Horst Pelckmann

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Horst Pelckmann (born January 27, 1904 in Berlin ; † March 10, 1975 ) was a German lawyer , notary and diplomat . He served as a defense attorney at the Nuremberg Trials .

Life

After completing his school career and passing his matriculation examination, Pelckmann completed a law degree at the University of Berlin, which he completed in 1928 with the first state examination in law and in 1932 with the second state examination in law. During the time of National Socialism he practiced as a lawyer in Berlin and later in Frankfurt am Main until the post-war period . He was a member of the NSKK .

Post-war and Nuremberg trials

At the trial against the main war criminals (co-defender until August 27, 1946, defense attorney from June 1, 1946), he and Carl Haensel defended the SS accused as a criminal organization as an appointed public defender . In this context, Pelckmann tried z. In some cases, it was possible to successfully depict individual formations of the SS as only formally associated and unencumbered. This strategy was successful with the SS helper corps, which he portrayed as harmless teletypes, teleprinters and radio operators. The result was that female SS members in the following denazification by denazification proceedings were time and again the youth amnesty which criminal organizations among members actually had no application shall find. With regard to the SS police regiments , Pelckmann argued that these had "been mistakenly viewed by the prosecution as SS regiments".

The fact that all police tasks of political content were reserved for the security police and that there was no Jewish department in the main office of the Ordnungspolizei shows that the troops of the Ordnungspolizei, as before 1933 and around the world, were only intended for general police tasks. If here and there an improper use of smaller units occurred, it is nonetheless certain that such abuse did not originate in the spirit and purpose of the troops of the Ordnungspolizei itself and was neither approved nor wanted by the troops or the central office of the Ordnungspolizei. "

- Pelckmann on August 26, 1946

He also defended Konrad Schäfer in the doctors' trial (December 9, 1946 to August 20, 1947) , Hermann Terberger in the Flick trial (April 18 - December 22, 1947) , and in the IG Farben trial (August 14, 1947) to July 30, 1948) August von Knieriem and at the Wilhelmstrasse Trial (November 4, 1947 to April 13, 1949) Karl Ritter .

Schäfer, Terberger and von Knieriem were acquitted, Ritter received a guilty verdict on only one of six charges, the concealment of the murder and abuse of members of the belligerent powers and prisoners of war. He was sentenced to four years in prison and released one month after the verdict was announced. Pelckmann was replaced at Ritter by defense lawyer Erich Schmidt-Leichner .

Since 1947 he was married to Erna, nee Kummer. The couple had a daughter. From 1948, he initially headed the legal department in the Hessian Ministry of Economics. When the federal government successfully banned the Socialist Reich Party (SRP) in 1952, he represented the federal government together with Hans Ritter von Lex . At the end of the 1960s, Pelckmann was still convinced that the federal government's lawsuit to ban the SRP was a good idea, as the Federal Republic of Germany only existed for a short time and radical political organizations took care of the politically discontented (including those who were displaced, those polluted by the Nazis). In relation to an NPD prohibition procedure considered by the federal government at the end of 1968 , according to Pelckmann, “one should not allow excited voices from home and abroad to dissuade [...] oneself from the view [...] that it now applies to deal with this party politically. Because a ban does not remove the causes [...] that a prohibition action, if successful, would only give a boost to all nationalist currents today or at least cause the government and its parties to lose prestige - simply out of compassion for the underdog ”.

From 1953 he joined the Foreign Service and was initially legal advisor to the embassy in Washington in the USA and from 1957 consul in Philadelphia . In 1956, Pelckmann, on behalf of Karl von Frisch, accepted the Magellanic Premium from the American Philosophical Society . From 1960 to 1962 he was a councilor in Bonn . In 1961, Wolfgang Pohle , Flick's defense attorney at the Nuremberg Trials, suggested that the federal government should send a permanent observer to the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in front of Pelckmann , as this trial could permanently damage Germany's image abroad. From 1962 he was consul in Seattle and from 1968 consul general in New York . He settled in 1969 again as a lawyer in Frankfurt down and was until his death the Bar Association in Frankfurt on.

Fonts

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Date and place of birth according to: Wer ist wer , Volume 16, Arani, 1970, p. 960
  2. ^ Date of death after the Nuremberg Medical Trial 1946/47. Index tape for the microfiche edition . Walter de Gruyter, 2000. pp. 129f.
  3. ↑ a b c d e f The Nuremberg Medical Trial 1946/47. Index tape for the microfiche edition . Walter de Gruyter, 2000. pp. 129f.
  4. ↑ Franka Maubach : Review of: Mühlenberg, Jutta : Das SS Helferinnenkorps. Training, deployment and denazification of the female members of the Waffen-SS 1942–1949. Hamburg 2012, in: H-Soz-u-Kult, April 4, 2013, [1] .
  5. ^ Minutes of the afternoon meeting on August 26, 1946
  6. ^ Who is who , Volume 16, Arani 1970, p. 960
  7. ↑ Should the NPD be banned? Compare with the judgment on the Socialist Reich Party . In: The time of March 31, 1967
  8. ↑ Norbert Frei: Politics of the Past. The beginnings of the Federal Republic and the Nazi past CH Beck, 2012 (Google eBook)
  9. ↑ NPD - Do and do . In: Der Spiegel issue 52/1968 of December 23, 1968, p. 29
  10. ^ Karl von Frisch: The Language and Orientation of Bees
  11. ↑ Werner Renz (2012): Interests around Eichmann: Israeli justice, German criminal prosecution and old comradeships. Campus Verlag p. 214
personal data
SURNAME Pelckmann, Horst
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German defense lawyer, notary and diplomat
DATE OF BIRTH January 27, 1904
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH March 10, 1975