Fritz Hartung (lawyer)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Fritz Hartung (born April 4, 1884 in Homberg , district of Kassel ; † May 14, 1973 in Göttingen ) was a German lawyer and, after 1945, a well-known commentator on criminal law and criminal procedure law in the Federal Republic.

Life

Fritz Hartung was the son of a deaf and dumb teacher in Homberg (Efze). In March 1903 he passed the Abitur at the Wilhelmsgymnasium Kassel with good grades. First he took up a degree in classical philology in Marburg. In the next semester he switched to law. In Marburg he heard Ludwig Enneccerus and Ludwig Traeger . During his studies in Marburg he was a member of the Germania Marburg fraternity, to which he remained lifelong. Reinhard Frank was one of his confederate brothers . After the fourth semester, he moved to Leipzig for one semester . There he heard Rudolph Sohm , Adolf Wach and Karl Binding . For the sixth semester he returned to Marburg and after the seventh semester at the end of January 1907 he passed the first state examination (“good”). He then began his service as a trainee lawyer at the Homberg District Court and began a doctoral thesis with Friedrich André . At the beginning of October 1907 he began his military service in the 114th Infantry Regiment in Constance. As a non-commissioned officer, he resigned and in October 1908 resumed his traineeship at the criminal chamber at the Kassel regional court. Shortly afterwards he had to take a break until autumn 1909 because of an illness that had dragged on from his military service. Then he went through the rest of the punishment and civil ward in Kassel. This was followed by the lawyer station and the second district court station in Homberg. The internship at the Kassel Higher Regional Court marked the end of the internship. There he worked under Karl Martin and Walter von Hagens . The second state examination passed in December 1912 (“good”) and became assessor in the same year. In April 1913 he became an unskilled worker for the legal advisors in the Reich Post Ministry . In Berlin he attended a seminar by Franz von Liszt for a while. He described these 1 ½ years as the happiest years of his life. In August 1914 he was drafted. During the First World War he was used in the 20th Infantry Regiment on the Western Front and in Serbia . On March 1, 1915, Fritz Hartung was appointed magistrate at the Frankfurt / M AG. This news reached him in the trenches on the Aisne. He held the rank of lieutenant in the reserve and was awarded the Iron Cross 1st Class. After an illness in 1916 ("gv Heimat") he was employed as an adjutant in the staff service from March 1917 and from October 1917 until the end of the war he was in the 7th Army stage inspection , where he finally became a deputy general staff officer. On December 18, 1918, he was demobilized in Treysa. On the New Year of 1919 he took up the position at the Frankfurt am Main District Court. After the war he became a lawyer at the Frankfurt Housing Office (April 1919 to May 1920). During the court holidays he became engaged to Else Stoffers, the youngest daughter of the city treasurer of Hameln, whom he married in January 1920 in Hameln. After the court holidays, Hartung was assigned to the Frankfurt Higher Regional Court as an assistant judge.

