Günter Spendel

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Günter Spendel (born July 11, 1922 in Herne ; † June 4, 2009 ) was a German legal scholar who researched criminal law and justice during the Nazi era .

Life

Having in Frankfurt had gained the baccalaureate, he took in 1940 at the University of Frankfurt am Main the study of jurisprudence on. He was inspired to choose this subject by Gustav Radbruch's "Introduction to Law". For the summer semester of 1941 he moved to the University of Freiburg im Breisgau . There he studied with Fritz von Hippel , Adolf Schönke and Erik Wolf . Even during the rule of the National Socialists in Germany he sought contact with Gustav Radbruch, who was officially considered a non-person at the time. During the legal clerkship and still asAssessor he was shortly after the end of World War II involved the mentally ill in the legal fight the murder. He completed his habilitation on the “doctrine of punishment ” and in 1958 became a professor in Frankfurt am Main. In 1961 he was appointed to the chair for criminal law, criminal procedural law and criminal law auxiliary sciences at the Julius Maximilians University of Würzburg , which he held until his retirement in 1992.

On the occasion of his 70th birthday, a commemorative publication published by Manfred Seebode in his honor was published in 1992 .

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Günter Spendel published on criminal law; Among other things, he wrote comments on the perversion of the law in the Leipzig Commentary on the Criminal Code . He published biographies of lawyers, such as the nine biographies in his "Kriminalistenporträts" published in 2001, and edited several volumes of the complete edition of Gustav Radbruch's works. One of Spendel's main research subjects was the justice system in the so-called Third Reich. Spendel, with a minority among German law teachers, consistently opposed attempts to retrospectively attribute a legal quality to the acts of violence during the Nazi era.

In his collection of essays “For Reason and Law”, published in 2004, he dealt “with the analysis of shaping the present and the future in the light of reason and law in a past based partly on madness and / or injustice”. Among other things, he dealt in the essays with the delimitation of rationality as a prerequisite for a reasonable jurisprudence from irrationality, such as the emotional jurisprudence of the Nazi era, but also with the golden rule . In addition, he dealt in the collection with dealing with the Nazi injustice, but also dealing with the injustice of the GDR. Gerd Roellecke noted in a positive review that controversial questions were also discussed, such as whether the life of an individual, such as Hanns Martin Schleyer , can be sacrificed in the fight against terrorism or whether a Nazi doctor was authorized to kill a thousand mentally ill people if he could save several thousand. With regard to dealing with the perversion of the law in the unjust state, Roellecke also notes positively that Spendel did not orient himself to the current zeitgeist.

Works (selection)

  • For Reason and Law: Twelve Studies . Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2004, ISBN 3-16-148252-2
  • Criminal portraits: nine biographical miniatures . Asendorf 2001, ISBN 3-89182-077-1
  • Perversion of Law through Jurisprudence: 6 Criminal Law Studies . Verlag de Gruyter, Berlin 1984, ISBN 3-11-009940-3

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Festschrift for Günter Spendel on his 70th birthday on July 11, 1992 . Edited by Manfred Seebode, Berlin 1992, ISBN 3-11-012889-6
  2. ↑ Joachim Perels : The myth of coming to terms with the past , Die Zeit , January 26, 2006
  3. ^ Maria-Katharina Meyer : Reviews - Günter Spendel, For reason and law (PDF file; 81 kB). In: Journal for International Criminal Law Doctrine , 2008, p. 348
  4. ↑ Gerd Roellecke: We don't break, we bow , Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , June 25, 2004 (review of Für Vernunft und Recht )
personal data
SURNAME Spendel, Günter
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German lawyer
DATE OF BIRTH July 11, 1922
PLACE OF BIRTH Herne
DATE OF DEATH June 4, 2009