Joachim-Dieter Bloch

Joachim-Dieter Bloch (born August 1, 1906 in Berlin ; † April 25, 1945 in Kleinmachnow ) was a German lawyer who, after 1933, although considered a "quarter Jew", worked as a consultant at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Foreign Public Law and International law was observed, was close to the resistance against Hitler and was shot in the last days of the war in 1945 by a member of the Red Army .

Life

Bloch was born as the son of the publishing bookseller Walther Bloch, who died in the First World War , and Else geb. Wish man was born. He graduated from the humanistic grammar school in Berlin-Zehlendorf and studied law since 1924, partly as a working student in Breslau, Munich and Göttingen. In 1927 he passed the first state examination and in 1931 the second state examination with the grade “good”. In the same year he was awarded a doctorate with a thesis on tariff ability "summa cum laude". jur. PhD. After 1918 his mother sent him out to the (European) world: in 1919 he was in Switzerland as a “war child”, in 1920/21 in Finland, where he learned the Scandinavian languages, and in 1924 with the Association for Germanism Abroad in Romania and been to Hungary. In 1930 he took a scholarship from the Reich Ministry of Justice on a study trip lasting several months to Sweden, Norway and Denmark, and in 1934 to France. It was due to the fact that “even as a schoolboy and young student he had the opportunity to get to know foreign peoples and their institutions” that, as a lawyer, he felt connected to one main topic: international law. After completing his doctorate, he joined the Institute for Foreign Public Law and International Law (IaöRV) in November 1927 and, some time later, the Institute for Foreign and International Private Law (IaiP) of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society in Berlin as a research assistant.

According to the National Socialist race legislation, Bloch was considered a "quarter Jew", but was kept at the institute after 1933 through the protection of his superiors. Bloch belonged to the Confessing Church and joined forces with colleagues of the same age, Hermann Mosler , Ellinor von Puttkamer , Berthold Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg , Ludwig Raiser and Helmuth James Graf von Moltke , who, like himself, were opposed to the Nazi regime. During his professional trips to Sweden he acted as a courier for the Kreisau district . “During the years when the worst forces of brutal inhumanity were unleashed,” wrote a colleague from the institute, “Bloch's friends had reason to worry him. It is truly tragic that his life was brought to a violent end the moment it seemed that these fears for him should disappear. ”On April 18, 1945, Bloch and his family of four had already left the combat zone when he boarded the train climbed into contested Berlin to take over the acting management of the institute and to take care of his handicapped mother who had stayed behind in Kleinmachnow. The director of the institute, Carl Bilfinger , had left and Bloch was chosen to "lead the institute over to the new era on the spot". A week later, on April 25th, he, a civilian, was shot dead by a Red Army soldier in the Machnower Forest in the presence of his mother. On May 29, 1945 he was buried in the Klein-Machnower forest cemetery. The last words were spoken by the institute Günther Weiss: “It will always be felt as a tragic fate that he, in whose hands the fate of the institute was laid, returned to Berlin at the last minute, in order to fulfill his professional career and human duties to find death. All of us who have built on him personally and professionally see great hopes buried with his passing. "

Carl Bilfinger emphasized to Bloch's widow in 1946, “that your deceased husband, regardless of the possibility of racial complaints from outside, was accepted into the institute and treated there without prejudice and, I repeat, respected according to his excellent achievements and abilities. I myself valued him very highly from the start and personally, alongside Mosler , very highly. The spirit of the institute was, I believe I can say, tolerant and objective, service to the law, in the sense of what we call the rule of law; it is also not a complete coincidence that the next member in rank, B. Stauffenberg , and one, if you will, employee at the institute, Count von Moltke , suffered death by hanging because of July 20th . "

family

From 1933 Bloch was married to Rosemarie Südekum (1906–2002), the daughter of the former Prussian finance minister Albert Südekum , who was considered to be "half-Jewish" after 1933 due to her maternal descent. He was the nephew of the historian Hermann Reincke-Bloch and the kindergarten director Marie Bloch . Uncle Wilhelm Bloch died in exile in the Netherlands. His son Horst Bloch and his grandchildren were murdered in Auschwitz . Adalbert Bloch, another uncle, survived the Holocaust . Joachim-Dieter Bloch's aunts Betty, Marie and Clare were murdered in Theresienstadt and Auschwitz.

literature

• Max Bloch: Dr. Joachim-Dieter Bloch (1906-1945). A legal life at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law , in: Journal for Foreign Public Law and International Law 74 (2014), Issue 4, pp. 873–878.
• AN Makarov: Joachim-Dieter Bloch (1906-1945) , in: Journal for foreign public law and international law 13 (1950), pp. 16-18.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Bloch, Joachim-Dieter: The tariff ability, Stuttgart 1928
2. ↑ Bloch, Max: Dr. Joachim-Dieter Bloch (1906-1945). A legal life at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law, in: Journal for Foreign Public Law and International Law 74 (2014), Issue 4, p. 874
3. ↑ Makarov, AN: Joachim-Dieter Bloch (1906-1945), in: Journal for foreign public law and international law 13 (1950), p. 16f.
4. ↑ cit. in: Bloch, Joachim-Dieter Bloch, p. 877
5. ↑ cit. in: Bloch, Joachim-Dieter Bloch, p. 877