Ministerial Councilor in the Weimar Republic

In June 1920 Hartung became an unskilled worker in the Prussian Ministry of Justice , initially "for a few months as a holiday representative" according to the Ministry's letter in April. There he was assigned to the criminal department and worked on mercy cases. He met Albert Hellwig at the ministry , who was appointed at the same time, and became friends with him. In 1921 the age limit for civil servants was introduced. Therefore Hartung moved up to the referee for the criminal process, and the co-referee for the substantive criminal law. At the same time he was promoted to the higher judicial council and thus finally accepted into the ministry. In 1923 he became a ministerial advisor. He worked closely with the parallel criminal law department in the Reich Ministry of Justice, in which Erwin Bumke was ministerial director, and worked with the ministerial councilors Leopold Koffka , Wilhelm Kiesow (criminal procedural law) Leopold Schäfer (substantive criminal law) and with Wolfgang Mettgenberg (international criminal law). Hartung was involved in various laws and regulations: He was involved in the Youth Court Act of 1923. He rejected the Goldschmidt / Schiffer draft of 1919/20 (E GRSt), which led to the Emminger Novellas, and ensured that it was implemented in Prussia. As a result, he wrote the amendment to the Prussian Arbitration Rules in 1924. Until then, in Section 33, parallel to Section 380 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, the attempted atonement was only compulsory for insults, which only permitted the attempted atonement for bodily harm if the injured party wanted to first choose to go to the arbitrator. The novella written by Hartung extended the atonement to six crime groups. The newer Arbitration Acts build on this new version from 1924. He was editor and editor of the arbitration newspaper from 1926 to 1967. From 1924 to 1929 he was busy with criminal law reform. According to his statement, he was a supporter of the Liszt School (“ Marburg Program ”). Therefore, for the special preventive criminal theory with its penal purposes, security, reform and deterrence, which he saw as part of criminal law . From this time comes a lifelong acquaintance with Alfred Bozi , the father of the concept of rehabilitation . For the official draft of 1925 for a "general German penal code", which was introduced into the Reichstag in 1927 and discussed until 1930, the Introductory Act and the Penal Code. He worked on the criminal records ordinance passed in 1926. Together with Mettgenberg he drafted the German extradition law.

Reich judge from 1929 to 1945

On November 18, 1929, Hartung was named as a candidate for the Imperial Court in Leipzig by the Prussian Minister of Justice Hermann Schmidt (politician, 1880) , whose goal was “a targeted personnel policy in the democratic sense” . Shortly before, in August, he joined the Republican Association of Judges , and in September the DDP . After this "opportunistic commitment to democracy" was successful, he immediately resigned from the DDP and withdrew from the Republican Judges' Association in the spring of 1932. On December 1, 1929, he was appointed Reich judge. In 1930 the University of Münster awarded him an honorary doctorate. The University of Halle habilitated him in 1930 without submitting a thesis. From 1931 to 1933 Fritz Hartung was a private lecturer at the University of Halle, but the attempted appointment as honorary professor failed. In the autumn of 1933, those assigned to the IV Civil Senate renounced the Venia legendi . In 1934 he returned to the 3rd Criminal Senate of the Reich Court and was a member of the Senate until the end of 1945. In this function, Hartung was also responsible for the “ racial disgrace ” case law of the 3rd Criminal Senate. The “Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor” of September 15, 1935, was interpreted extensively by the 3rd Criminal Senate, without being forced to do so by the wording. He himself held the deputy chairmanship of the Senate. After 1945 he himself advocated the thesis that under the leadership of the President of the Reich Court, Erwin Bumke , the 3rd Criminal Senate "prevented worse things".

Rather, he said in 1971: "In the legal, especially criminal law area, the National Socialist regime ... brought progress of fundamental importance ..., improvements that have endured to this day and have become an integral part of criminal law".

According to Hartung's memory, in the case of the bathtub, he had ad hoc suggested the extreme expansion of the subjective doctrine of perpetration in order to save a young girl from the death penalty who had drowned her sister's newborn child at her insistence. The proposal was based on the unanimous decision of February 19, 1940.

post war period

In 1945 he went back to his hometown Homberg. At the beginning of August 1945 he was arrested by the American occupation forces. He was released from prison at the end of May 1946. A subsequent court proceedings in Fritzlar classified him as "exonerated". From the winter semester 1946/47 to the spring of 1948 he worked as a lecturer at the University of Marburg , until he was dismissed by the Liberation Ministry in Wiesbaden because of his membership in the NSDAP , that the arbitration chamber proceeded and ordered the dismissal. In his memoir, Hartung traces the cassation back to a Nazi propaganda article in the arbiter's newspaper which inadvertently bore his name. In May, he was convicted in a new panel trial. From February 1949 the state of Hesse granted him a pension advance of DM 275 net. From November 1951 he received a regular pension based on Article 131 of the Basic Law.

After 1949, Hartung was a commentator on criminal law and criminal procedure. Eberhard Schmidt and Hartung clashed because of the Göttingen scaling process . Schmidt took the view that the recognition of a physical confrontation as a sport fight was necessarily dependent on the assessment of the German Sports Confederation or another specialist organization. Hartung, on the other hand, took the traditional position.

