Case by Ewald Schlitt

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The Ewald Schlitt case was a judicial murder in 1942 at the personal instigation of Adolf Hitler .

Criminal prosecution

On March 14, 1942, the Wilhelmshaven shipyard worker Ewald Schlitt was sentenced to five years in prison by the Oldenburg Regional Court . The punishment was based on the fact that Schlitt had mistreated his wife so severely out of jealousy in the summer of 1940 after she had confessed to him a sexual relationship with another man that she had to be admitted to a mental institution. There she contracted an intestinal flu and died as a result.

The district court considered it proven that the offense of serious bodily harm resulted in death . It expressly refused to apply the violent crime ordinance , however, because the perpetrator had no previous convictions , acted irascible but not in cold blood and was overly sensitive due to an illness.

A week after the conviction, Hitler found out about it from a misleading report in the Berlin night edition . That same night he called the acting Minister of Justice, Schlegelberger , and ordered the death penalty to be imposed on him. The minister immediately obtained information from Oldenburg and had the incumbent senior Reich attorney lodge an “extraordinary appeal” against the judgment at the Reichsgericht in Leipzig on March 24 , a type of procedure for which a separate criminal senate had been set up three years earlier . The chairmanship there was held by the President of the Reich Court of Justice Bumke , who only two days later scheduled the main hearing against Schlitt, who had meanwhile been transferred to the Leipzig remand prison , for March 31st. After a four-and-a-half hour trial, Schlitt was sentenced to death in accordance with Section 1 of the Violent Criminal Ordinance, without any admission to the grounds of the Oldenburg District Court. Full Stretches the judgment on the morning of April 2 was Dresden .

Bumke is said to have feared negative reactions from Hitler if he defied his instructions, and therefore sacrificed Schlitt in order to avert damage to the judiciary. As a result, however, the Oldenburg judges objected to the course of the proceedings before the President of the Oldenburg Higher Regional Court . He in turn brought the complaint to Gauleiter Carl Röver . When he finally discussed it with Hitler, Hitler is said to have declared that he was "wrongly informed by the Ministry of Justice".

Hitler's distrust of the judiciary was great, as evidenced by a variety of sources. It therefore came as no surprise to those in the know when, three and a half weeks later, in his last speech in the Reichstag on April 26, 1942, Hitler turned against the judiciary and had himself appointed by the Reichstag as supreme court lord. Addressing the judiciary, he proclaimed:

"[...] I have - to mention just one example - no understanding of the fact that a criminal who marries in 1937 and then abuses his wife until she is finally insane and dies as a result of one last mistreatment, admit was sentenced to five years in prison at a time when tens of thousands of good German men have to die to save their homeland from being destroyed by Bolshevism. So that means to protect their wives and children. From now on I will intervene in these cases and remove judges who clearly do not recognize the commandment of the hour. "

- Adolf Hitler

Legal classification

After the most important basic rights were undermined and all guarantees of basic rights ceased, as well as the abolition of the principle of separation of powers in 1933, Hitler eliminated the principle of federalism in 1934 and appointed himself supreme court lord in the month of the death penalty imposed on Schlitt in 1942. This completely breached all the principles of the rule of law in the Weimar Constitution . According to Uwe Wesel, the Schlitt case shows in particular that the “ normative state ” had given way to a “state of measures” during the war . At the behest of the political leadership, the state had direct access to the individual; judicial independence had become insignificant.

The former President of the Federal Court of Justice, Günter Hirsch , noted in his speech on the 50th anniversary of the court in Karlsruhe: The death sentence that the Reichsgericht, under the personal direction of Erwin Bumke, sentenced Ewald Schlitt in 1942 was “nothing more than a judicial murder. "

literature

  • Dieter Kolbe: President of the Reich Court of Justice Dr. Erwin Bumke. Studies on the decline of the Reichsgericht and the German administration of justice , Karlsruhe 1975, ISBN 3-8114-0026-6 . Pp. 337-353.
  • Uwe Wesel : History of Law. From the early forms to the present . 3rd revised and expanded edition, Beck, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-406-47543-4 , pp. 509-512.

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ a b c Uwe Wesel : History of the law. From the early forms to the present . 3rd revised and expanded edition, Beck, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-406-47543-4 , pp. 509-512.
  2. ^ Ordinance against violent criminals of December 5, 1939, RGBl. I p. 2378
  3. ^ Karl Michaelis : The extraordinary resumption of legally concluded proceedings in the practice of the Reichsgericht 1941–1945 . In: Ralf Dreier / Wolfgang Sellert (eds.), Law and Justice in the "Third Reich" , Frankfurt / M. 1989, pp. 278-282.
  4. ^ Friedrich Karl Kaul : History of the Imperial Court . Volume 4, 1933-1945. Akademie-Verlag, 1971. pp. 196-202.
  5. ↑ Max Domarus: Hitler - Reden und Proklamationen , Würzburg 1963, Vol. 2, p. 1874.
  6. ^ Speech by Günter Hirsch on the 50th anniversary of the establishment of the Federal Court of Justice on October 6, 2000