Karl Engert

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Karl Engert during the Nuremberg Trials

Karl Engert (born October 23, 1877 in Stettin ; † September 8, 1951 ) was a German lawyer . He was Vice President at the People's Court and SS Oberführer .

Life

The son of Government Commercial Council Armin Engert and his wife Hedwig Gruber, daughter of the District Court Council Julius Gruber, began after graduating from high school in 1897 at the Wilhelm Gymnasium München and subsequent studies at the University of Munich his legal career as a district court secretary in Munich . Then he worked at the local court of Scheinfeld . In Regensburg he was appointed regional court director.

In Schweinfurt he held the position of district court president. He was promoted to Ministerialrat in the Bavarian Ministry of Justice . During the First World War he served as a lieutenant and became a judge-martial .

He established relationships with the National Socialists at an early age and as Scheinfeld's chief magistrate in 1921 he became a member and co-founder of the first local group of the NSDAP in northern Bavaria and Franconia , founded on March 21, 1921 for Scheinfeld and Markt Bibart , and its local group leader . Several years of employment as a writer for newspapers and magazines followed. He also had contact with Adolf Hitler, whom he visited on November 3, 1924 while he was in prison in Landsberg .

After the end of the NSDAP ban, he became a member of the party again (membership number 57.331). From 1932 to 1933 he held a mandate in the Bavarian state parliament for the NSDAP. In the Reichstag election on March 29, 1936, he ran unsuccessfully in the back of the list, number 1027.

His legal career reached its climax with his appointment as Vice President at the People's Court and Chairman of the 2nd Senate in Berlin. At a conference of the leading lawyers of the German Reich on April 23 and 24, 1941 in Berlin, he was informed about how the “ destruction of life unworthy of life ” (Nazi jargon) could be practiced by inhaling gas.

According to his Nazi convictions, he sentenced young people under the age of 18 to death before the People's Court , although the legal provisions did not allow the death penalty . However, he cited a special provision as an exception, which stated that a death sentence was possible if the young person had the intellectual and moral maturity of an eighteen-year-old.

On August 11, 1942, he sentenced Helmuth Hübener , who belonged to a youth resistance group, to death on this basis . It was also Walter blades Beck , the leader of a group of youths sentenced in this way in September 1942 to death.

In the autumn of 1942 he became a ministerial director in the Reich Ministry of Justice . There he was the head of the Secret Special Department XV, which decided which prisoners in prison were given to the concentration camps as part of the so-called anti-social campaign . By February 1944, 2,464 prisoners were handed over to the police because of his work, a much larger group to the SS for accommodation and possibly killing in concentration camps.

From June 1943 he also took over the management of Department V (penal system) of the Reich Ministry of Justice. Under his responsibility, thousands of prisoners died from the consequences of forced labor , poor nutrition and poor hygienic conditions in penitentiaries, prisons and prison labor camps in the German Reich by the end of the war .

Furthermore, a guideline came from his department, which provided for measures for the evacuation of prisons: "Prison evacuation in case of enemy threat". Because of this guideline, the Sonnenburg massacre occurred , which is why Engert and others in the Nuremberg legal process . a. was charged. However, Engert was no longer convicted because Engert was no longer able to stand trial due to illness. But during the interrogations that were still possible, he denied any responsibility about the guidelines.

literature

  • Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich . Frankfurt 2003
  • Herrmann AL Degener : Who is it? Berlin 1935
  • Erich Stockhorst: 5000 people. Who was what in the Third Reich . Arndt , Kiel 1998
  • Nikolaus Wachsmann : Prisoners under Hitler. Justice terror and the execution of sentences in the Nazi state . Munich 2006 In English, previous text from 1999: "Annihilation through Labor". The killing of state prisoners in the Third Reich. Journal of Modern History 71, no. 3 ISSN  0022-2801 pp. 624-659
  • Death sentences against the Klingenbeck group
  • The verdict against Helmuth Hübener
  • 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. ( Online (PDF; 76 kB)) 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, pp. 12-35. In it the “ Guidelines for the evacuation of correctional facilities within the framework of the clearing of threatened Reich territories ” from Department V in the Reich Ministry of Justice .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Annual report from the K. Wilhelms-Gymnasium in Munich. ZDB ID 12448436 , 1896/97
  2. ^ Wolfgang Mück: Nazi stronghold in Middle Franconia: The völkisch awakening in Neustadt an der Aisch 1922–1933. Verlag Philipp Schmidt, 2016 (= Streiflichter from home history. Special volume 4); ISBN 978-3-87707-990-4 , p. 28.
  3. ^ Rainer Hambrecht: History in the 20th Century: The district offices / districts Neustadt ad Aisch, Scheinfeld and Uffenheim 1919–1972. In: District Neustadt ad Aisch-Bad Windsheim. Scheinfeld 1982, pp. 380-418; here: p. 384.
  4. ↑ Wolfgang Mück (2016), p. 28, note 39.
personal data
SURNAME Engert, Karl
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Vice-President at the “People's Court” and SS-Oberführer
DATE OF BIRTH October 23, 1877
PLACE OF BIRTH Szczecin
DATE OF DEATH September 8, 1951