Friedrich Schaffstein

Friedrich Schaffstein (born July 28, 1905 in Göttingen ; † November 8, 2001 there ) was a German criminal lawyer and legal historian . Alongside Georg Dahm , Friedrich Schaffstein is considered to be one of the most exposed representatives of National Socialist criminal law.

Life and Scientific Work

Origin, studies and first publications

Friedrich Schaffstein's father, Carl Schaffstein (1863–1938), Dr. phil. der Mathematik, number theorist, was a private scholar in Göttingen . Friedrich had two younger brothers. After graduation in 1924 he studied at the Universities of Göttingen and Innsbruck law . In 1928 he was at Robert von Hippel in Göttingen with the dissertation Treatment of guilt species in the foreign criminal law since 1908. Dr. jur. PhD . He also completed his habilitation in 1930 with Robert von Hippel with a legal history work that is still regarded as significant today, in which he dealt with the common law precursors of the modern system of crimes.

He then became known to a wider legal public through the pamphlet Liberales or Authoritarian Criminal Law , which was written together with Georg Dahm around the turn of the year 1932/33 . In this pamphlet, the two young criminal lawyers advocated anti-liberal and authoritarian criminal law, which should be based solely on retaliation and deterrence (through harsh sanctions), but not on the special preventive educational ideas of Franz von Liszt's “modern school” . In particular, authoritarian criminal law has methodologically turned away from individualism of any intellectual-historical character and turned to values ​​that are beyond the individual. In this work, the authors did not yet explicitly acknowledge National Socialism , but saw themselves as part of a broader, overall völkisch movement .

Entanglement in the jurisprudence of the Third Reich

Shortly after the National Socialist " seizure of power ", Friedrich Schaffstein then explicitly committed himself to National Socialism. In 1933 he received a call to the University of Leipzig , from where he moved to Kiel in 1935 . In 1937 he joined the NSDAP . He headed the subcommittee for juvenile criminal law at the Academy for German Law .

In addition to Dahm, Schaffstein was the second main criminal representative of the so-called Kiel School (also known as: "Kieler Direction") of law. The "Kiel School", to which Karl Larenz , Franz Wieacker and Ernst Rudolf Huber also belonged, tried hard a redesign and reinterpretation of all basic legal concepts in a National Socialist and Volkish sense. After he had initially belonged to the “Kiel School” “only mentally”, Schaffstein was officially appointed to Kiel in 1935.

Schaffstein contributed to the theory formation of the "Kiel School" in three ways:

1. through his conception of a "political criminal law science"
2. through his doctrine of crime as a breach of duty
3. through its contributions to the founded by Georg Dahm mind stätertypenlehre.

According to Schaffstein's view at the time, there is no apolitical way of doing science . Rather, every science is based on certain fundamental political views. The pre-National Socialist criminal law doctrine, wrongly titled as apolitical, was by no means apolitical, but was based on the now "overcome" political principles of an individualistic and rationalistic age. In this respect, consequently, Schaffstein demanded an open commitment to the "new" criminal law doctrine of National Socialism. In the light of the National Socialist worldview , political criminal law studies should not regard the crime as a violation of legal rights , but as a violation of duty towards the national community . The systematic distinction between “illegality” and “guilt” carried out by traditional criminal law should be abandoned and combined in the overarching concept of “material illegality”.

Schaffstein further concretized the normative doctrine of conviction offenders designed by Dahm by explicitly distinguishing this “new” criminal law from the criminal law of the criminal law school Franz von Liszt . The perpetrator should not, as Franz von Liszt demanded, be rationally and purposefully recorded, but should be recorded on the basis of a “holistic and concrete view of the essence”. Franz von Liszt's doctrine of the types of offenders has also been overcome ideologically and - here Schaffstein expresses himself entirely in line with his concept of political criminal law - precisely because of its "rationalistic and utilitarian " attitude to be rejected.

Schaffstein's views - like those of his colleague Dahm in Kiel - had an influence on the criminal law discourse of the Third Reich that should not be underestimated. Most controversial were his theses on replacing the term “legal asset” with the concept “breach of duty” and his suggestion that a National Socialist criminal law should not distinguish between illegality and guilt. Schaffstein's views were strictly rejected by the two Marburg criminal lawyers Erich Schwinge and Leopold Zimmerl , who classified and criticized him as a representative of criminal irrationalism in 1937/38 (see above all Erich Schwinge's work listed below). Following this criticism, Schaffstein relativized some of the theories he had worked out before 1937 or spoke of having only made a shift in emphasis.

