Gebrüder Götze
The brothers Max (* 3. January 1891 in Köpenick ; † 30th June 1938 in Plötzensee ) and Walter Götze (* 14. November 1902 in Oberschöneweide ; † 30th June 1938 in Plötzensee) was an in car robbery case specialist Berliner criminals duo. The criminal case was the reason for the law against road theft by means of car traps (Reichsautofallgesetz) of June 22, 1938, which the National Socialists demonstratively passed retrospectively in a departure from the principles of the rule of law to sharpen the condemnation of the perpetrators. The law went down in jurisprudence and criminal history as Lex Götze (or: lex Goetze ).
crime
At the beginning of the 1930s, the streets on the Kleiner Stern in Berlin's Grunewald were a popular nighttime meeting place for lovers in their cars. On the night of November 1 and 2, 1934, two masked men attacked several parked cars and robbed the occupants at gunpoint. More robberies of this kind took place in the spring of 1935. After the number of robberies had increased rapidly in June 1935 and victims reported to the police almost every day, Reich Propaganda Minister Goebbels forbade the media to report on the series of robberies, as they had the capital in the year before the Olympics Could bring gambling into disrepute. When there were exchanges of fire with injured people during some of the attacks, the police formed the special commission “Grunewald”, unsuccessfully used “decoys” and had the Grunewald combed. She was only able to secure cartridge cases from the perpetrators' weapons. The perpetrators changed turf and looked for their victims at the other end of town; In July 1935 the first attack took place in the forest near Grünau . Around the Müggelsee and in the forest between Grünau and Schmöckwitz , more couples were robbed. In the meantime, the perpetrators were no longer satisfied with the cash and valuables of lovers; they raided gas stations and robbed the cash registers of the S-Bahn stations in Grunewald , Hirschgarten and Rahnsdorf .
A little later, in the south-eastern outskirts of the capital, the construction of nocturnal car traps began, in which delivery vehicles were stopped by branches and beams and robbed. On November 2, 1935, an attack on the night bus to Köpenick failed . In order to prevent their intended victims from escaping, the traps were later built from tensioned wire ropes and ultimately from felled trees. On December 23, 1936, an SS-Oberführer was robbed on the Berlin - Küstrin trunk road . On January 12, 1937 a convoy of several vehicles with armed Nazi functionaries drove into a tree trap on the road between Hangelsberg and Neu Hartmannsdorf . While the first car managed to escape, the following ones got stuck on the obstacle. The inmates, including an SS leader, a Gauamtsleiter, an NSDAP district leader and a regimental commander from Fürstenwalde / Spree were robbed without any resistance. The “Auto Traps” special commission that had been formed was initially unsuccessful in its search for the perpetrators, and a connection with the robbery of lovers was not considered. Since the attacks with the help of tree traps had become known to many drivers, the perpetrators looked for new methods of bringing vehicles to a stop. A stuffed wallet that was left in the street seemed a suitable lure. They buried one of these after an earlier attack near Grünau.
On the evening of March 24, 1937, the corpse of the police chief Artur Herrmann (1903–1937), who had been on duty as a bicycle patrol , was found in the forest at Adlergestell between Grünau and Schmöckwitz . The investigation of the homicide commission under Ernst Gennat revealed that Herrmann had stopped a pedestrian with a money bag and was immediately fatally injured by a shot in the left half of the chest. Before he died, Herrmann had followed the perpetrator who had fled about 30 meters into the forest and fired a shot from his service weapon. With the help of several reports on the deadly projectile, Gennat recognized that it came from the weapon also used in the car trap attacks. A little later another murder occurred in Grunewald; the 20-year-old bricklayer Bruno Lis was shot on March 29, 1937 when he defended himself and his girlfriend in a robbery. Since the murder weapon turned out to be the same as in the murder of patrol officer Herrmann, the connection between the two crime series, which had previously been assigned to different groups of perpetrators, was recognized. In addition, the police had known since the spring of 1937 that one of the perpetrators had a disfigured finger.
The police received the decisive clue about the perpetrators on March 5, 1938 from an innkeeper from Schöneweide . This indicated that the unemployed transport worker Walter Götze and his brother, the bricklayer Max Götze, whom they had previously suspected of attacking the Hirschgarten S-Bahn station , were generously handling large sums of money. Max Götze, who gave the honest husband to the police, was initially not involved in the series of crimes.
His brother Walter could not be found at first. He was arrested on March 18, 1938 after a theft in a garden colony and identified as one of the perpetrators by his finger. When he was interrogated, Walter Götze made a comprehensive confession, which enabled his brother Max to be arrested as an accomplice.
