Fritz Werner (judge)

Fritz Werner (born May 4, 1906 in Stettin , † December 26, 1969 in Hanover ) was a German judge and university professor. From 1958 until his death in 1969 he was President of the Federal Administrative Court and from 1964 a full professor at the Free University of Berlin . He embodied the rare case of the president of a federal supreme court who was also a full professor.

Life

Born in Stettin as the son of a bank clerk , Werner attended the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Realgymnasium in his hometown until he graduated in 1924 and then did an apprenticeship as a forwarding agent . In 1926 he became managing director of the Pomeranian regional association of the Association for Germanness Abroad ; The state chairman was August Hahne , the Szczecin City School Councilor . In 1927 Werner studied law in Berlin, Kiel, Frankfurt / Main and Greifswald and in 1934 at the University of Greifswald in Erich Molitor with a treatise on the collective agreement and tariff regulations for Dr. jur. PhD. In the years 1932–1936 he was an assistant in Greifswald with Arnold Köttgen, among others . He was particularly interested in public law.

Werner was already a member of the SA and the NSDAP before 1933 , so he had the honorary title of "Old Party Member " and after 1933 was appointed senior SA leader. After that, Werner first became a court assessor in Greifswald and Kassel, where he was appointed local court advisor in 1939. After taking part in the Second World War from the beginning , Werner became a captain and battalion commander in Soviet captivity, from which he was released in 1947 and returned to Kassel from the Soviet occupation zone. In 1949 he became a district judge there. In 1950, in line with his academic interests, he was appointed as a judge at the newly established Higher Administrative Court for the states of Lower Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein in Lüneburg , where he was Senate Chairman from 1952 and Vice President from 1955. From 1951 he became a member of the editorial team of the German Administrative Gazette . From 1958 he was President of the Federal Administrative Court , where he was Chairman of the 1st Senate.

Under Werner's chairmanship, the 1st Senate negotiated in December 1962 the application for a ban against the association of those persecuted by the Nazi regime - the Association of Antifascists , which the federal government had made in October 1959.

The New Statesman commented sharply on the proceedings under Werner's chairmanship and the associate judge Eugen Herig (member of the NSDAP since 1933, later also a member of the SS):

Putting the VVN on trial shows very bad taste, but then appointing a Nazi judge and SA member as chairman is absolutely unbelievable ... Well, if Adenauer is the representative of people who suffered in concentration camps, wants to punish absolutely, in order to determine her guilt, would have to find a judge somewhere in his kingdom who was not a Nazi himself.

The court canceled the date in the prohibition proceedings without setting a new one. Thus the application for a ban had failed. The reason stated:

“The question arises whether a possible finding that the respondent is an association whose activities are directed against the constitutional order is sufficient in the present case to justify the request for a ban. The idea of ​​atonement on which the same constitutional order is based, the realization of which is one of the foremost tasks of the Federal Republic, requires a weighing up of whether a ban with the inextricably linked penal sanction may be issued against an organization of the persecuted. "

- Federal Administrative Court : Order of December 5, 1962, Az .: BVerwG IA 20.59

This supreme court procedure was controversial at the time and caused a sensation, because it highlighted the problem of the location of the idea of ​​atonement for National Socialist injustice in the Federal German constitutional order in connection with the tolerance concept of the constitutional order also addressed in the prohibition of Article 9 (2) of the Basic Law . This “unorthodox supreme court decision”, which Helmut Ridder described as the “domestication of the state of emergency from the moral approach”, did not find any resonance in the discussion on constitutional law at the time. On the part of the VVN-BdA, it is assumed that the trial had burst because of Werner's Nazi past, which the secretary of the VVN Lower Saxony, August Baumgarte , had made public during the hearing.

Fritz Werner had been honorary professor at the University of Göttingen since 1956 and was appointed full professor for constitutional law and politics at the Free University of Berlin in 1964. He held advanced training courses at the German University of Administrative Sciences in Speyer .

Werner shaped the view of administrative law as concrete constitutional law. A large number of his publications dealt with basic legal questions of his time, for example with problems of the separation of powers, judicial independence and the role of administrative jurisdiction, but also with the topic of “law and justice”, often against a historical and legal philosophical background.

Fonts (selection)

• Law and judgment in our time. Speeches, lectures, articles 1948–1969 , edited by Karl August Bettermann and Carl Hermann Ule , Cologne / Berlin / Bonn / Munich 1971. ISBN 3-452-17359-3 .
• On the relationship between general legal clauses and judicial law , Karlsruhe 1966.
• On trends in the development of law and court in our time , Karlsruhe 1965.
• Law and Tolerance , Tübingen 1963.
• The problem of the judge state , Berlin 1960.
• Is it advisable to codify the general part of administrative law? (Expert opinion for the 43rd German Lawyers' Association ), Tübingen 1960.
• Basic information on the judge's indictment , 1950.
• On the history of the Chamber Court in Berlin, 1968.
• On Goethe's work in administration, DVBl. 1949, pp. 421–424.
• Georg Büchner's drama “Danton's Death” and the Problem of the Revolution, 1952.
• Sport and Law, 1968.
• School, State and Law, 1957.
• Collective agreement and collective bargaining regulations, dissertation (Greifswald), Stettin 1934.

literature

• Fritz Werner , in: Internationales Biographisches Archiv 17/1970 of April 13, 1970, in the Munzinger archive ( beginning of article freely available)
• Horst Sendler: Fritz Werner as a reminder. In: Neue Zeitschrift für Verwaltungsrecht (NVwZ), 5th year 1986, issue 5, p. 366 f.
• Hans Joachim Becker: Fritz Werner - President of the Federal Administrative Court from 1958 to 1969 . In: Yearbook of Public Law of the Present (JöR) 36 (1987), p. 105 ff.
• Eckhard Wendt: Stettiner Lebensbilder (= publications of the Historical Commission for Pomerania . Series V, Volume 40). Böhlau, Cologne / Weimar / Vienna 2004, ISBN 3-412-09404-8 , pp. 483-485.

Web links

• Literature by and about Fritz Werner in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Willy Hundertmark / Hendrik Bunke: Memories of a resistant life. Bremen 1997, p. 93.
2. ↑ cit. after Victor Grossmann: Traditions and an almost forgotten bankruptcy. In: Rotfuchs , January 2020, p. 4.
3. ↑ ^{a b} Helmut Ridder: The social order of the Basic Law: Guide to the basic rights of a democratic constitution . Westdeutscher Verlag, Opladen 1975, p. 161.
4. ↑ Hans Joachim Becker: Fritz Werner - President of the Federal Administrative Court from 1959 to 1969 , In: Yearbook of Public Law of the Present NF 36 (1987), pp. 105–120, here p. 113 f.
5. ↑ Hans Joachim Becker: Fritz Werner - President of the Federal Administrative Court from 1959 to 1969 , In: Yearbook of Public Law of the Present NF 36 (1987), pp. 105–120, here p. 114.
6. ↑ Hans Coppi: 60 Years Association of the Persecuted of the Nazi Regime, in: Antifaschistisches Infoblatt No. 77, Issue 4 2007 of December 13, 2007 ( online ). Max Oppenheimer : From the prisoner committee to the anti-fascist union: The path of the VVN . Röderberg, Frankfurt / M. 1972, p. 43.
7. ^ Fritz Werner: Administrative law as a concrete constitutional law. In: DVBl . 1959, pp. 527 to 533 (manuscript of a lecture from 1959).