Hugo Suchomel

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Hugo Franz Suchomel (born March 30, 1883 in Vienna ; † August 1, 1957 there ) was an Austrian lawyer and ministerial official.

Live and act

Suchomel, whose father was a military drug director, completed his high school career in Lviv and Vienna. He then studied law at the University of Vienna and was awarded a Dr. jur. PhD . After passing the examination for the office of judge, he worked as a judge in the district of the Higher Regional Court of Vienna from 1910 to 1914 . In May 1914 he moved to the Austro-Hungarian Ministry of Justice. He rose to Ministerialrat in the Austrian Ministry of Justice until 1927. From 1933 he headed the department for criminal law and criminal procedure law and was promoted to section head on March 7, 1938 by Federal Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg . From 1933 to 1938 he was a member of the Fatherland Front .

After Austria was annexed to the National Socialist German Reich , Suchomel was appointed to the Reich Ministry of Justice , where from October 1938 he headed the Austria Department in Vienna as Ministerial Director. According to the sources published by the lawyer Werner Schubert on the reform of criminal and criminal procedure law , Suchomel became a member of the NSDAP , which in this case refers to the Koblenz Federal Archives . After Claudia Kuretsidis-Haider, he was not a party member. At the beginning of April 1939 he moved to the Reich Ministry of Justice in Berlin. In the same year he was appointed ministerial director. In the Reich Ministry of Justice, among other things, he headed sub-division III / C (higher regional court districts of the Ostmark). He was one of the protagonists of “the approximation of law between Germany and Austria” and was “instrumental in ensuring that German criminal law was not fully adopted, but that parts of Austrian law remained in force”. Later Suchomel was also responsible for criminal legislation in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia . Suchomel took part in a meeting of the highest lawyers in the " House of Aviators " in Berlin from April 23 to 24, 1941 , where the participants were informed about the " Action T4 " for " Destroying life unworthy of life " (" Euthanasia "). Documented is a letter from Suchomel to the Reich Minister of Justice dated November 27, 1944, in which he announced the appointment of a further executioner for the execution district of Vienna.

After the end of the war he was, according to his own statement, taken into automatic arrest on July 23, 1945 because of his high official rank , from which he was released on April 16, 1946. After his release, he was again head of section in the Austrian Ministry of Justice in the same year. In the course of the Nuremberg medical trial , Suchomel made a written affidavit on February 21, 1947 for the prosecution on the crime complex euthanasia. Suchomel's failure to appear during the stab trial turned into a political scandal. The former attorney general in Vienna, Johann Karl Stich, had to answer two other defendants in May / June 1948 before the Vienna People's Court for their involvement in Nazi crimes. Stich insisted that Suchomel be questioned, as he, as his superior, had given him instructions during the Nazi era. Suchomel initially stayed away despite being summoned to the court hearing with reference to sick leave. Suchomel was then examined by a forensic doctor for his ability to be questioned and found to be meaningful. On June 4, 1948, Suchomel finally appeared in court and testified on the matter, u. a. on the possibility of pardoning the 44 prisoners sentenced to death who were brought from Vienna to the Stein prison in mid-April 1945 and shot there. In relation to his own work, Suchomel stated that, on the instructions of State Secretary Roland Freisler, he had drawn up a draft for Reich criminal law in Austria, but had taken a position against it with a memorandum. The editor-in-chief of the Austrian newspaper Der Abend Bruno Frei sent an open letter to the Austrian Justice Minister Josef Gerö on June 4, 1948, in which he described Suchomel as a “highly active collaborator ” of the Nazi system. Now he is again head of the section in post-war Austria, and that is why the Ministry of Justice has tried to influence the court proceedings. On June 7, 1948, Gerö was accused in this newspaper of not wanting a public statement by Suchomel during the trial. In the public discussion, his knowledge of patient murders as part of the Nazi euthanasia program and the appointment of an executioner played no role. Suchomel retired in 1948 after arguments in the Austrian parliament.

