Herbert Neubeck

Herbert Neubeck (born March 30, 1923 in Düsseldorf ; † April 21, 1943 in Plötzensee prison , Berlin) was a German / stateless apprentice pharmacist and a victim of Nazi war justice.

Life and activity

Neubeck's family left Germany in 1935 because of the repression to which they had been exposed due to their Jewish descent, as well as the communist sentiments of their parents, and moved to Belgium. After their emigration, the family's German citizenship was revoked, so that from then on they were stateless. The father, Hans Neudeck (born June 28, 1897 in Essen) died in 1940 of the consequences of an injury sustained in the Spanish Civil War , in which he participated as a member of the International Brigades, which sided with the Republicans against the fascist ones Armies under General Francisco Franco fought.

Neubeck began an apprenticeship as a pharmacist in Brussels . In May 1940 he was arrested by the Belgian police and taken to the French camp at St-Cyprien, where he was interned for a few weeks. After the French surrender he managed to return to Belgium. There he made - rather loosely - connections to a resistance group composed of Belgian partisans and political refugees from Germany, which turned against the German occupation of the country and against the Nazi system in general: The group carried out political education work among the German occupation forces and spread it anti-Nazi sticky notes and leaflets. Neubeck used his position as a pharmacist's apprentice to obtain potassium chloride , glycerine and iodine in preparation for acts of sabotage for the group that they wanted to use for the manufacture of explosives and incendiary materials. But there were no more actions with them.

After the leaders of the group to which Neubeck belonged, Kurt Garbarini and Hermann Geisen , were arrested in August 1941, he was also taken into custody on December 5, 1941.

After his transfer to Berlin, Neubeck was held in various prisons for almost a year and then charged before the 2nd Senate of the People's Court on charges of having committed preparation for high treason and treasonous favoring the enemy in occupied Belgium . At the hearing on February 2, 1943, the court found him guilty and sentenced him to death.

The verdict against Neubeck was based on complicated legal constructions, which the Spiegel cited in 1960 as a concise example of the "stupendous [...] compilations" on which many judgments of the People's Court were based Burdened, although he was not guilty of this offense due to the fact that he was not a German citizen and therefore could not actually be guilty of the criminal offenses that he was charged with, according to the technical definition of the same. Since there was also no evidence of his involvement in the actions marked as treason or the preparation thereof, so that even if he had been a citizen he should not have been convicted for lack of evidence according to the traditional legal opinion, the court resorted to one Another auxiliary construction: In the grounds of the judgment, the lack of tangible evidence of involvement in the highly treasonable and treasonable activities of his co-defendants was declared to be balanced by the succinct statement that the fact that Neubeck was not particularly actively involved in them should be explained from it was that he had the “peculiar lack of courage” of the “Jewish race” and that if he were not a Jew, he would have committed the corresponding acts. The fact that, out of cowardice, he did not commit crimes for which he had the necessary criminal disposition to commit, was not a reason for exculpation. In addition, it was asserted that even without evidence there could be no doubt about Neubeck's hatred of National Socialist Germany and his desire to destroy it, which was justified with the reference that this was "the inferior value of the Jewish race to all of the world "and so" caused his parents to emigrate ", which in turn must have resulted in hatred of the National Socialist state.

Neubecks execution - together with Geisen and Garbarini - by the guillotine was executed in the prison Berlin-Plötzensee on June 21 1943rd His accuser Bruchhaus was a public prosecutor in Wuppertal until the 1960s.

Neubeck's mother Anna (born June 20, 1900) and younger sister Marianne (born June 15, 1924) died in 1943 in the Auschwitz extermination camp.

In 1973, a metal plaque for Neubeck was inaugurated on Franz-Jacob-Strasse (corner of Karl-Lade-Strasse) in Berlin. This was stolen in 1996 and has been missing ever since. Since January 25, 2007, there have been four stumbling blocks in front of the house at Reisholzer Str. 26, which remind of Neubeck, his parents and his sister.

literature

• Karl Heinz Jahnke: Decisions. Youth in the Resistance 1933–1945 , 1970.
• Ders .: Youth in Resistance, 1933–1945 , 1985, pp. 103–107.
• Ders .: Young communists in the resistance struggle against Hitler's fascism , 1977.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Berlin memorial plaques .