Schaffstein lived and taught during the Second World War from 1941 at the University of Strasbourg , where he also headed the Institute for Criminal Law and was dean .

After 1945

For reasons of denazification , it was initially not possible for Schaffstein to get another chair at a German law faculty . It was not until 1954 that he was appointed to the University of Göttingen , where he taught until his retirement in 1969. As part of an investigation into the history of the faculty, the legal historian Eva Schumann placed Karl Michaelis in a phase of re-Nazification that began in 1954, during which the Göttingen legal faculty received numerous appeals to former members of the Kiel School.

In 1955 he was elected a full member of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences . At that time, Schaffstein was primarily concerned with Wilhelm von Humboldt and with legal history studies on European criminal law at the time of humanism . Furthermore, Schaffstein advanced to become one of the most prominent representatives of German juvenile criminal law in the post-war period . His textbook juvenile criminal law. A systematic presentation had fourteen editions by 2002 and became a classic in the relevant legal training literature.

Towards the end of his life, Schaffstein increasingly regretted his involvement in Nazi legal doctrine and wrote self-critically in 1965: "The war and the crimes of Auschwitz grew out of the same roots ."

Works

• The treatment of types of debt in foreign criminal law since 1908 , Breslau 1928.
• The General Lessons of Crime as Developed by the Science of Common Criminal Law , Berlin 1930.
• Liberal or authoritarian criminal law , Hamburg 1933 (together with Georg Dahm).
• On the problem of teleological concept formation in criminal law , Leipzig 1934.
• Political criminal law , Hamburg 1934.
• The crime as a breach of duty . In: Karl Larenz (Ed.): Basic questions of the new jurisprudence , Berlin 1935, pp. 108–142.
• Wilhelm von Humboldt. A picture of life , Frankfurt a. M. 1952.
• European criminal law studies in the age of humanism , Göttingen 1954.
• Juvenile criminal law. A systematic introduction , Stuttgart 1959 (14th edition 2002).

literature

• Werner Beulke: In memoriam Friedrich Schaffstein . In: Monthly magazine for criminology and criminal law reform 85 (2002), pp. 81–83.
• Christoph Cornelißen / Carsten Mish (ed.): Science at the limit. The University of Kiel under National Socialism (= communications from the Society for Kiel City History , vol. 86). Klartext, Essen 2009, ISBN 978-3-8375-0240-4 .
• Jörn Eckert : What was the Kiel School? In: Franz Jürgen Säcker (Hrsg.): Law and legal theory in National Socialism. Nomos-Verlag, Baden-Baden 1992, ISBN 3-7890-2452-X , pp. 37-70.
• Gerald Grünwald u. a. (Ed.): Festschrift for Friedrich Schaffstein for his 70th birthday on July 28, 1975. Göttingen 1975.
• Manfred Maiwald:  Schaffstein, Friedrich. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 22, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-428-11203-2 , p. 541 f. ( Digitized version ).
• Erich Schwinge : Irrationalism and the holistic view in German jurisprudence. Bonn 1938 (contemporary dispute).
• Jan Telp: Weeding and Treason. For the discussion of punitive purposes and terms of crime in the Third Reich (= legal historical series , vol. 192). Lang, Frankfurt a. M. 1999, ISBN 3-631-34170-9 (also Munich, Univ., Diss., 1998).

Web links

• Literature by and about Friedrich Schaffstein in the catalog of the German National Library
• Friedrich Schaffstein in the professorial catalog of the University of Leipzig

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Ernst Klee: The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 525 f.
2. ^ Eva Schumann: The Göttingen Law and Political Science Faculty 1933–1955 . In this. (Ed.): Continuities and caesuras. Jurisprudence and lawyers in the »Third Reich« and in the post-war period. Göttingen 2008, pp. 65–121.
3. ^ List of members . In: Yearbook of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences . tape 2000 . Göttingen 2001, p. 13 .
4. ^ Friedrich Schaffstein: The juvenile delinquency in the industrial affluent society. In: Monthly magazine for criminology and criminal law reform 48 (1965), no. 2, pp. 53–67, here p. 67.