Franz Gürtner

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Franz Gürtner (1938) with the gold party badge of the NSDAP (left breast).

Franz Gürtner (born August 26, 1881 in Regensburg , † January 29, 1941 in Berlin ) was a German politician ( DNVP , NSDAP ), who was Reich Justice Minister from 1932 until his death in 1941 .

Life

Gürtner was the son of the locomotive driver Franz Gürtner and Marie Gürtner, née Weinzierl. After high school in 1900 at the New School (now Albrecht Altdorfer-Gymnasium ) Regensburg, he studied in Munich law a scholarship from the Maximilianeum Foundation . After eight semesters, he passed his university examination in 1904. He interrupted his preparatory service for the Bavarian "state bankruptcy" to do his military service as a one-year volunteer with the 11th Infantry Regiment "von der Tann" . After his second state examination in 1908, he initially worked as an in-house counsel for a Munich brewery association. On October 1, 1909, he entered the civil service at the Bavarian Ministry of Justice and for the next five years mainly worked on personnel and examination matters. The work in the Ministry of Justice formed the knowledge and experience basis for his later position as a competent minister.

Until 1911 he was III. Public Prosecutor at the District Court of Munich I and was appointed judge at the District Court of Munich in January 1912 .

On August 7, 1914, Gürtner was drafted as a reserve officer for military service in the First World War with the 11th Infantry Regiment and was initially deployed on the Western Front. He rose to the position of deputy battalion leader and received the Iron Cross II. And I. Class and the Bavarian Order of Military Merit IV. Class with Swords. From September 1917 he took part with the Bavarian Infantry Battalion 702 in the Pascha II expeditionary force in Palestine . For this he received the Knight's Cross of the Royal House Order of Hohenzollern with Swords and the Iron Crescent . With the appointment as battalion commander on October 31, 1918, the day of the surrender of the Ottoman Empire, he led the battalion back to Constantinople and arrived on March 17, 1919 in Wilhelmshaven, where he was demobilized.

On April 11, 1919, Gürtner began his service as second public prosecutor at the Munich I district court. Four days earlier, the Soviet Republic had been proclaimed in Munich . In November 1919 he took the oath on the Bamberg constitution and in July 1920 on the Weimar constitution . In August 1920 he was appointed district court director and reappointed to the ministry. There he became (initially deputy) consultant for the pardon system, which was important at the time, as neither appeal nor retrial was possible against the judgments of the people's courts . His brother-in-law Dürr worked on the department for criminal law and criminal procedural law, the state of war and siege and the suppression of proceedings, for which Gürtner was an assistant. Gürtner was appointed Bavarian Justice Minister in August 1922 as a representative of the German national Bavarian Middle Party . In June 1932 appointed him Franz von Papen to the Reich Minister of Justice . He retained this office until his death in 1941.

In 1933 Gürtner was one of the founding members of the National Socialist Academy for German Law by Hans Frank .

In 1920 he married the evangelical Luise Stoffel , daughter of a lieutenant colonel; they had three sons. The sons were brought up Protestant after their mother.

Political activity

“State Emergency Defense Act”, signed by Gürtner
"Reichstag Fire Ordinance" signed by Gürtner

During his time as Minister of Justice, the judiciary in Bavaria was indulgent towards right-wing extremist political tendencies, which benefited Adolf Hitler in his 1924 trial at the Munich People's Court through early release from Landsberg correctional facility , the lifting of the ban on speaking and the re-admission of the NSDAP .

Gürtner's attempts, who only became a member of the NSDAP in 1937, to guarantee independence and the rule of law for the German judiciary after 1933, were doomed to failure. Protests against Gürtner's abuse and murders by the SA in concentration camps since 1933 were ineffective, but did not lead to his release. In 1935 Gürtner had also campaigned for the lawyers detained by the Gestapo who represented the widow of the Catholic politician and former head of the police department in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior, Erich Klausener , who was murdered in the political cleansing wave of the so-called Röhm Putsch , which contributed to her release from prison . Gürtner protested against the methods of the Secret State Police, which extracted confessions through torture; however, from 1935 onwards, his political influence became weaker and weaker. Since the beginning of the Second World War, the security service and the secret state police have been working independently of the state judicial system.

On Gürtners initiative was decided on 14 October 1936 by Hitler, the death penalty in Germany instead of the ax in the future with the guillotine to execute. In his function as Minister of Justice, he signed a large number of National Socialist acts of injustice in the form of statutes or ordinances. This includes the “ Reichstag Fire Ordinance ”, by which the civil rights of the Weimar Reich constitution were suspended and which served as the legal basis for the measures of the Gestapo , as well as the “ Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor ”, which regulates sexual acts by Jews and " Aryans " made a punishable offense (see " Rassenschande "). Furthermore, in 1934 he signed the Law on Measures of State Emergency Defense ("State Emergency Defense Law"), which subsequently attempted to legalize the murders in the so-called Röhm Putsch and meant the abolition of the separation of executive and legislative branches . He was also one of the signatories of the Second Ordinance for the Implementation of the Law on the Change of Family Names and First Names , in which Jews were forcibly given the discriminatory first name Israel or Sara .

