Josef Schafheutle

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Josef Schafheutle (born March 17, 1904 in Freiburg im Breisgau ; † December 22, 1973 ibid) was a German lawyer who worked as a ministerial official at the time of National Socialism in the Reich Ministry of Justice and later in the Federal Ministry of Justice .

Life

Schafheutle studied law and political science at the Universities of Freiburg and Heidelberg . Here he joined the Catholic student union WKSt.V. in 1922 . Unitas Heidelberg at. He was promoted to Dr. jur. did his doctorate and completed his studies with the major state law examination. In 1930 he joined the Baden judicial service as a court assessor. From 1932 he was a government councilor in the Baden Ministry of Justice. At the time of National Socialism , the government council moved to the Reich Ministry of Justice in 1933 . There he worked on the development of special political criminal law as well as the law of criminal procedure, including the ordinance to speed up the process in high treason and treason cases , the ordinance on the formation of special courts , the law on the imposition and execution of the death penalty and the Law to ward off acts of political violence . From November 1936 to 1941 he was also regional court director at the regional court in Karlsruhe while maintaining his employment in the Reich Ministry of Justice, where he was appointed to the senior government council in 1941. During the Second World War he worked in the Wehrmacht at the court of Division No. 143, in the subdivision of legal officers of the Army Legal Department at the Army High Command and finally from May 1, 1944 as a chief magistrate . Schafheutle was not a member of the NSDAP , but only because the party did not want him, although he made an emphatic effort to be accepted into the party.

After the end of the war in 1945 he was briefly a clerk in the finance department of the provincial administration of Mark Brandenburg. In 1945 he was one of the founders of the CDU in Berlin . In the same year he became legal advisor at the German Central Finance Administration in the Soviet zone of occupation . From 1946 to 1950 he was imprisoned in the special camps in Hohenschönhausen and Sachsenhausen . After his release, he moved to the Federal Republic of Germany and from 1950, at the request of State Secretary Walter Strauss, worked as a senior government councilor and then as a ministerial advisor in the Federal Ministry of Justice, where he headed Section II 1 (Substantive Criminal Law; Impunity Acts). He was instrumental in the creation of the First Criminal Law Amendment Act, which was later referred to as the Blitzgesetz and came into force on August 30, 1951. According to the constitutional lawyer Alexander von Brünneck, this law, which is clearly directed against communists, contained almost the same word for the treason offenses from the amendment to the penal code of 1934. In the course of this law, special political criminal chambers were established in all higher regional courts. From 1951 to 1968 this law was used to investigate half a million German citizens and convict 10,000 defendants. From 1951 to 1953 he was Attorney General at the Higher Regional Court in Freiburg im Breisgau. In August 1953 he returned to the Federal Ministry of Justice, where he headed Department II (Criminal Law and Procedure) as Ministerial Director. Schafheutle had briefly been in talks with the judges' selection committee as Senate President at the Federal Court of Justice and as Federal Constitutional Judge . The SPD member of the Bundestag Otto Heinrich Greve pointed out, however, that Schafheutle wrote in an anthology in 1937 that “people's judges are in line with the political and ideological foundations of the Third Reich” and that the new state must be based “on the idea of ​​unlimited leadership responsibility” . Schafheutle's defense that he was coerced into it and that his contribution was falsified did not convince the committee and it was rejected. When his colleague Eduard Dreher was to become a judge at the Federal Court of Justice in early 1959 , his past as a public prosecutor at the Innsbruck Special Court became a problem in the course of the imposition of the death penalty. Schafheutle issued exonerating statements in favor of Dreher. Several GDR publications appeared from 1960 onwards. In 1962, Federal Minister of Justice Wolfgang Stammberger asked him to comment on the allegations. He came to this request in detail after 1965, and saw himself as a staunch anti-communist who, after the war, ensured that criminal law to combat communists was consistently used in order to protect the free democratic basic order. Therefore, according to Section 79 Clause 2 of the Federal Civil Servants Act of 1965, the employer must protect himself against him. Schafheutle retired in January 1967 under pressure from the new Federal Minister of Justice, Gustav Heinemann .

A brief vita of Schafheutles is listed in the Brown Book of the GDR.

