Karl Leopold Schaps

Stumbling block for Karl Leopold Schaps in front of the house at Hohenzollernring 18 in Cologne, where his place of work, the atelier bar , was

Karl Leopold Schaps (born October 7, 1910 in Mannheim , † August 20, 1942 in Cologne ) was a German Jew who was charged with "racial disgrace", fraud and other crimes in 1942 during the Nazi era . Although the death penalty was not provided in the case of " racial disgrace, " he was sentenced to death and executed. In order to enable a death sentence, the Cologne special court characterized the accused as a "dangerous habitual criminal".

biography

Karl Leopold Schaps was born in 1910 as a son of the married couple Eva, née Gans, and Isidor Schaps. He had three siblings. Shortly after his birth, the family moved to Potsdam , where they ran a shoe shop and Karl Schaps graduated from secondary school. In 1923, the father had a fatal accident in a tram. The son completed a commercial apprenticeship in Berlin and worked from 1930 to 1939 first as a dishwasher and later as a clerk and steward on various passenger ships on the Hamburg-America Line . In 1940 he came to Cologne and got a job as a bartender in the restaurant-bar Atelier am Ring on the Hohenzollernring , which belonged to the West German restaurants and entertainment businesses ( Blatzheim-Betriebe ); in the application he pretended to be a former lieutenant captain in the navy . He lived in hotels and had no permanent residence. In the summer of 1941, “Charly” Schaps met Charlotte S., a female guest from Berlin, in the bar; the two fell in love and began an affair. Schaps, who impressed the woman with his cosmopolitanism and charm, traveled to Berlin several times. However, Charlotte S. was engaged to an officer who was deployed to the front, and when he came on leave, she ended the relationship with Schaps and confessed to her fiancé that she was on the side.

A little later, a guest in the Atelier-Bar , to whom Schaps owed 35 Reichsmarks for a train ticket, asked the residents' registration office in Mannheim about Schaps and found out that he was a Jew. The businessman informed the Blatzheim companies, Schaps was dismissed, and the police started extensive investigations. In doing so, she found out that Charly Schaps had, in her opinion, had a “dizzying” number of relationships with “ Aryan ” women, had operated a small trade in alcohol in the bar and owned a weapon of uncertain origin. Numerous women from different places in the Reich, including Charlotte S., were interviewed as witnesses and they stated that they did not know that Schaps was not " German-blooded ", otherwise they would not have "given themselves" to him. Other witnesses from Schaps' environment were also questioned. The Hamburg-America Line certified Schaps "high technical ability" and "proper leadership", but he was dismissed after he had stayed away from work and got involved with a passenger on the Patria .

Schaps initially denied being a Jew: he did not know who his birth parents were and had grown up in a foster family in Acapulco . The authorities were quick to refute this claim, as he himself had given the correct names of his real parents before 1933. Eventually he admitted that he was the son of Jewish parents. However, he allegedly believed that he was not Isidor Schaps' biological son, but that he came from an extramarital relationship between his mother and an "Aryan". For fear of difficulties, he did not report that he was considered a Jew.

In the final report of the investigation, it is said that the accused had for years "in the most sophisticated way" understood how to hide his Jewish origin and had not complied with the legal requirements - such as wearing a yellow star: Schaps was a "dangerous habitual criminal". In fact, it was about a man, in Serup-Bilfeldt's assessment, “who is a mixture of“ Bonvivant ”and“ Filou ”, a Don Juan, a charming brother who is light-footed, who is not too strict about the truth, likes to pile up a lot is told, even more kept silent and - apparently not in a position to realistically assess the political forces that are in power in Germany ”.

The case was handed over to the Gestapo and Schaps was imprisoned in Klingelpütz prison on March 14, 1942 . He was charged with 11 “racial disgrace”, six cases of fraud, embezzlement and pimping (because of his relationships with prostitutes), illegal possession of weapons and refusal to wear a yellow star. “In the indictment, the Cologne public prosecutor's office tried to construct the life path of an ideal“ Jewish criminal ”.” Elsewhere it says: “If there was a corresponding will to punish, the Cologne public prosecutors sometimes turned out to be extremely 'imaginative' when it came to using the People's Pest Ordinance [and thus the death penalty]. ”On June 25, 1942, the trial opened before Special Court I in Cologne; A few months earlier, the Cologne public prosecutor's office had ruled that charges of “racial disgrace” should no longer be tried before a regular chamber of the regional court , but rather before a special court in order to be able to achieve harsher punishments.

The judges of the special court also classified the defendant, who had previously only been convicted of a minor tax offense, as a “dangerous habitual criminal” in order to be able to sentence him to death; this high penalty was not provided for “racial disgrace” alone. The legal basis for this was the “Customs Criminal Law” of November 24, 1933, which stated that a person who had committed three deliberate crimes was one such. Up to 15 years imprisonment were planned for this. On September 4, 1941, the law was tightened: "Dangerous habitual criminals and moral criminals are subject to the death penalty if the protection of the national community and the need for just atonement so require."