At over 75 years of age, the federal government appointed him as an expert in its commission for the reform of criminal law , where he continued to work for years. Hartung was also significantly involved in founding the Association of German Arbitrators in 1950, of which he was appointed honorary chairman in 1952.

Organizational affiliation

Honors

  • Iron Cross 1st class in World War I
  • 1930 Doctorate from the University of Münster
  • April 20, 1938 Gold Loyalty Badge
  • January 30, 1945 War Merit Cross, 2nd class
  • 1963 Johann Stephan Pütter Medal from the University of Göttingen

editor

Works

  • Commentary on the Arbitration Rules 1st edition 1925.
  • Is the destination censorship punishable? (PDF; 7.3 MB). Legal opinion, Berlin 1955.
  • Criminal tax law: comment on d. Provisions d. 3rd part (Section I) d. Reich Tax Code, 2nd edition, Berlin, Frankfurt a. M. 1956.
  • Jurist under four realms [sic!], Cologne, Berlin, Bonn, Munich 1971.
  • Road traffic law; Commentary based on Johannes Floegel, edited in 8th to 16th editions by Fritz Hartung, later by Heinrich Jagusch and then Peter Hentschel, Munich 2009.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Obituary in the Arbitration Office newspaper (SchAZtg) Vol. 44 (1973), p. 113 ff.
  2. ↑ a b c Klaus-Detlev Godau-Schüttke : The Federal Court of Justice - Justice in Germany - , Berlin 2005, p. 49.
  3. ↑ Hartung was not chairman of the Senate, as can sometimes be read, for example in Dallinger NJW 1959, p. 618: "Hartung, who presided over a Senate for a long time ...".
  4. ^ Jurist under four realms, p. 123.
  5. ^ Fritz Hartung: " The" bathtub case " . A reminiscence ”, in: JZ 1954, p. 430 ff.
  6. Jump up ↑ "Thugs and Criminal Law", JZ 1954, 369.
  7. ↑ In his autobiography he says "that I had belonged to the SPD for a while in Frankfurt", Fritz Hartung: Jurist under four realms, Cologne, Berlin, Bonn, Munich 1971, p. 126; Günter Spendel's statement is based on this : Gustav Radbruch Complete Edition: Volume 18, Letters II: 1919–1949, 1995, p. 545. Kaul and Godau-Schüttke, who had access to the personnel file, know nothing about it.
  8. ↑ a b c Entry on Fritz Hartung in the Catalogus Professorum Halensis (accessed on July 28, 2015)

literature

  • Emil Böhmer : "Fritz Hartung 80 years old" . In: Juristentung 1964, p. 234.
  • Emil Böhmer: "Fritz Hartung †" . In: Juristenteitung 1973, p. 565.
  • Wilhelm Dallinger : “Reichsgerichtsrat a. D. Dr. hc Fritz Hartung 75 years old " , NJW 1959, p. 618.
  • Klaus-Detlev Godau-Schüttke : "The Federal Court of Justice - Justice in Germany -" , Berlin 2005, p. 49 f.
  • Klaus-Detlev Godau-Schüttke: “From denazification to renazification of the judiciary in West Germany” , in: forum historiae iuris (fhi) from June 6, 2001 (February 18, 2010).
  • Friedrich Karl Kaul , "History of the Reichsgericht, Volume IV (1933–1945)" , East Berlin 1971.
  • Richard Schmid : Review of "Jurist under four realms", KJ Heft 2/1973, p. 231 ff.
  • Erich Schmidt-Leichner: "Fritz Hartung †" , NJW 1973, p. 1171 f.
  • Josef Schafheutle : “Reichsgerichtsrat a. D. Dr. hc Fritz Hartung on his 80th birthday " , NJW 1964, p. 641 f.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Hartung, Fritz
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German lawyer
DATE OF BIRTH April 4, 1884
PLACE OF BIRTH Homberg , Kassel district
DATE OF DEATH May 14, 1973
Place of death Goettingen