Gottfried Kuhnt

Gottfried Kuhnt (born June 25, 1884 in Jena , † November 30, 1967 in Hamburg ) was a German politician ( CDU ). He was President of the Higher Regional Court and Minister of Justice of Schleswig-Holstein .

Life

Kuhnt, son of the professor of ophthalmology Hermann Kuhnt , studied law in Bonn from 1904, where he became a member of the Corps Rhenania . In 1910 he joined the judicial service as a court assessor. In 1913 Kuhnt received his doctorate as Dr. jur. with work Enforcement in the rights of the installment buyer and the furniture lender . In 1916 he became a public prosecutor at the Cologne Regional Court.

In the Weimar Republic, Kuhnt was one of the supporters of the young democracy - actually rather untypical for a lawyer. He switched to the Prussian Ministry of Justice and rose to Ministerialrat under Justice Minister Hugo von Zehnhoff , who belonged to the center . In 1926, Kuhnt became Prussia's deputy authorized representative at the Reichsrat . In 1927, at the age of 43, he took over the position of President of the Schleswig-Holstein Higher Regional Court based in Kiel . Kuhnt tried to defend democracy against attacks by the National Socialists and Communists. From 1926 until its merger into the German State Party in 1930 he was a member of the DDP . Kuhnt was also a member of the Republican Club of Kiel, which also included Ferdinand Tönnies and other democrats.

This made Kuhnt an avowed opponent of the National Socialists, who had long been demanding his dismissal and enforced it on April 7, 1933 with the help of the Law on Civil Servants passed on that day . Kuhnt left Kiel, held office for a short time as Senate President at the Düsseldorf Higher Regional Court and was soon retired. After the Second World War , he was reappointed President of the Schleswig-Holstein Higher Regional Court with seat in Kiel by the British military government in 1945 and held the office until December 1, 1946. On December 2, 1946, Prime Minister Theodor Steltzer appointed him the first Minister of Justice of Schleswig-Holstein. He held this office until April 19, 1947. On this date, the Steltzer cabinet was voted out and replaced by an SPD government under Hermann Lüdemann . On May 2, 1947, Kuhnt was again President of the OLG. The OLG was relocated to Schleswig in 1948 and Kuhnt remained its president until June 30, 1952.

MP

From December 1946 to April 1947 Kuhnt belonged to the second appointed state parliament of Schleswig-Holstein .

Honors

• 1952: Great Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany

Web links

• Gottfried Kuhnt in the state parliament information system Schleswig-Holstein

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Klaus-Detlef Godau-Schüttke: I only served the law. The "renazification" of the Schleswig-Holstein judiciary after 1945. Nomos-Verlagsgesellschaft, Baden-Baden 1993. Page 29ff.