner. He had previously represented Hoelz in an extradition matter from Czechoslovakia . After Hoelz's conviction, he appeared at numerous events that concerned the release of Hoelz and his other supporters.

His political commitment was received negatively by his conservative colleagues. His fellow lawyers in Celle broke off contact, he was spied on, and in 1920 there was an investigation into high treason . Because of his offensive litigation, he was twice subjected to disciplinary court proceedings before the bar association.

During the Kapp Putsch in 1920, Hegewisch actively participated in the counter-mobilization in Celle. The mayor of Celle had joined the putsch and parts of the bourgeoisie and the Reichswehr sympathized with it. The situation in Celle was tense. After several hundred armed workers arrived in Celle on March 17th, a delegation from the Action Committee, headed by Hegewisch, went to the Celle garrison elder and informed him that the workers had taken over military power.

On August 6, 1921, the KPD invited to a meeting of communist lawyers. A legal protection commission for the whole Reich as well as a legal central office in the Reichstag parliamentary group was formed. The aim was to centrally coordinate the limited scope for action against repression. At the time , fellow lawyers included Felix Halle , Arthur Wolf , Hans Barbasch , Viktor Fraenkl , Joseph Herzfeld , Gerhard Obuch , Arthur Samter and Hugo Seckel . This group was one of the founders of the Red Aid in Germany in 1924 and formed the core of its first defenders. The negative attitude to the death penalty and a legal opinion on the Supreme Court, against Communists by Moritz Liepmann declined mainly due to the initiative of the Central Office legal and personal contact with Hegewisch.

In 1923 he wrote a memorandum on the unconstitutionality of the state of emergency and the extradition of prisoners to General Hans von Seeckt . At the request of the KPD, he became the main defender for the workers accused as a result of the Hamburg uprising . Here the case against Hugo Urbahn , political secretary of the KPD, and eight other communists stood out. Its significance was that a first KPD ban should be established with litigation materials. Hegewisch coordinated the defense with the KPD. As a verdict, Urbahn received ten years' imprisonment and most of the remaining defendants were acquitted. A KPD ban could not be justified in the end.

The Red Aid and the KPD asked Hegewisch to work permanently in Hamburg , as there were only a few trustworthy lawyers in the KPD district with the largest number of members. In 1926 he opened his office in Hamburg. There he worked as a legal advisor to the Russian consul and for Russian commercial agencies. At the suggestion of the KPD he was elected as an assessor in the State Court for the German Reich.

Before the transfer of power to Hitler in 1933, two more significant trials followed in Hamburg: One was the Central Trial against the KPD leadership , which in the end was politically unenforceable and was discontinued in 1928 due to an amnesty . Furthermore in the follow-up processes of the Altona Blood Sunday . Hegewisch worked as the main defender for the more than 100 anti-fascists . At the end of 1932 all but 11 were free, but the prosecution brought murder charges against 16. In 1933 he was unable to continue their defense. In February he was temporarily taken into " protective custody ". Neither could Kurt Rosenfeld take on an assignment for the defense of Ernst Thälmann . Both were banned from working in the spring of 1933. However, the bourgeois Thälmann defender Erich Wandschneider was selected on his mediation.

From May 1933 he worked as a lawyer for the commercial agency of the Soviet Union and as a consultant for Russian companies. On October 2, 1934, he and two others were arrested for high treason. The reason was his continued active membership in the illegal KPD. He was sentenced to 18 months in prison. After the end of his prison term, he was again forced into the Sachsenhausen concentration camp for another 18 months by the Secret State Police . Here he was released on October 20, 1938. In consultation with the remaining members of the KPD and under the pretense of rapprochement with the Nazis, he tried to regain his license to practice as a lawyer. However, this failed. From then on he worked as a lawyer for the Hamburg waterworks .

After the Second World War , at the suggestion of the KPD, Hegewisch ran unsuccessfully for the office of Hamburg Attorney General . He worked in the committee for the denazification of the Hamburg judiciary , he wrote a larger memorandum on this, which through his commitment contributed to the fact that the former judges of the High Treason Senate of the Higher Regional Court, who had been re-admitted in 1945, had to be dismissed.

On the initiative of the judicial administration of the Soviet zone of occupation , Hegewisch entered the judicial service in Saxony-Anhalt in 1947. In 1948 he became regional court director in Halle-Merseburg, later a judge at the higher regional court. He also worked as a lecturer for trainee judges .

In July 1952, Hegewisch fled with the entire family to the Federal Republic and spent his old age in Rheinbach near Bonn.

literature

• Udo Reifner , Gundula Knobloch: The "communist" lawyer and the free lawyer. On the biography of Ernst Hegewisch (1881-1952) . In: Margarethe Fabricius-Brand, Edgar Isermann, Jürgen Seifert , Eckart Spoo (eds.): Legal policy “with an upright walk”. Festschrift Werner Holtfort for his 70th birthday . Nomos-Verl.-Gesellschaft, Baden-Baden 1990, ISBN 3-7890-1986-0 , pp. 23-25.
• Hans-Jürgen Schneider, Erika Schwarz: The lawyers of the Red Aid Germany. Political defense attorney in the Weimar Republic. History and biographies . Pahl-Rugenstein-Verlag, Bonn 2002, ISBN 3-89144-330-7 , pp. 149-154.
• Hans-Jürgen Schneider: Ernst Hegewisch, 1881–1952. Communist, lawyer for the Red Aid and resistance fighter. In: Um-breaks. Celler life stories. With contributions by Heidrun Uta Ehrhardt, Peter Erf, Reinhard Rohde, Hans-Jürgen Schneider, Sebastian Winter (editor: Reinhard Rohde). celler issues 5–6. Series of publications by the RWLE Möller Foundation, Celle 2010, pp. 29–38.

Web links

• Literature by and about Ernst Hegewisch in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ^ Justice for Max Hoelz by Nikolaus Brauns (accessed on May 31, 2009)
2. ↑ Celle between the November Revolution and the Currency Reform (accessed on August 14, 2012) ( Memento of the original from March 4, 2016 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. 
3. ↑ Hilde Benjamin - A biography, by Volkmar Schöneburg , in UTOPIE Kreativ No. 85/86, 1997, p. 114.
4. ^ Heinz-Jürgen Schneider / Erika Schwarz / Josef Schwarz: The lawyers of the Red Aid Germany. Bonn 2002, p. 153.