Friedrich-Wilhelm Geier

Friedrich-Wilhelm Geier (born January 6, 1903 in Glatz , district of Glatz ; † April 13, 1965 in Karlsruhe ) was a German lawyer and from 1953 until his death president of various criminal panels of the Federal Court of Justice .

Life

Childhood, study time, professional years and Nazi time

Geier was born in 1903 as the son of the locomotive driver Josef Geier and his wife Agnes Schmohel in Glatz, Lower Silesia . In his hometown he attended the Catholic elementary school from 1909 to 1913 and the Catholic grammar school from 1913 to 1922. He then studied law at the University of Breslau and took his first state examination in early 1926. In the same year he received his doctorate in law in Breslau with a thesis on "The methods of interpreting the law of the Reichsgericht" . During his studies he was also involved in the old Breslau country team Glacia.

He completed his legal preparatory service from 1926 to 1929 in Glatz and Breslau. In November 1929 he passed the second state examination at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin . After completing his legal training, he entered the Prussian judicial service at the end of 1929 and over the next few years worked as a court assessor and judge in various Upper and Lower Silesian cities. From 1931 to 1932 he also worked as a faculty assistant in the field of commercial law at the University of Wroclaw. In 1934 he was appointed to the district court advisor in Waldenburg .

During the Nazi era , Geier held the post of " Wehrmacht judge ", which later became relevant in the trial against Otto John. He took part in the attack on Poland , on France and the Soviet Union , most recently as lieutenant and regimental adjutant. In 1942 he was promoted to the higher regional judge at the higher regional court in Katowice , but could not exercise the office because of his military service.

Career in post-war Germany

After the war ended, he moved to Hamburg, where he was initially appointed to the regional court in 1946 . In the Hanseatic city, after two and a half years, there was also a reunion with his wife and two sons, who had been expelled from Silesia . This was followed by brief judgeships at the Bergedorf Court of Justice and, from the end of 1947, as a senior judge at the Supreme Court of Justice in Hamm . From 1948 he was a member of the Cologne-based Supreme Court for the British Zone .

In 1950 he was appointed judge at the Federal Court of Justice and three years later he was promoted to President of the Senate. At first he headed the 5th criminal senate located in Berlin . In 1954 he was given the chairmanship of the newly founded 6th Criminal Senate, which from 1956 on was named the dissolved 3rd Criminal Senate. This Senate had the first instance jurisdiction for state security offenses , so that Geier chaired some sensational trials in the young Federal Republic, including the court proceedings against Viktor Agartz and Otto John . Its dominance earned the panel the name "Vulture Senate". From 1958 until his death he presided over the 1st criminal senate . In this function he dealt with the revision requests by Vera Brühne and Johann Ferbach and the politicians convicted in the Bavarian casino affair.

Geier was one of the editors of the major commentary on the Code of Criminal Procedure , founded by Ewald Löwe and Werner Rosenberg , which is regularly updated to this day. He also worked on the editorial team of the Deutsche Richterzeitung . From 1960 he was head of the Association of Federal Judges and Federal Prosecutors at the BGH, and he was also a member of the full board and the presidium of the German Association of Judges .

literature

• Reinhard Schiffers: Between civil liberty and state protection. Restoration and revision of the political criminal law in the Federal Republic of Germany 1949–1951. Droste Verlag, Düsseldorf 1989, ISBN 3-7700-5154-8 .
• Karl Schindler: That was their life: important counters from four centuries. Marx-Verlag, Leimen / Heidelberg 1975, pp. 185-189.
• Friedrich Wilhelm Geier †. In: Deutsche Richterzeitung. May 1965, p. 171.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Lexicon of Political Criminal Trials
2. ^ Schiffers: Between civil liberty and state protection. Restoration and revision of the political criminal law in the Federal Republic of Germany 1949–1951. P. 300.