Since January 30, 1937 Gürtner was the holder of the Golden Party Badge of the NSDAP .

By his order in 1937, the National Socialist People's Welfare was made available to the courts as an investigative aid. According to his press release, it should be "an aid to the administration of criminal justice and not to the accused." It also "helps to decide on the punishment or to order security proceedings or emasculation ...".

Thanks to his influence, Franz Gürtner managed to save Ricarda Huch and her son-in-law Franz Böhm , both of whom were critical of the National Socialist regime, from criminal proceedings. He succeeded in having the proceedings against them dropped after the annexation of Austria as part of an amnesty issued by Hitler .

Franz Gürtner only received official knowledge of a secret so-called “ Führer Decree ” from October 1939, which was backdated to September 1, 1939, in which doctors were authorized to commit euthanasia (see Action T4 and child euthanasia ). In addition, on August 16, 1941 - d. H. after Gürtner's death - also received a letter from Limburg Bishop Antonius Hilfrich , in which the sender pointed out the untenable legal assessment of the T4 campaign.

See also

Publications

  • with Roland Freisler : The new criminal law. Basic thoughts on escort. Berlin 1936.
  • Ed .: 200 years of service to law. Commemorative letter on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the Prussian Ministry of Justice. Berlin 1938.
  • Ed .: The coming German criminal proceedings. Report of the Official Criminal Procedure Commission. von Decker, Berlin 1938.

literature

Web links

Commons : Franz Gürtner  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Robert Volz: Empire Manual of German society . The handbook of personalities in words and pictures. Volume 1: A-K. Deutscher Wirtschaftsverlag, Berlin 1930, DNB 453960286 , p. 398.
  2. ↑ Cuno Horkenbach (Ed.): The German Empire from 1918 to today. Volume III, Verlag für Presse und Wirtschaft, Berlin 1933, p. 511.
  3. ^ The German Leader Lexicon 1934/1935. Berlin 1934, p. 516.
  4. ↑ The German newsreel (544/7/1941) reports on the state ceremony, who died on January 29, 1941 Minister of Justice Dr. Franz Gürtner in the mosaic hall of the New Reich Chancellery. Youtube. Retrieved October 8, 2014.
  5. ^ Hans Frank (ed.): Yearbook of the Academy for German Law, 1st year 1933/34. Schweitzer Verlag, Munich / Berlin / Leipzig, p. 254.
  6. ↑ Wolfram Selig in: Wolfgang Benz , Hermann Graml (ed.): Biographisches Lexikon zur Weimarer Republik. C. H. Beck, Munich 1988.
  7. ^ Robert Wistrich : Who was who in the Third Reich? Munich 1983.
  8. ↑ Executions in Plötzensee 1933–1945. Plötzensee Memorial , accessed December 12, 2010.
  9. ↑ Large Bavarian Biographical Encyclopedia. Volume 1, de Gruyter, Berlin 2005, p. 714.
  10. ^ Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945 . Second, updated edition. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2005, p. 209.
  11. ^ Klaus D. Patzwall : The Golden Party Badge and its honorary awards 1934-1944. Studies of the history of awards. Volume 4, Verlag Klaus D. Patzwall, Norderstedt 2004, ISBN 3-931533-50-6 , p. 70.
  12. ↑ German information no. 250, p. 2.
  13. ↑ Alexander Hollerbach : Streiflichter on the life and work of Franz Böhm. Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1989, p. 290.
  14. ↑ Jürgen Peter: The Nuremberg Doctors Trial as reflected in its processing based on the three document collections by Alexander Mitscherlich and Fred Mielke / Jürgen Peter . 2nd Edition. Münster 1998, p. 25.
  15. ↑ Wulf Steglich , Gerhard Kneuker: Encounters with euthanasia in Hadamar . Revised new edition Heimdall-Verlag, Rheine 2016, ISBN 978-3-939935-77-3 , p. 24 f. to Stw. "Reich Minister of Justice".
  16. ↑ Chapter I (pp. 9–83): Justice Minister under Hitler: the fate of the national conservative official Franz Gürtner ( reading sample ).
personal data
SURNAME Gürtner, Franz
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German lawyer, Minister of Justice during the time of National Socialism
DATE OF BIRTH August 26, 1881
PLACE OF BIRTH regensburg
DATE OF DEATH January 29, 1941
Place of death Berlin