Georg Dahm

Georg Dahm (born January 10, 1904 in Altona , † July 30, 1963 in Kiel ) was a German criminal lawyer and international lawyer . In addition to Friedrich Schaffstein , he is considered to be one of the most prominent representatives of National Socialist criminal law.

Life and scientific work up to the National Socialist seizure of power

Georg Dahm was born in the then independent Altona. His father was a lawyer and notary. After graduating from the Christianeum there, he studied law in Tübingen , Hamburg and Kiel . In 1925 he passed the first state examination in law. In the same year Dahm joined the SPD . He received his doctorate in 1927 with the legal dissertation perpetration and participation in the official draft of a General German Criminal Code: A critical contribution to the teaching of participation as a problem of legislation . Dahm completed his habilitation in 1930 in Heidelberg with Gustav Radbruch with a fundamental legal history thesis on medieval Italian criminal law .

Dahm then became known to a wider legal public through the pamphlet "Liberal or authoritarian criminal law", which he wrote together with Friedrich Schaffstein at the turn of the year 1932/33 . In this paper, the two young criminal lawyers advocated an anti-liberal and authoritarian criminal law, which should be based solely on deterrence (through harsh sanctions ), but not on the special preventive educational ideas of Franz von Liszt's "modern school" (see theories of criminal purpose ). 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 national movement .

Entanglement in the judicial policy of the Third Reich

Georg Dahm in Kiel

In 1933 Georg Dahm was appointed to Kiel because he was close to National Socialist ideas. He should renew the law faculty, legal training and law in the National Socialist sense. As a full professor of criminal law at the Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, Dahm took over the professorship of the recently expelled committed democrat and Hermann Kantorowicz, branded as Jewish . On May 4, 1933, Dahm joined the NSDAP and in November the SA . From 1935 to 1937 he was the rector of Kiel University. Dahm was a pioneer in the persecution of Jews at the university. So he arranged for the relegation of Jewish students. He also blocked the doctorate of Jewish scientists in Kiel, even before the relevant decrees of the Ministry of Science from Berlin were available, for example with the student of geology Daniel Wirtz in 1936. Since 1933 he was also a member of the official National Socialist Criminal Law Commission, whose task it was to codify a new National Socialist penal code.

Member of the Kiel School

From Kiel, Dahm worked together with Friedrich Schaffstein, who was also appointed there in 1935, as the main criminal representative of the so-called Kiel School (also known as the “Kiel direction”) of law. The Kiel School, to which besides Georg Dahm and Friedrich Schaffstein also belonged Karl Larenz , Franz Wieacker and Ernst Rudolf Huber , endeavored to redesign and reinterpret all basic legal terms in a National Socialist “folkish” sense. This included the exclusion of Jews and Democrats , the elimination of regulations of the liberal constitutional state and the propagation of the Führer principle .

Georg Dahm developed the theory of the " honor punishment " - known from the Middle Ages - and a "thought of treason" that permeates all criminal law: the offender becomes fundamentally dishonorable through the act and must be expelled from the community. In all crimes there is also an element of betrayal. In the worst case, this betrayal would have to be atoned for by " laying peace ". Dahm here explicitly took up old Germanic legal ideas . He turned against the - in his opinion characterized by an "unhealthy" and rationalistic separation thinking - previous criminal law dogmatics. A National Socialist criminal law must be " popular " and pictorial. The rationalistic rules of interpretation of traditional dogmatics are to be replaced by a “ holistic view of essence ”. The criminal law theory of Dahm was criticized in the Nazi state, for example by the criminal lawyer Erich Schwinge , who characterized Dahm's ideas as criminal “ irrationalism ”.

Dahm in Leipzig, Strasbourg and Berlin

Georg Dahm left Kiel in 1939 to become a professor in Leipzig , then professor and deputy rector of the University of Strasbourg . After the conquest of Strasbourg by the Allies and the flight of the German occupiers, Dahm finally came to Berlin in 1944 as a lecturer . Dahm also worked as a judge at a special court .

The normative offender type

In Leipzig, Georg Dahm developed the "doctrine of the normative offender type" which he had already founded during his time in Kiel. According to this doctrine, for example, a “thief” is not everyone who takes away someone else's movable property - according to Section 242 of the Criminal Code - but only someone who is “a thief by nature”. Dahm had already expressed these thoughts during his time in Kiel. At that time, however, they had only served him as a schema of interpretation in an explicitly National Socialist sense (which could also be used to extend the punishment), he now emphasized above all the punishment-limiting potential of his doctrine of perpetrators. It is unclear to what extent Dahm's gradual turning away from National Socialism can be interpreted in this turnaround. His doctrine of the types of offenders influenced, among other things, the 1941 amendment to the murder offense, § 211 StGB, which since then (until today) begins with the words "The murderer will".

After 1945

After 1945, Georg Dahm was initially not allowed to hold a university teaching post in Germany in the course of denazification . After initially working as a lawyer, he went to Pakistan in 1951 , where he contributed to the expansion of the law faculty at Dhaka University as dean until 1955 . At the same time, Georg Dahm discovered in the post-war period an interest in international law that had not yet emerged in his previous works and was recalled to the University of Kiel in 1955 as a full professor of international law . During this time he wrote, among other things, a three-volume textbook on international law, which is still regarded as an important standard work.

