Gerhard Lassar

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Several important points are not proven: early recognition as a specialist after dissertation, will to reform administrative law (who says, in which direction), the matter with the suicide was published in which edition of the FAZ - With best regards, Kriddl Please write me something. 12:01 pm, Jul 28, 2016 (CEST)

Gerhard Oskar Lassar (born February 16, 1888 in Berlin ; † January 6, 1936 there ) was a German lawyer .

Apprenticeship and university lecturer in Berlin

Stumbling block in front of the Hamburg University

Gerhard Lassar was a son of the dermatologist Oskar Lassar and his wife Emma. After graduating from the Wilhelm-Gymnasium in Hamburg , he studied law at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau and the University of Berlin and in the meantime did the one-year voluntary service in the Guard Cuirassier regiment in 1908/09 . In 1910 he applied to the Paul Schultze Foundation with “The contractual penalty according to the German Civil Code ” and received a grant for this. In 1911 he passed the first state examination in law .

Lassar stayed at the Berlin University and conducted research with Gerhard Anschütz during his legal clerkship . From August 3, 1914, he fought as a soldier during the First World War . After an injury, he was given convalescence leave and, in the meantime, submitted his doctoral thesis "The Basic Concepts of Prussian Right of Way" to Heinrich Triepel in April 1918 . The military service ended on November 13, 1918. The habilitation with Triepel on "The Reimbursement Claim in Administrative and Financial Law " followed two years later. Both works were published as books in 1919 and 1921 respectively. The writings brought Lassar an early reputation in the professional world and showed that he wanted to reform public law .

Afterwards Lassar taught administrative, economic , tax and criminal law as a private lecturer and lecturer in Berlin. He spent a semester at the University of Münster . In 1924 he received a call from the Berlin University as an extraordinary associate professor . In addition, from 1921 to 1923 he worked as a volunteer for a year in the Reich Ministry of Economics and, for a fee, as a research assistant in the Reich Ministry of Finance .

University professor in Hamburg

Stumbling block in Harvestehude

Lassar married the trained singer Margarete Küller and in 1922 adopted the orphan Herwarth (* 1916). In April 1925 the family moved to Hamburg , where Lassar took over a newly established chair for public law at the university there until 1933 . Kurt Perels and Rudolf Laun were among Lassar's colleagues, who lived in Harvestehude . At the University of Hamburg he taught a special part of administrative law , labor and tax law . He developed English law into his specialty. In 1926 and 1928, thanks to grants from the Reich Ministry of Justice , he spent a long time in Great Britain for research purposes .

During his time in Hamburg, Lassar researched and published extensively. He wrote articles for yearbooks, commented on general police law and dealt with the competencies of the Reich and the Länder in the “Handbuch des Deutschen Staatsrechts” in 1930. Lassar participated intensively in considerations on the reform of the empire and the reform of studies for lawyers. He edited the administrative archive and the Reichsverwaltungsblatt and worked with Bill Drews on a new edition of the “Administrative Laws for Prussia”. From 1926 to 1933 he was the director of studies at the Hamburg Administrative Academy.

In 1930 Lassar was offered a chair for public law at the University of Greifswald . The University of Hamburg responded with the suggestion that the previously extraordinary professorship should be increased. Lassar did not accept either offer. He rejected the salary increase in Hamburg because he considered it to be irresponsible due to the economic circumstances.

Lassar, who cooperated with Mayor Carl Petersen on the reform of the empire , was a member of the DStP and had maintained a close friendship with Hans von Dohnanyi since the mid-1920s , publicly took a stand against emerging radical and polarizing tendencies and the National Socialists in the early 1930s . On December 5, 1930, he gave a lecture for the legal department of the university on reforms of legal studies and the requirements that were to be placed on prospective civil servants. He said that Germany threatened to be divided and called for the constitution of the Weimar Republic and its democratic principle to be seen as a unifying element. He emphatically demanded that people with National Socialist convictions should exercise legal professions, but that they should not be employed by the state.

In January and February 1933, Lassar lectured on “Constitution and Constitutional Reform ” at four public events in the second largest lecture hall in the main university building . Since the National Socialists classified him as a “non- Aryan ” after the seizure of power , Lassar faced dismissal in the summer semester of 1933 on the basis of the law to restore the civil service . During a lecture on labor law in July of the same year, his doctoral student Arnold Köster organized a solidarity rally, which did not help: in September 1933, the National Socialists resigned Lassar “to simplify administration”, but de facto racially motivated, at the end of the year. In doing so, they did not apply a statutory derogation that could have delayed the forced retirement due to multiple awards as an officer during the First World War.

Forced retirement and suicide

Lassar then went to Berlin, where he had no prospect of a new job. In 1935 he met his friend Harold Laski in England and stayed for some time with his former doctoral student and court trainee Köster. Both advised him to leave the German Reich permanently. Even though he might have been able to get a temporary job in England, Lassar poisoned himself in early 1936. At this point he must have known that he was protecting his wife and adopted son, who were considered "Aryans", from further measures by the National Socialists . In order for Margarete Lassar to receive a widow's pension, a family doctor friend diagnosed her with fish poisoning.

The adopted son Herwarth Lassar later did military service as a medical doctor in the Wehrmacht . After graduating as Dr. med. In 1944 in Berlin, he left Germany after 1945 and emigrated to the USA.

memories

Obituaries from the 1950s and 1960s said that Lassar had died after a short, serious illness or from polio . Arnold Köster first made the suicide known in 1979 with an article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . More extensive publications on this were later published.

In front of the main building of the University of Hamburg and on his former home in Harvestehude there are two stumbling blocks that are reminiscent of Gerhard Lassar.

literature

• Rainer Nicolaysen: Lassar, Gerhard . In: Franklin Kopitzsch, Dirk Brietzke (Hrsg.): Hamburgische Biographie . tape 6 . Wallstein, Göttingen 2012, ISBN 978-3-8353-1025-4 , p. 181-183 .