Karl Klein (murderer)

Karl Klein (* 1901 in Bexbach ; † 1993 ibid) was a Saarland communist , mayor of Bexbach and murderer of the police officer Johann Kerner. Klein was imprisoned for 24 years . In 1969, sitting in a garbage can, he managed a spectacular escape from the Lerchesflur prison . In 1974, Klein's life sentence was confirmed in a retrial .

Life until 1945

Karl Klein comes from a Bexbach bourgeois family. The father was a butcher . In 1923 Klein was convicted of theft for the first time. At the end of the 1920s, Klein had his father pay off his inheritance and temporarily went to Canada . At the beginning of the 1930s he returned to Bexbach and opened a butcher's shop. In 1936, one year after the Saar was reintegrated into the German Reich , Klein had to give up his business due to illness. Because of a leg injury sustained in the 1920s, Klein was not drafted into the military during World War II . He temporarily worked in aircraft construction at the Junkers factories in Dessau . Back in Bexbach, he opened the “Goldener Stern” restaurant shortly before the start of the war. In 1943 the "Golden Star" was closed. Klein joined his father as a farm laborer. During this time, Klein is said to have clashed with the later murder victim, Johann Kerner, over illegal slaughter , which Klein carried out on a large scale. Some witnesses stated that policeman Kerner wanted to bring proceedings against Klein towards the end of the war.

In 1943, Klein went to Ukraine with others and made large sums of money smuggling large quantities of matches. The Bexbach communist Rudi Buschlinger testified that as a prisoner in the Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps from 1941 to 1943 he received food parcels from Karl Klein. When the Americans occupied Bexbach on March 21, 1945, Klein hoisted both the US flag and the Soviet flag with hammer and sickle at his inn .

The American occupation forces viewed Klein as anti-fascists and unencumbered Germans. Despite this, the police officer Johann Kerner, who had been a member of the NSDAP , was appointed acting mayor. However, upon Klein's intervention, this decision was reversed and Klein now became mayor himself.

Murder of Johann Kerner

On April 20, 1945, the police chief Johann Kerner was murdered in the Bexbacher Susannastraße by two pistol shots. After a non-fatal shot in the abdomen, he was killed by a second shot in the neck.

The incumbent mayor Karl Klein was called and appeared at the scene 20 minutes after the crime and interviewed witnesses. It turned out that the caretaker Edmund Neufang had no alibi for the night . Thereupon Klein invited the suspect for questioning the next day. Three days later, the mayor himself came under suspicion. In early 1946, Neufang and Klein were arrested by the American occupation forces, but were acquitted after a short time. However, Klein lost his office as mayor.

After 1946, Klein was arrested again by the now French occupation forces and handed over to the now autonomous Saarland and thus German authorities on August 1, 1947. In 1948 there was another trial, which ended in 1949 with a guilty verdict and the death penalty for Karl Klein. Neufang admitted in these proceedings that they planned and carried out an assassination attempt on Kerner with Klein . Kerner had too much incriminating information about Klein and Neufang. Neufang admitted firing the first non-fatal shot at the victim and was sentenced to 14 years in prison for attempted murder. Neufang said he dropped the pistol after the first shot and ran away. The court came to the conclusion that only Karl Klein could have fired the second, fatal shot. Klein denied the act all his life and stated that he had been at home with his wife and daughter who confirmed this.

In 1949 the death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. With the help of 16 lawyers, Klein filed over 50 applications for retrial over the next 20 years, all of which were rejected.

Escape

In 1969 Karl Klein managed one of the most spectacular escapes from a German prison. One of Klein's tasks as a kitchen helper in the prison was collecting leftover bread, which was kept in an oil barrel and later picked up. Klein made a dummy out of leftover bread, which he put over his head and was able to hide in the oil barrel in a crouched position. A farmer picked up the barrel and left the detention center. It wasn't until over an hour later that Klein's outbreak was noticed in the detention center. Klein jumped from the car, was able to escape and initially went undetected.

A few days later, Klein appeared in the local editorial office of the Bildzeitung in Frankfurt am Main and reported that he was innocent and that he was demanding a retrial. The tabloid reported extensively that Klein was arrested again, but managed to have the case renegotiated in 1973. He turned down an offer from Erich Honecker , who was a childhood friend of Klein, to allow him to enter the GDR .

Retrial

In 1971, Karl Klein's life sentence after 24 years became the parole suspended and he was at liberty and returned to Bexbach. In 1973 the case was retried before the Saarbrücken jury court with great public sympathy. The statements of a still living, alleged witness, on whom Klein had high hopes, were classified as untrustworthy. Neufang and others incriminated Klein again. On January 18, 1974, the jury upheld the 1949 guilty verdict.

After his imprisonment, Karl Klein lived in Bexbach for 19 years and died in a senior citizens' home in 1993.

literature

• Helfried Spitra (ed.): The great criminal cases . The killer from the garbage can. Campus Verlag, 2004, ISBN 978-3-593-37438-3 .
• Kerstin Rech : Spectacular criminal cases in Saarland . Geistkirch Verlag, 2015, ISBN 3-946036-43-0 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ There 's a knock at the bottom in: Der Spiegel, issue 48/1973