Georg Froeschmann

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Georg Fröschmann (born August 18, 1882 ; † 1959 ) was a German lawyer . In the Nuremberg war crimes trials he defended Joachim von Ribbentrop , Viktor Brack , Karl Mummenthey , Richard Hildebrandt and Gottlob Berger . He also defended SS men who had been convicted in the Dachau trials . For them he initiated a “general action”. Fröschmann was a member of the Heidelberg Juristenkreis and the silent help for prisoners of war and internees .

Life

Fröschmann had been a lawyer in Nuremberg since 1906 and took part in the First World War as a volunteer . After the war he was a member of the Nuremberg city council for the DVP . Fröschmann belonged to the right wing of the DVP and in 1924 founded the city council faction “Volksgemeinschaft Schwarz-Weiß-Rot” as a bourgeois- folk- national collective movement. In 1925 an attempt to overthrow the left-liberal Lord Mayor Hermann Luppe and install Fröschmann in his place failed . Fröschmann had applied for a solution to the service contract with Luppe because he was pursuing "black-red-gold-Marxist politics". The Luppe biographer Hermann Hanschel describes the application as "legally untenable". It had "evidently only served demonstrative and agitational purposes" and was supposed to "paste up the first cracks" that had appeared in Fröschmann's parliamentary group after a change in the rules of procedure. Fröschmann's city council faction fell out and had little influence until it broke up in 1929. Fröschmann's subsequent candidacy as a city councilor for the DVP failed in the same year.

Fröschmann was a member of the Corps Bavaria Erlangen and a veterans organization. In 1933 he transferred to the Stahlhelm, Bund der Frontsoldaten , and a year later he was transferred to the SA with the Stahlhelm . He belonged to SA Reserve I and he was given the management of a squad in the Nuremberg SAR storm 23/14. In 1941 he was promoted to SA storm leader. The Nazi Party , he joined the 1937th After the Second World War, rumors circulated among the Nuremberg lawyers that Fröschmann had actively participated in the destruction during the November pogrom in 1938. Fröschmann could not prove this in his arbitration chamber proceedings . Nor did Froschmann succeed in proving his innocence. During the Second World War, Fröschmann worked as a clerk and adjutant in Military District I from 1939 to 1944 .

After the war Fröschmann worked again as a lawyer. He was initially hired by Ribbentrop's wife Anneliese von Ribbentrop as an additional defense attorney and worked as Ribbentrop's assistant defender in the Nuremberg trial against the main war criminals . He also defended the physician process the co-organizer of the Nazi euthanasia Viktor Brack , in the Pohl Trial Karl Mumme They , in rusha trial the Higher SS and Police Chief Richard Hildebrandt and in Wilhelmstrasse process the chief of SS main office Gottlob Berger . In his defense, Fröschmann portrayed Brack as an idealist who, for ethical reasons, organized the T4 campaign to relieve the severely disabled from their suffering. For Gottlob Berger, Fröschmann made a radical plea in which he invoked the fight against communism and Bolshevism as world-destructive ideas and apologized for the Waffen-SS "as an elite organization, an anti-Bolshevik fighting force of the German people". He saw the attack on Poland and the attack on the Soviet Union justified by anti-Bolshevism and as a preventive war . He presented an apologetics of the values ​​of the Waffen SS .

Fröschmann's statements, submissions and memoranda were made available to the American journalist Freda Utley by Hellmut Becker in addition to his own and those of Otto Kranzbühler . Utley took over these notes essentially without comment in her book The High Cost of Vengeance , the German translation of which was sold over 50,000 times by 1951.

Fröschmann also took over the defenses of SS people who were in the Landsberg war crimes prison . He initiated a “general action” for them and did lobby work claiming that there had been abuse in the Dachau internment camp . The American Simpson Commission could not determine this in October 1948. Subsequently, Fröschmann's collaboration with the Ohlendorf defender Rudolf Aschenauer intensified . Together they opened an office in Nuremberg in May 1949 on the premises of Caritas and with financial support from both churches. In the joint cooperation, however, conflicts developed, and the Landsberg inmates did not want to agree to an overall mandate. Fröschmann's "general action" failed.

Fröschmann was one of the founding members of the silent help for prisoners of war and internees and the Heidelberg legal circle . He advised Helene Elisabeth von Isenburg on legal issues.

Fonts

  • Fraud in illegal legal transactions, inaugural dissertation ... by Georg Froeschmann ,. R. Noske printing house, Borna-Leipzig 1906.

literature

  • Hubert Seliger: Political lawyers? The defenders of the Nuremberg trials . Nomos, Baden-Baden 2016.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Hubert Seliger: Political lawyers? The defenders of the Nuremberg trials . Nomos, Baden-Baden 2016, p. 60 f.
  2. ^ Hermann Hanschel: Lord Mayor Hermann Luppe. Nuremberg local politics in the Weimar Republic . At the same time: University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Philos. Fak., Diss., 1975. Association for the history of the city of Nuremberg, Nuremberg 1977, ISBN 3-87191-028-7 , (Nürnberger Forschungen; Volume 21), pp. 235, 239.
  3. ↑ Hubert Seliger: Political Lawyers? The defenders of the Nuremberg trials . Nomos, Baden-Baden 2016, p. 61.
  4. ^ Paul Weindling: Nazi Medicine and the Nuremberg Trials: From Medical Warcrimes to Informed Consent . Palgrave Macmillan, Houndmills 2004, pp. 164, 254.
  5. ↑ Hubert Seliger: Political Lawyers? The defenders of the Nuremberg trials . Nomos, Baden-Baden 2016, pp. 367-370, cited above. 367.
personal data
SURNAME Froschmann, Georg
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Froeschmann Georg
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German lawyer
DATE OF BIRTH August 18, 1882
DATE OF DEATH 1959