The presiding judge of the court in Cologne was District Court Director Karl Eich , who, after taking over Special Court I at the beginning of 1941, " rose like a zealot " into the attitude he expected and "literally went over corpses", as the presiding judge at the Higher Regional Court of Cologne in 1981 ( OLG Cologne) Adolf Klein stated in the book Justitia Coloniensis . Klein compared the verdict against Schaps with the “shameful sayings of the late medieval witch judges” and generally referred to Eich's decisions at the special court as “terrorist judgments”. The assessors in the Schaps case were the judges Ottmar Matthaei and Heinrich Voss, the public prosecutor was represented by Franz Klodt. The verdict against Karl Leopold Schaps, whose statements the newspaper Der Neue Tag described as "tearful assurances", was passed on July 8, 1942.

In “Desperation and Fear of Death”, Schaps wrote three requests for clemency : to Minister Bernhard Rust , whom he had met during a voyage, to Roland Freisler and to Adolf Hitler ; the requests were rejected. He sent one last letter to Charlotte S. in Berlin. On August 20, 1942, the condemned man was executed with the guillotine by executioner Friedrich Hehr . He was 31 years old. His body was handed over to the Anatomical Institute of the University of Münster ; their further whereabouts are unknown. The von Schaps family was not informed of the trial or of the execution later.

Review of the verdict

The death sentence against Schaps was never revised. In the early 1960s, it was checked by the Ministry of Justice of North Rhine-Westphalia under public pressure . After the then President of the Cologne Higher Regional Court had taken the view that the judgment against Schaps was “unlawful” and “incompatible with the rule of law”, however, an employee of the ministry stated that there was nothing to be objectionable to the judgment: the accused was one "Inferior drive and pleasure-seeker" as well as an "unscrupulous incorrigible lawbreaker": "The particular severity of the judgment may also be found in the fact that the accused did not shy away from continuing his life as a lotter, which was punishable under the laws of the time, until the middle of the war and to use a soldier's cloak to do this. In this situation, I consider a deliberate breach of duty [...] to be undetectable [...]. "

Against the three judges was never because of the conviction of Karl Leopold Schaps on suspicion of violation of the law determined. Karl Eich was investigated for other cases in 1952 and 1960. He retired after 1952 "because of political concerns", which he spent in his native Vallendar .

memory

On October 5, 2020 , a stumbling block was laid in memory of him in front of the Hohenzollernring 18 property, where the Atelier am Ring , the workplace of Karl Leopold Schaps, had been .

literature

• Thomas Bichat: The public prosecutor's office as a legal and criminal policy control body in the Nazi regime. Shown using the example of the Cologne Special Court from 1933–1945 . Ed .: Martin Avenarius et.al. (=  Rhenish writings on legal history . Volume 22 ). Nomos, Baden-Baden 2016, ISBN 978-3-8487-2047-7 .
• Adolf Klein: A hundred years of files - a hundred years of facts . In: Adolf Klein / Günter Rennen (eds.): Justitia Coloniensis. Regional court and district court of Cologne tell their story (s) . Greven, Cologne 1981, ISBN 3-7743-0192-1 , p. 89-194 .
• Ingo Müller: Terrible lawyers . The unresolved past of the German judiciary . Edition Tiamat, Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-89320-179-2 .
• Thomas Roth: Racial madness and everyday persecution in the Cologne-Aachen district. The Nuremberg «Blood Protection Act», the offense of «Rassenschande» and the discrimination against the Jewish population in the Cologne-Aachen area . In: Thomas Deres et.al. (Ed.): History in Cologne. Magazine for town and regional history . No. 57 . sh, Cologne 2010, p. 119-161 .
• Kirsten Serup-Bilfeldt: Burned into memory. How Cologne people experienced the Second World War . Kiepenheuer & Witsch , Cologne 2005, ISBN 3-462-03579-7 , pp. 61-79 .
• Hans Wüllenweber: Special courts in the Third Reich . Luchterhand Collection, Frankfurt / Main 1990, ISBN 3-630-61909-6 .

Web links

Commons : Karl Leopold Schaps  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d} NS Documentation Center Cologne: Annual Report 2020. p. 125. Accessed on May 31, 2021.
2. ↑ ^{a b} Serup-Bilfeldt, In memory burned in , pp. 68/69.
3. ↑ Roth, Rassenwahn , p. 148.
4. ↑ Serup-Bilfeldt, Burned In Memory , pp. 64/65.
5. ↑ ^{a b} Serup-Bilfeldt, In memory burned in , p. 66.
6. ↑ ^{a b} Serup-Bilfeldt, In memory burned in , p. 75.
7. ↑ Serup-Bilfeldt, Branded In Memory , p. 69.
8. ↑ Bichat, Die Staatsanwaltschaft , p. 318.
9. ↑ Roth, Rassenwahn , pp. 139/140.
10. ↑ Wüllenweber, Sondergerichte , p. 202.
11. ↑ Müller, Furchtbare Juristen , p. 144.
12. ↑ Klein, Hundert Jahre Akten , p. 165.
13. ↑ Klein, Hundert Jahre Akten , p. 165.
14. ↑ Klein, Hundred Years of Files , p. 132.
15. ↑ Wüllenweber, special courts . P. 199.
16. ↑ The New Day. The big Cologne morning newspaper , July 10, 1942.
17. ↑ ^{a b} Serup-Bilfeldt, In memory burned in , p. 78.
18. ↑ Roth, Rassenwahn , p. 161.
19. ↑ Roth, Rassenwahn , p. 154.
20. ^ The Cologne Special Court and its judges. In: Gabriel Weber - memorial page. Retrieved June 9, 2021 .