Dahm completely revised his book German Law , published in 1944 . He removed the explicitly National Socialist passages (e.g. the justification of violent measures against Jews and Democrats). This new version then appeared in 1951 under the title German Law with the subtitle The historical and dogmatic foundations of current law , which could only be seen on the inside of the book. Like its predecessor from 1944, this book is a basic work that introduces all areas of law and was specially designed for law students. However, even with this new conception, Dahm was unable to really break away from his past. A passage from the second edition of this work illustrates Dahm's still ambivalent attitude: Overall - Dahm summed up in 1963 - it was not yet time to make a final assessment of National Socialism:

“It is not yet time to talk about National Socialism. [...]. Excessive overestimation was followed by excessive rejection and degradation [...]. [...] Neither one nor the other way of looking at things seems appropriate to us. "

Dahm further glossed over the arbitrary justice of the National Socialists by claiming that the judges had not ruled wrongly from 1933 after abandoning the principles of a democratic constitutional state - for example using the view of the " healthy public feeling ", which Dahm himself still used in 1944 as an important assessment criterion for the Conviction of criminal offenses. On the contrary, they had observed the barriers that “the legislature” - from 1933 that was Adolf Hitler - “with full awareness” - imposed on them. In addition, Dahm claimed that the Nuremberg Trials - i.e. the conviction of his former superiors for crimes against humanity and war crimes - had contradicted the rules of a constitutional state on essential points (the murder of the Jews is not mentioned in this context, nor are the National Socialist attacks on the countries of Europe). Germany had long been bound by international treaties to the principles of international law, violations of which were accused in Nuremberg. Dahm went on to explain that for reasons of the non-retroactivity and the requirement of certainty, even denazification was contrary to the rule of law.

Georg Dahm stopped working as a criminal lawyer after 1945.

Fonts

• Offender and participation in the official draft of a General German Criminal Code: A Critical Contribution to the Doctrine of Participation as a Legislative Problem , Breslau 1927.
• The criminal law of Italy in the late Middle Ages , Berlin and Leipzig 1931.
• Liberal or authoritarian criminal law , Hamburg 1933 (together with Friedrich Schaffstein ).
• Treason and crime. In: Journal for the entire political science 95 (1935), pp. 283-310.
• National Socialist and Fascist criminal law . Junker & Dünnhaupt, Berlin 1935 (Was placed on the list of literature to be segregated in the Soviet occupation zone after the end of the Second World War .).
• Crime and Facts. In: Karl Larenz , Georg Dahm et al. (Eds.): Basic questions of the new jurisprudence , Berlin 1935, pp. 62–107.
• Community and Criminal Law. Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, Hamburg 1935 (Speech on taking over the rectorate in Kiel in 1935. Was placed on the list of literature to be sorted out in the GDR .)
• The acquittal judgment in criminal proceedings. German legal and economic-scientific publishing company, Berlin 1936 (= people and law , vol. 2).
• Contemporary questions in criminal law. Festschrift for the 60th birthday of Count Wenzeslaus Gleispach . Together with Wilhelm Gallas , Friedrich Schaffstein, Erich Schinnerer, Karl Siegert and Leopold Zimmerl, Berlin 1936 (Dahm is represented with the article The protection of honor of the community .).
• Method and system of the new criminal law . 2 papers together with Friedrich Schaffstein, Berlin 1937.
• The type of offender in criminal law. In: Festschrift for Heinrich Siber , Leipzig 1940.
• Atonement, protection and purification in the new German criminal law. In: German Law (DR) 1944, p. 2 ff.
• German law . Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, Hamburg 1944 (= basics of law and economics, jurisprudence , A). (This book contains a description of the new National Socialist law, including the legally justified exclusion of "Jews". In the GDR it was placed on the list of literature to be segregated.)
• German law. The historical and dogmatic foundations of applicable law . 1st edition, Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 1951 (Another revised edition appeared in 1963).
• International law . 3 vol., Stuttgart 1958–1961, de Gruyter, 2002 .

literature

• 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 Verlag, 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-Verl.-Ges., Baden-Baden 1992, ISBN 3-7890-2452-X , pp. 37-70.
• Ewald Grothe : Between History and Law. German constitutional historiography 1900–1970 . Oldenbourg, Munich 2005 (= Ordnungssysteme , Vol. 16), ISBN 3-486-57784-0 .
• Michael Grüttner : Biographical lexicon on National Socialist science policy. Synchron, Heidelberg 2004, ISBN 3-935025-68-8 , p. 37.
• Friedrich Schaffstein : Memories of Georg Dahm . In: Jahrbuch der Juristische Zeitgeschichte 7 (2005/06), pp. 173–202.
• 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 History Series , Vol. 192), Lang, Frankfurt a. M. 1999, ISBN 3-631-34170-9 (also Munich, Univ., Diss., 1998).

Web links

• Literature by and about Georg Dahm in the catalog of the German National Library
• Georg Dahm in the professorial catalog of the University of Leipzig

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} biography
2. ↑ http://www.uni-leipzig.de/unigeschichte/professorenkatalog/leipzig/Dahm_598 Biography in the professorial catalog of the University of Leipzig.
3. ↑ Gerhard Paul , Miriam Gillis-Carlebach (ed.): Menorah and swastika. On the history of the Jews in and from Schleswig-Holstein, Lübeck and Altona (1918–1998). Wacholtz, Neumünster 1998, ISBN 3-529-06149-2 , p. 241 f.
4. ↑ Ewald Grothe : Between history and law. German constitutional historiography 1900–1970 . Oldenbourg, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-486-57784-0 , pp. 181 f., 185 f.
5. ↑ A second edition appeared in 1963.
6. ^ Georg Dahm: German law. 2nd edition, Stuttgart 1963, p. 268.
7. ^ German law. The historical and dogmatic foundations of applicable law. Stuttgart 1951, p. 618.
8. ^ German law. Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, Hamburg 1944, p. 97 f.
9. ↑ List on polunbi.de.
10. ↑ ^{a b} list on polunbi.de.