Globke trial

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Attorney General Josef Streit makes his plea, July 19, 1963.

The criminal proceedings against the head of the Federal Chancellery Hans Globke , which took place in July 1963 before the Supreme Court of the GDR , are referred to as the Globke trial . After a two-week trial, Globke was sentenced to life imprisonment on July 23, 1963 in absentia for his involvement in the anti-Semitic legislation of the Nazi regime as a ministerial advisor in the Reich Ministry of the Interior and commentator on the Nuremberg race laws .

Globke's role in National Socialism

Globke had a doctorate in law and during the entire Nazi regime in the Reich Ministry of the Interior, he was heavily involved in naming and race legislation, civil status and nationality law.

In the commentary on the Nuremberg Laws and the implementing ordinances drawn up for them with his participation, he had legally defined who was to be regarded as a Jew, to be identified as such and thus exposed to persecution, for example by the Eichmann department . In particular, the Reich Citizenship Act and the First Ordinance of November 14, 1935, which was issued for it, served as the formal legal basis for the systematic exclusion of the Jewish population from the so-called national body, as well as the Eleventh Ordinance on the Reich Citizenship Act of November 25, 1941 for the Wannsee Conference in January 1942 discussed murder of all European Jews.

He was also involved in the creation of other laws such as the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor of September 15, 1935, the Law for the Protection of the Hereditary Health of the German People of October 18, 1935, the Civil Status Act of November 3, 1937 and on 'Law on the change of surnames and first names' of January 5, 1938. According to the second implementing regulation for this law of August 17, 1938, male Jews had to use the middle name Israel and women the middle name Sara .

In his capacity as a senior administrative officer, Globke had also insisted on the strict interpretation of the Nuremberg Laws in various individual decisions on marriages, employment relationships or adoptions between "Reich citizens" and "Jews" and thus also contributed to the " Germanization " in the annexed areas of Eastern Europe .

Post war career

In 1945/1946 Globke was in the Allied internment camp in Hessisch Lichtenau. He was placed on a list of war criminals and questioned by the American prosecution as a witness in the Nuremberg trial of the main war criminals and in the Nuremberg follow-up trials, especially the Wilhelmstrasse trial . During one of these interrogations, he already cited that he had belonged to a resistance group during the Nazi era , but was unable to provide evidence or name other members of this group.

On the other hand, Globke is said to have maintained contacts with military and civilian resistance circles. He was an informant for the Berlin bishop Konrad Graf von Preysing and an accessory to the preparations for a coup d'état by Hitler’s opponents around Carl Friedrich Goerdeler and Ludwig Beck . According to the testimonies of Jakob Kaiser and Otto Lenz , Globke was earmarked for a senior ministerial post in an imperial government formed by Goerdeler in the event that the Nazi regime had been overthrown. However, there was never any evidence of Globke's later claim that the National Socialists wanted to arrest him in 1945, but that the advance of the Allies prevented them from doing so.

According to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and its agent Allen Welsh Dulles , Globke, as an alleged resister, was one of the German "crown jewels" from which a later German government was to be formed after the end of the war.

Globke worked on the reparation agreement in 1952 and in further economic aid for Israel in the early 1960s. In this context, Israel refrained from questioning Globke as a witness later in the Eichmann trial and Globke law enforcement at all.

At the beginning of the trial, Globke was State Secretary in the Federal Chancellery in Bonn and a close confidante of Konrad Adenauer . With his resignation in October 1963, Globke also left office.

The process

The function of the process

The negotiations were held in Globke's absence. The execution of sentences, especially in the GDR, was unrealistic from the start. The procedure therefore did not serve to find the law, but primarily had propaganda and historical-political functions. Since 1960, the GDR leadership had carried out a high-profile campaign against Globke, in which the aim was to increase one's own legitimacy vis-à-vis the local population and abroad.

Deputy criminal justice system

The judgment against Globke introduces the background and justification of the proceedings.