Fonts (selection)

  • Company concept and acquisition in company assets: contributions z. Erl. D. Society d. bourgeois Right ; With e. Nachw. V. Prof. Dr. Heinrich Hoeniger: On the structure of the concept of society , Bensheimer, Mannheim / Berlin / Leipzig 1931, treatises z. civil, commercial u. Employment Law. H. 6 (also: Freiburg i. B., law and political science dissertation)
  • Law against dangerous habitual criminals and on measures of security and reform with the associated implementation law / law by Leopold Schäfer, Otto Wagner, Josef Schafheutle, Vahlen, Berlin 1934
  • The amendments to the penal code of 1933 and 1934: With implementing regulations / Erl. Leopold Schäfer; Hans Richter; Josef Schafheutle, Industrieverl. Spaeth & Linde, Berlin 1934

literature

  • Manfred Görtemaker , Christoph Safferling (ed.): The Rosenburg. The Federal Ministry of Justice and the Nazi past - an inventory . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2013 ISBN 978-3-525-30046-6
  • Manfred Görtemaker , Christoph Safferling : The Rosenburg files. The Federal Ministry of Justice and the Nazi era . CH Beck, Munich 2016, ISBN 978-3-406-69768-5 . (especially p. 702ff)
  • Gerrit Hamann: Josef Schafheutle: Fateful continuities from the Reich Ministry to the Federal Ministry of Justice . In: Wolfgang Proske (Hrsg.): Perpetrators helpers free riders. Nazi-polluted from Baden-Württemberg , Volume 9: Nazi-polluted from the south of today's Baden-Württemberg . Kugelberg Verlag, Gerstetten 2018, pp. 338-360, ISBN 978-3-945893-10-4 .
  • The Cabinet Protocols of the Federal Government 1961 , Volume 14, Oldenbourg Verlag, Munich 2004, pp. 336f. (on-line)
  • Ernst Klee : The personal lexicon for the Third Reich: Who was what before and after 1945. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2005. ISBN 3-596-16048-0 .
  • Marc von Miquel: Punish or amnesty? West German justice and politics of the past in the sixties , series: Contributions to the history of the 20th century, Volume 1, Wallstein, Göttingen 2004, ISBN 3-89244-748-9 .
  • Werner Schubert : Sources for the reform of the criminal law and criminal procedure law . Vol. 2. P EFERENCE the Great Criminal Commission of the Ministry of Justice (1936-1938) ; Part 1. First reading: Principles, preliminary proceedings, main proceedings, common procedural rules (judge, public prosecutor, parties, means of truth research, means of coercion), legal remedies (general regulations, complaint, appeal) , p. XXVII

Individual evidence

  1. Wolfgang Burr (ed.): Unitas manual . tape 2 . Verlag Franz Schmitt, Siegburg 1996, p. 294 .
  2. a b Hans canje: For example: Josef Schafheutle . In: Ossietzky , edition 13/2013
  3. Marc von Miquel: Punish or amnesty? West German justice and politics of the past in the sixties , Göttingen 2004, p. 65
  4. Görtemaker / Safferling: “The Rosenburg Files”, p. 715.
  5. Klaus-Detlev Godau-Schüttke: The Federal Court of Justice - Justice in Germany , Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-922654-66-5 , p. 87
  6. Joachim Rückert: Some remarks about followers, followers and other runners in the Federal Ministry of Justice after 1949 . In: Manfred Görtemaker, Christoph Safferling (ed.): The Rosenburg. The Federal Ministry of Justice and the Nazi past - an inventory , Göttingen 2013, p. 85
  7. Görtemaker / Safferling: “The Rosenburg Files”, p. 721f.
  8. Joachim Rückert: Some remarks about followers, followers and other runners in the Federal Ministry of Justice after 1949 . In: Manfred Görtemaker, Christoph Safferling (ed.): The Rosenburg. The Federal Ministry of Justice and the Nazi past - an inventory , Göttingen 2013, p. 85
  9. Görtemaker / Safferling: “The Rosenburg Files”, p. 714f.
  10. Christoph Safferling : The work of the Independent Scientific Commission , in: Federal Ministry of Justice (ed.): Die Rosenburg - The responsibility of lawyers in the process of processing , speeches at the 2nd symposium on February 5, 2013 in the courtroom in Nuremberg, Berlin 2013, p. 19f.
  11. ^ "Hitler's war judges and military criminal experts in the service of Bonn's war preparations" 1960; "Hitler's blood lawyers - Adenauer's legislator" 1961, "Freisler's ghost in Bonn's conviction criminal law" 1963
  12. Görtemaker / Safferling: “The Rosenburg Files”, p. 717f.
  13. Görtemaker / Safferling: “The Rosenburg Files”, p. 722f.