Friedrich Döbig

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Friedrich Döbig during his testimony in the Nuremberg legal process on April 9, 1947

Friedrich August Döbig (born March 5, 1887 in Nördlingen ; † June 3, 1970 in Nuremberg ) was President of the Senate at the Reich Court and, after 1945, President of the Senate at the Nuremberg Higher Regional Court . He was a participant in the Berlin conference, at which high-ranking lawyers were informed about the ongoing T4 campaign in 1941 .

Life

The son of a master shoemaker passed his Abitur in 1906 at the grammar school near St. Anna in Augsburg . After studying law at the universities of Munich and Erlangen , he passed the first state examination in law in 1911. He was a trainee lawyer until 1914. From 1915 to 1918 he took part in the First World War, most recently in the rank of lieutenant in the reserve. He passed the second legal exam in 1920 with "good". In the same year he became a court assessor and in the middle of the year III. Public prosecutor in Augsburg . In 1922 he was seconded to the State Ministry of Justice . In 1923 he was promoted to the district court counselor, in 1925 to the first public prosecutor with continued use in the Ministry of Justice. In 1927 he was appointed chief magistrate in Sonthofen . In 1929 he became a district judge and again worked in the Ministry of Justice and seven months later became a senior government councilor. On New Year's Day 1933 he became a ministerial advisor . Döbig was a criminal law officer in the ministry in 1933/34. In the days of the June murders in 1934 , he tried to legalize the execution order against Ernst Röhm and the leadership of the SA , who were in prison in Munich-Stadelheim , through court martial . In the course of the " Gleichschaltung ", staff at the ministerial level had to be cut, and so on April 1, 1935, he came to Nuremberg as a higher regional judge . In July he became attorney general at the Nuremberg Higher Regional Court . Since he was responsible for the criminal investigation of National Socialist riots in Franconia (e.g. the pogrom in Gunzenhausen ), he later said that the Gauleitung in Franconia had resisted his appointment. On October 1, 1937, Döbig was appointed President of the Higher Regional Court in Nuremberg. On the occasion of his appointment, the NSDAP, Gau München-Oberbayern, Office for Civil Servants, judged him to be "an extremely pleasant superior, tactful and courteous towards subordinates. There are no concerns about his political reliability ”.

Backdated letter of authorization from Hitler for Action T4

In his capacity as President of the Higher Regional Court, Döbig took part in the meeting of the highest lawyers in the German Reich on April 23 and 24, 1941 in Berlin , at which Viktor Brack and Werner Heyde provided information about the "destruction of life unworthy of life" in the gas chambers of the T4 campaign .

During his term of office, Oswald Rothaugs was sentenced to death against the 68-year-old Jew Leo Katzenberger on March 14, 1942 for alleged “ racial disgrace under the Blood Protection Act in conjunction with the ordinance against public pests ”. The judgment played a role in the Nuremberg legal process after 1945 . Döbig testified after the end of the war as a witness in the trial against Rothaug and Rudolf Oeschey . During the trial, a communication from Oeschey from December 1942 to the deputy Gauleiter Holz about Döbig came up, in which many accusations were made against Döbig for taking no action against officials subordinate to him who did not carry out the measures against Jews and Poles. Oeschey defended himself by saying that these accusations had been copied from a letter that the Defendant Rothaug had presented to him. By submitting the report to Reich Minister of Justice Thierack in January 1943, Holz promoted the recall of Döbig. Some time later he was officially declared politically unreliable. Thereupon Döbig was appointed Senate President of the 4th Criminal Senate of the Reich Court on July 1, 1943 . Döbig saw in his transfer an intrigue of Rothaug, who exercised revenge for Döbig's attempts to promote Rothaug to the east. He stayed at the Reichsgericht until 1945. In April 1945 he was in Erlangen .

From November 1945 until the end of 1947 he was a construction worker in Nuremberg. In 1948, Döbig was classified in group V as exonerated in the court proceedings . On August 1, 1948, he came back to Nuremberg as a higher regional judge and 13 months later he became president of the senate at the higher regional court in Nuremberg. He retired in 1955. In 1965 Fritz Bauer applied for the preliminary investigation to be opened against the participants in the April 1941 conference. Therefore, Döbig had to face an interrogation because of alleged aiding and abetting mass murder by omission. He was released from prosecution on February 12, 1969 for an alleged permanent incapacity to stand trial.

Party membership

Honors

Fonts

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Ernst Klee: Das Personenlexikon zum Third Reich , Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 114; Lilla: Döbig, Friedrich , in: ders .: Minister of State, senior administrative officials and (NS) functionaries in Bavaria from 1918 to 1945, indicates the month of July.
  2. ^ Lothar Gruchmann : Justice in the Third Reich 1933-1940. Adaptation and submission in the Gürtner era , Munich 2001, p. 274 .
  3. ^ Lothar Gruchmann: Justice in the Third Reich 1933-1940. Adaptation and submission in the Gürtner era , Munich 2001, pp. 274, 403f.
  4. ↑ Ernst Klee : What they did - What they became. Doctors, lawyers and others involved in the murder of the sick or Jews , 12th edition, Frankfurt am Main 2004, p. 345.
  5. ↑ Christiane Kohl: The Jew and the Girl. A forbidden friendship in Nazi Germany , Hamburg, 1997, p. 288.
  6. ↑ Helmut Kramer : Higher Regional Court Presidents and General Public Prosecutors as Assistants in Nazi 'Euthanasia' - self-exoneration of the judiciary for participating in institutional murder , in: Kritische Justiz 17 (1984), no. 1, p. 33f. ( PDF ).
  7. ^ Gerhard Köbler : Juristen, [1] , accessed on February 18, 2012.
  8. ^ Ernst Klee: Das Personenlexikon zum Third Reich , Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 114
personal data
SURNAME Döbig, Friedrich
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Döbig, Friedrich August
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German Imperial Judge
DATE OF BIRTH March 5, 1887
PLACE OF BIRTH Nordlingen
DATE OF DEATH 3rd June 1970
Place of death Nuremberg