Hans Dahs (lawyer, 1904)

Hans Dahs sen. (* February 4, 1904 in Bonn ; † May 1, 1972 ibid) was a German lawyer . He represented Chancellor Adenauer and one of his closest advisers in the SPIEGEL-Schmeißer trials in 1952, the manufacturer's son Ernst Klönne in the trial of the massacre in the Arnsberg Forest in 1957/58 and the entrepreneur Hermann Wirtz in the Contergan scandal in 1962/63.

Life

After studying law, Hans Dahs passed both state exams. He received his doctorate from the University of Bonn as Dr. jur. and established himself as a lawyer in Bonn in 1929. He was one of the most famous German defense lawyers . In 1953 he became an honorary professor for civil law and civil procedural law at Bonn University. In 1954, he and his former trainee Konrad Redeker founded a law firm that today operates as the Redeker Sellner Dahs partnership . He was one of the defenders in the trial of the massacre in the Arnsberg Forest in 1957/58. Dahs managed to downplay Ernst Klönne's considerable guilt for the killings in Warstein, Suttrop and Eversberg, in which 208 slave laborers and 2 children were murdered in the final phase of World War II.

Hans Dahs represented Hermann Wirtz , the founder of Grünenthal GmbH, in the Contergan scandal . Wirth, like the managing directors of the pharmaceutical company, had transferred considerable property and real estate assets to close relatives in 1962 when investigations were already underway. After the Aachen public prosecutor Dr. Havertz had disclosed the exact dates of the asset transfers to the press, Dahs filed a complaint against him in which he not only questioned his "professional and human aptitude" for conducting such a procedure, but also incorrectly presented it as if the guardianship court had the asset transfers in 1962 were classified as harmless in terms of bankruptcy protection.

From the end of the 1940s until his death, Dahs was chairman of the criminal law committee of the German Bar Association and the criminal law committee of the Federal Bar Association . He had been a member of the German Lawyers' Association since 1946 . In 1954, he was the only lawyer appointed to the Great Criminal Law Commission of the Federal Ministry of Justice . He is a member of the “Association Internationale de Droit Pénal” as well as the board of trustees of the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law in Freiburg .

The Hans-Dahs-Plakette is the highest distinction of the German legal profession and is awarded by the German Lawyers' Association to lawyers who have rendered outstanding services both to the legal profession and to their connection to science.

His son Hans Dahs joined the Redeker Sellner Dahs law firm in 1964 .

Fonts

• Defense Attorney's Handbook. Otto Schmidt publishing house, Cologne 1969.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Hans Dahs on munzinger.de, accessed on March 24, 2013.
2. ↑ LTO: Journalists in court (part 2): Adenauer on the run, Augstein in court . In: Legal Tribune Online . ( lto.de [accessed on November 19, 2018]).
3. ↑ Westfalenpost 1/1958, January 1, 1958.
4. ↑ Jens Hahnwald, Peter Bürger, Georg D. Heidingsfelder: Atonement Cross Meschede: The mass murders of forced laborers in the Sauerland during the final phase of World War II and the history of a difficult commemoration . Books on Demand, November 30, 2016.
5. ↑ CRIME: The killers are among us . In: Der Spiegel . tape 50 , December 11, 1957 ( spiegel.de [accessed November 20, 2018]).
6. ^ CONTERGAN: Bill without Wirtz . In: Der Spiegel . tape February 8 , 1963 ( spiegel.de [accessed November 19, 2018]).
7. ^ Review by Heinrich Ackermann in Die Zeit . Retrieved March 24, 2013.