The path of a new Germany, which would never again pose a threat of war for other European peoples, required an honest approach to the past. This task was solved in the GDR in contrast to the Federal Republic, where leading Nazi ideologues like Theodor Oberländer and officers like Friedrich Foertsch, as heavily incriminated fascist criminals, were given high political positions. This group also includes Globke, who, despite all the publications about his crimes committed during the Nazi era, holds the key position of State Secretary in the Federal Chancellery. A judicial criminal procedure was never initiated in West Germany. That is why the organs of the GDR are now obliged to carry out this procedure on behalf of the entire German people. The former Federal Minister of Displacement, Theodor Oberländer, was sentenced to life imprisonment in absentia on April 29, 1960 .

After the Second World War, the two lines of German development were embodied on German soil in the two German states with opposing social and economic systems: in the Federal Republic the old Germany, whose existence under international law the GDR did not dispute, but in which the aims of the anti -Hitler coalition of 1945 had not been realized and therefore again endangered peace; in the GDR the legitimate German state that has drawn the lessons of German history, fulfills its obligations under international law from the Potsdam Agreement and which has built a new social order on the ruins of the past. This state has the historical and political legitimacy to bring the defendant Globke, one of the most active helpers to the Hitler government, to justice.

The court derived its jurisdiction - like the Jerusalem District Court in the Eichmann trial - from the principle of universal law , which provides for global jurisdiction of all courts for criminal offenses under international criminal law. In addition, Globke committed the accused as a German citizen predominantly at his place of employment in Berlin, i.e. on then and now German territory and is therefore subject to the penal powers of the GDR, one of the two successor states of the Third Reich.

Relation to the Eichmann trial

While the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, from which the name Globkes was deliberately excluded, served on the one hand to irrefutably prove the final solution to the Jewish question in all its phases to the world public in the interests of the victims and survivors , and on the other hand to unite the Israeli immigration society and To pacify, the Globke Trial in East Berlin shortly after the building of the Wall , the NATO exercise Fallex 62 and the Cuban Missile Crisis mainly served the ideological self-affirmation and demarcation of the GDR, which by its own definition was anti-fascist and therefore behind the inhuman Nazi past thought to have left himself. In this respect for the GDR had the controversial in the West " draw a line drawn" under the Nazi era. At the same time, the process also served to place the West German elites in an unbroken ideological and personal continuity with their fascist predecessors; in the GDR propaganda Globke was called the "Eichmann in Bonn".

The Eichmann trial focused on the practice of persecution, namely Adolf Eichmann's and the actual fate of the persecuted. The Globke trial, on the other hand, deals extensively with the legal basis of Nazi racial politics and Globke's role as a desk perpetrator in their creation and implementation. In the proceedings, in particular those instructions and orders were discussed that Eichmann had invoked to justify himself as a marginal figure and mere “recipient of orders”.

In contrast, even in the GDR, the process was not accompanied by any actual coming to terms with the past . The extent to which the GDR also made use of the former Nazi elite in its development phase and integrated them institutionally, namely into the National People's Army , has not yet been scientifically investigated.

The accusation

The legal basis for the process was the internationally recognized Nuremberg Principles , Article 6 of the London Statute for the International Military Tribunal of August 8, 1945 in conjunction with Article 5, Paragraph 1 of the Constitution of the German Democratic Republic of 1949 and Sections 211, 47 of in of the GDR at that time still valid Reich Criminal Code (crime of murder ).

In addition to numerous documents such as the Jäger report , tape recordings and films, a total of 59 witnesses from seven countries and numerous experts from the USSR , the People's Republic of Poland , Czechoslovakia and the GDR such as Charles Lederman and Ernst Engelberg were available to the Supreme Court .

Charles Palant from France, a member of the Ligue Internationale Contre le Racisme et l'Antisémitisme (LICRA), was among the co-plaintiffs .

The defence

Globke was defended by lawyer Friedrich Wolff .

The judgment

Globke was called "cold-hearted, dogged anti-Semite " because in complicity committed continuing war crimes and crimes against humanity in partial coincidence with murder lifelong prison convicted. The civil rights were denied him for life.

Since the matter had already been heard in the first instance before the highest court in the GDR, no appeal could be lodged. The judgment therefore became final without further ado . Globke lived outside the reach of the state organs of the GDR and did not serve the sentence.

