Johann Karl Stich

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Johann Karl Stich (born July 20, 1888 in Vienna , † October 21, 1955 in Steyr ) was an Austrian lawyer and attorney general in Vienna during the Nazi era .

Career and politics

Johann Karl Stich was born in Vienna as the son of a citizen school director. After attending the Elisabeth Gymnasium, he studied law at the University of Vienna and joined the Libertas fraternity in 1907 . He was promoted to Dr. iur. PhD . In 1913 he joined the judiciary as a legal intern and as such worked mainly in Krems.

Stich was politically German national and in 1919 a founding member of the local group Krems of the German National Socialist Workers' Party around Walter Riehl . In 1919 he was appointed judge and he worked in this position first in Krems, from 1921 on at the district court of Enns. In 1923, Stich switched to the Enns public prosecutor and from 1930 worked in Krems, Steyr and Korneuburg . On May 30, 1930 he joined the NSDAP , which made him an old fighter after the “Anschluss” of Austria .

His political commitment to the NSDAP led to a conflict with the state institutions. In April 1933 he was interrogated by the Chief Public Prosecutor on suspicion that he had organized a Nazi attack on members of the Home Guard and illegally released the Nazis who were later arrested for this. On June 12, 1933, Stich was transferred to the Vienna Public Prosecutor's Office.

On June 19, 1933, the NSDAP was banned in Austria and shortly thereafter Stich was suspended from work with a reduction in his salary because he had publicly used the Hitler salute. In the course of disciplinary proceedings and against the backdrop of the July coup , he was held in police custody for a few days on July 27, 1934. Although he remained illegally a member of the NSDAP, as nothing could be proven, his dismissal was revoked in July 1935.

Career in National Socialism

As an old fighter, Stich profited from the annexation of Austria to the National Socialist German Reich . He was quickly entrusted with the management of the Vienna I Public Prosecutor's Office and on April 11, 1939, he was appointed Public Prosecutor General at the Higher Regional Court of Vienna. His personal acquaintance with the Vice Mayor of Vienna, Hanns Blaschke , hadn't hurt. In 1940 Baldur von Schirach became Gauleiter of Vienna and tried to fill key positions in the OLG with lawyers from the old Reich . Although Schirach tried to get Stitch recalled, he held on as attorney general until the end of the war.

Within the Sturmabteilung he was promoted to SA standard leader.

When the Red Army moved closer and closer to Vienna towards the end of the Second World War , the presidium of the OLG and the public prosecutor's office left the city. Not only was the judiciary evacuated, but also 60 prisoners (including 46 sentenced to death). These now had to march west on foot. The control over this was subject to Stich, since according to the regulations valid at the time, the execution of sentences was the task of the public prosecutor. On April 9, 1945 the convoy reached Krems, where Stich released the prisoners who were not sentenced to death. The remaining 44 - two escaped on the way - were taken to the Stein prison, where they were shot on April 15 by members of the Waffen SS . Whether the order for this bloody chapter of the Stein massacre came from Gauleiter Hugo Jury or from Attorney General Stich has never been finally clarified.

In the meantime, Stich was one of the few lawyers at the Vienna Higher Regional Court who stayed longer in Krems, while the others moved further west. The reason for this lay in four trials at the court courts in Krems and St. Pölten, in which he acted as prosecutor from April 13th. As a result, 17 people were sentenced to death and carried out, including those against members of the Kirchl-Trauttmansdorff resistance group . These processes contradicted any civilized understanding of the law: the accused had no legal representation, were only questioned by the court for ten minutes, and the judgment consultation was also done in ten minutes.

On May 5, 1945, Johann Karl Stich was captured by American troops and handed over to the Austrian judiciary.

After the end of the war

The post-war justice system had to grapple with how much personal guilt lawyers incur when they apply legal provisions that run counter to human dignity. The Ministry of Justice did not consider the application of current National Socialist laws in the Third Reich by judges and public prosecutors to be punishable.

Added to this was for the Second Republic the dilemma that the justice sector denazify wanted, but then the court operation had maintained despite staff shortages. The statistics of the proceedings against National Socialist members of the judiciary before the Vienna People's Court are sobering: eight of 52 accused were convicted, of which only three convictions, including those of Johann Karl Stich, were final.

On June 18, 1948, Stich was sentenced as a people's court by the Vienna Regional Court for Criminal Matters to eight years of heavy imprisonment and the forfeiture of his property. Although the court also took the events in Stein into consideration, the conviction was only given for the offense of "illegality" according to Sections 10 and 11 of the Prohibition Act , i.e. illegal membership of the NSDAP after its ban in 1933.

Already on March 22, 1950 he was released from prison for health reasons and afterwards earned his living as an insurance agent for Victoria . As for the remainder of the sentence, he was pardoned on March 25, 1955. A mercy pension for himself and his wife were refused. On October 21, 1955, Stich died in Steyr.

literature

  • Matthias Keuschnigg: Johann Karl stitch . In: Library Association in the Regional Court for Criminal Matters Vienna (Hrsg.): The history of the gray house and the Austrian criminal jurisdiction . BMJ , Vienna June 2012, p. 56–58 ( online on the BMJ website [PDF; 13.2 MB ]).
  • Winfried R. Garscha, Claudia Kuretsidis-Haider: The evacuation of the prisons in 1945 as the subject of post-war trials - using the example of the people's court proceedings against Leo Pilz and 14 other defendants . In: Gerhard Jagschitz, Wolfgang Neugebauer (eds.): Stein, April 6, 1945. The judgment of the Vienna People's Court (August 1946) against those responsible for the massacre in the Stein prison . Vienna 1995, p. 12–35 ( online on the DÖW website [PDF; 76 kB ]).
  • Helge Dvorak: Biographical Lexicon of the German Burschenschaft . Volume 1, Part 8, Supplement L-Z. Winter, Heidelberg 2014, ISBN 978-3-8253-6051-1 , pp. 321–322.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Ernst Klee: Das Personenlexikon zum Third Reich , Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 602
  2. ↑ From: Indictment by the Vienna Public Prosecutor's Office against former District Court Director Viktor Reindl and others for high treason and other crimes, February 23, 1948 . In: DÖW (Hrsg.): Resistance and persecution in Lower Austria 1934-1945 . tape 2 . Österreichischer Bundesverlag ÖBV - Youth and People, Vienna 1987, ISBN 978-3-215-06418-0 , p. 515–519 ( excerpt online on the DÖW website).
personal data
SURNAME Stich, Johann Karl
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian lawyer and attorney general in Vienna during the Nazi era
DATE OF BIRTH July 20, 1888
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH October 21, 1955
Place of death Steyr