After 1945, Suchomel was regarded as the “keeper of the Austrian code of criminal procedure” during the Nazi era . He was also known for his writings on criminal law in Austrian legal literature. At the instigation of the dean Fritz Schwind at the time , Suchomel was solemnly honored by the University of Vienna on March 17, 1957, by renewing his doctoral degree due to “his great services in the Ministry of Justice from 1917 to 1948”. In the mid-1980s, the then rector of the University of Vienna, whose father had been murdered in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp , suspected that the law faculty at the time “was not informed about the evil history”.

Suchomel was married to Bertha Henke and the couple had three children.

literature

  • Gertrude Enderle-Burcel, Michaela Follner: Servants of many masters. Biographical manual of the section heads of the First Republic and 1945. Documentation archive of the Austrian Resistance, Vienna 1997, ISBN 3-901142-32-0 .
  • Werner Schubert : Sources for the reform of the criminal law and criminal procedure law . Vol. 2. Protocols of the Great Criminal Trial Commission of the Reich Ministry of Justice (1936–1938) ; Part 1. First reading: Principles, preliminary proceedings, main proceedings, joint procedural rules (judge, public prosecutor, parties involved, means of truth research, means of coercion), legal remedies (general regulations, complaint, appeal). De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 1991, p. XXIX.
  • Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945 . 2nd Edition. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-596-16048-8 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Werner Schubert: Sources for the reform of criminal and criminal procedure law . Vol. 2. Protocols of the Great Criminal Trial Commission of the Reich Ministry of Justice (1936–1938) ; Part 1. First reading: Principles, preliminary proceedings, main proceedings, joint procedural rules (judge, public prosecutor, parties involved, means of truth research, means of coercion), legal remedies (general regulations, complaint, appeal). De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 1991, p. XXIX
  2. ^ A b c d Claudia Kuretsidis-Haider: The Engerau case and post-war jurisdiction. Reflections on the significance of the Engerau trials in Austrian post-war justice history . In: Jahrbuch 2001, Documentation Archive of Austrian Resistance , Vienna 2001, pp. 67–90, here p. 78
  3. ↑ a b Volume of the microfiche edition: With an introduction by Angelika Ebbinghaus to the history of the process and short biographies of those involved in the process . S. 141. Karsten Linne (Ed.): The Nuremberg Medical Process 1946/47. Verbal transcripts, prosecution and defense material, sources on the environment. Published by Klaus Dörner , German edition, microfiche edition, Munich 2000 on behalf of the Hamburg Foundation for Social History of the 20th Century
  4. ↑ a b Ernst Klee: The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 615
  5. ↑ Hugo Suchomel's testimony before the Vienna People's Court on June 4, 1948. In: Arbeiter-Zeitung . June 5, 1948, p. 3
  6. ^ Statement by Wilhelm von Ammons to the Public Prosecutor's Office in proceedings Ks 1/69 before the LG Frankfurt am Main, cf. Ernst Klee: The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 615
  7. ↑ a b c d Eduard Rabofsky: Silence and Forget. Austrian forms of restoration. In: Yearbook for Social Economy and Social Theory: Restoration in Law. Publication by the Hamburg University of Economics and Politics, Westdeutscher Verlag, Opladen 1988, p. 88, ISBN 978-3-531-11930-4 .
  8. ↑ Hugo Suchomel's statement on February 21, 1947 in the course of the Nuremberg Trials (Affidavit concerning the euthanasia program, translation of Document NO-2253, p. 1) at http://nuremberg.law.harvard.edu
  9. ↑ Hellmut Butterweck : National Socialists before the Vienna People's Court: Austria's struggle for justice 1945–1955 in contemporary public perception . StudienVerlag, Innsbruck 2016, ISBN 978-3-7065-5833-4 ( limited preview in Google book search).
  10. ↑ Gertrude Enderle-Burcel, Michaela Follner: Servants of many masters. Biographical manual of the section heads of the First Republic and 1945. Documentation archive of the Austrian Resistance, Vienna 1997, ISBN 3-901142-32-0 , p. 458
personal data
SURNAME Suchomel, Hugo
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Suchomel, Hugo Franz (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian lawyer and ministerial official
DATE OF BIRTH March 30, 1883
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH August 1, 1957
Place of death Vienna