Contemporary rating

In West Germany, the Globke trial was rated as a propaganda offensive by the GDR leadership to end the Globke era and to make it difficult for him to succeed with similarly burdened people.

The headline at the start of the trial in New Germany , the central organ of the SED , on July 9, 1963, however, read: “In the German state of peace and justice: World judgment over Globke”. The society for the protection of civil rights and human dignity describes the process up to the present day as a “criminal process which is subject to the highest requirements of the rule of law and is sufficient” and is used as an argument against the characterization of the GDR as an unjust state .

In 1972 the Globke trial was artistically adapted in the DEFA feature film Die Bilder des Zeugen Schattmann .

literature

Web links

Commons : Globke process  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ First ordinance to the Reich Citizenship Law of November 14, 1935, RGBl. l, 1333
  2. ^ Eleventh ordinance to the Reich Citizenship Act of November 25, 1941, RGBl. 1941, 722
  3. ↑ Detlef Winter: Hans-Maria Globke source collection, accessed on September 7, 2016.
  4. ↑ Blood Protection Act , RGBl. I, pp. 1146-1147
  5. ↑ Marriage Health Act , RGBl. 1933 I p. 529, 1935 p. 773, 1936 p. 119
  6. ↑ Personal Status Act , RGBl. I, p. 1146
  7. ↑ RGBl. P. 9
  8. ↑ RGBl. I, p. 1044
  9. ↑ Otto Köhler : Eichmann, Globke, Adenauer. CIA records: Why the Chancellor's right hand had to be spared . Friday June 16, 2006.
  10. ↑ Globke - An insignificant man . Der Spiegel , February 15, 1961.
  11. ↑ Affidavit by Jakob Kaiser, December 31, 1945. Affidavit by Otto Lenz, January 3, 1946. Declaration by Konrad Cardinal von Preysing, January 18, 1946. Printed in: Klaus Gotto (Ed.): Der Staatssekretär Adenauers. Personality and political work of Hans Globke. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1980, pp. 259-262, 266-267.
  12. ↑ Richard Herzinger : How Adenauer solved the Israeli ban Die Welt , March 7, 2015
  13. ↑ Klaus Wiegrefe : The curse of the evil deed. The fear of Adolf Eichmann. Der Spiegel , April 11, 2011
  14. ↑ Christine Axer: The processing of the Nazi past. Germany and Austria in comparison and in the mirror of the French public. Böhlau, Köln / Weimar / Wien 2011, ISBN 978-3-412-21343-5 , pp. 61 and 117 (accessed via De Gruyter Online).
  15. ↑ Christiaan F. Rüter : Judgment of the 1st Criminal Senate of the Supreme Court of the German Democratic Republic of July 23, 1963 GDR Justice and Nazi Crimes Vol. III, serial no. 1068, DJuNSV Vol. III p. 75
  16. ↑ Klaus Wiegrefe: The curse of the evil deed. The fear of Adolf Eichmann. Der Spiegel , April 11, 2011; Willi Winkler : Holocaust Trial: Adolf Eichmann. When Adenauer panicked. Süddeutsche Zeitung , March 29, 2011.
  17. ↑ Elizabeth Broerken: Nazi crimes - 65 years legal treatment in Israel. Zukunft-bendet-Erinnerung.de.
  18. ↑ Lisa Schoß: We don't need any tutoring! Representations of the Shoah in East German film using the example of 'Die Bilder des Zeugen Schattmann' (1972). Simon Wiesenthal Conference 2014. Prime Time Genocide - The Holocaust on TV. December 3 to 14, 2014, Funkhaus Wien, Studio 3, 1040 Vienna. YouTube , from min. 47:49.
  19. ↑ Marcel Fürstenau: Brown shadows. on Deutsche Welle, March 2, 2012
  20. ↑ Neues Deutschland from July 9, 1963 , headline on the front page
  21. ↑ Hans Bauer : The GDR was not an injustice state Contribution to the colloquium 60 years of the founding of the GDR , website of the Society for the Protection of Civil Rights and Human Dignity eV, accessed on September 12, 2016