Lex Gotze
After his confession of the two murders, Walter Götze was certain of the death penalty . Max Götze had to expect a long prison sentence. The proceedings against the Götze brothers were opened on June 13, 1938 at Special Court II of the Berlin Regional Court . The prosecution charged them with robbery in 157 cases with a total loot of 13,000 Reichsmarks , 16 cases of grievous bodily harm and two murders.
For the National Socialist state , however, there was no question that Max Götze would also have to be executed . After prosecutor Henkel State Secretary of the Ministry of Justice Roland Freisler had informed that the legal lent little security for a death penalty for Max Götze, was a fast-tracked at the 22 June 1938 law against street robbery by car traps created (Reichsautobahnen case law) that opposes the rule of law ( retroactivity ) came into effect retrospectively on January 1, 1936. It consisted of a paragraph with the wording "Anyone who sets a car trap with robbery intent will be punished with death."
During the trial it turned out that Max Götze could have been sentenced to death without Lex Götze. In a robbery at the Hirschgarten train station, he shot a uniformed railway official during his “official activity”, thereby violating the law of 13 October 1933 to ensure legal peace .
On June 24, 1938, Walter Götze was charged with two murders, one of which was a unit of aggravated robbery and one for crimes against Section 1 (1) No. 1 of the Law on Legal Peace, the collective crime against the law against road theft using car traps in Unity of offense with aggravated robbery and attempted aggravated robbery in eight cases and sentenced to the death penalty eleven times for aggravated robbery and predatory extortion. In addition, he was sentenced to 15 years in prison for further serious robbery in eight cases, attempted murder and serious bodily harm. A nine-fold death sentence and a 15-year prison sentence were pronounced against Max Götze on the same day.
The two brothers were executed by guillotine on June 30, 1938 in Plötzensee .
Aftermath
The Allied Control Council repealed the National Socialist law against road theft using car traps on January 30, 1946. In a modified form, the offense was added to the German Criminal Code on December 19, 1952 as Section 316a StGB .
Cinematic processing
The case formed the basis for Erich Engels ' crime film In the Name of the People from 1939.
See also
literature
- Matthias Niedzwicki: The law against street robbery by means of car traps of June 22, 1938 and § 316a StGB in ZJS 4/2008, pp. 272–273 ( PDF ; 65 kB).
- Ulrich Zander: A gangster couple as a thorn in the side of the Nazis . In: Freie Presse , June 7, 2013, p. B4.
Primary sources
- Landesarchiv Berlin: A Pr.Br.Rep. 030-03 Central file for murder and teaching material collection online finding aid (PDF; 1.7 MB)
- No. 1979 Murder in Berlin, Schmöckwitz-Grünau, on March 24, 1937, victim: Police Sergeant Artur Herrmann (* October 25, 1903), perpetrator: Walter Götze (* November 14, 1902 in Oberschöneweide)
- No. 1737 and 1738: robbery, murder, robbery and theft in Berlin-Grünau and the surrounding area, between November 1934 and January 1938, victims: police sergeant Artur Herrmann (* 25.10.1903 † 24.03.1937) and worker Bruno Lis (* 02.02.1916 in Berlin † March 29, 1937), perpetrator: Transport worker Walter Götze (* November 14, 1902 in Oberschöneweide) and brother Maurer Max Götze (* January 3, 1891 in Köpenick), both sentenced to death
Web links
- Pictures of the brothers on nordkurier.de ( memento from June 26, 2013 in the web archive archive.today )
Individual evidence
- ↑ Detailed description of the Herrmann murder case by Michael Stricker: Last use. Police officers killed on duty in Berlin from 1918 to 2010 , Verlag für Polizeiwissenschaft, Frankfurt 2010, ISBN 3-86676-141-4 , (= series of publications by the German Society for Police History, Volume 11), pp. 120–122.
- ↑ Hitler, Gürtner, Seyß-Inquart: 199. Announcement of the Reich Governor in Austria, whereby the law against street robbery by means of car traps of June 22, 1938 is made known . In: Law Gazette for Austria . No. 67 , June 28, 1938, pp. 580 ( alex.onb.ac.at [accessed on February 26, 2015] “This law, which is announced in the Reichsgesetzblatt under I p. 651, is in force in Austria on June 24, 1938 with effect from January 1, 1936 kicked. ").
- ↑ See Matthias Niedzwicki: The law against street robbery by means of car traps of June 22, 1938 and § 316a StGB , p. 372.