Karl Siegert

Karl Rudolf Gustav Adolf Siegert (* July 2, 1901 in Uslar ; † August 1, 1988 in Göttingen ) was a German lawyer and university professor for criminal law, criminal law and civil procedure law.

Early years

Karl Siegert was the son of the senior government councilor Carl Siegert and his wife Marie, née Struckmann. After graduating from high school, he studied law at the Universities of Halle and Münster . During his studies he became a member of the Association of German Students in Münster . He passed the first state examination in law in 1922 and was awarded a Dr. jur. PhD . After completing his legal internship, he passed the second state examination in law in 1926. Then he was a court assessor at the Münster Regional Court . From 1928 he was district and district judge in Münster, from 1929 district judge in Hamm and finally from 1931 to 1933 he was again active as district and district judge in Münster. In addition to his legal career, however, he had pursued his academic career: he had been employed as an assistant at the law faculty of the University of Münster since the summer semester of 1925, where he completed his habilitation there in 1931 with a paper on emergency and putative emergency and became a private lecturer in criminal law, criminal procedural law and the law of volunteers Jurisdiction. In the summer semester of 1932, he was a substitute professor at the University of Greifswald .

Professor in Göttingen and National Socialist activity

After the handover of power to the National Socialists, Siegert joined the NSDAP in early May 1933 ( membership number 2,490,163). Appointed full professor, he took over the chair of criminal law at the University of Göttingen as the successor to Richard Honig , who had emigrated . In 1933 he became a member of the Nazi legal guardian association , for which he acted as a Gaugruppenwalter university lecturer for Göttingen, Braunschweig and Clausthal and from 1937 as a district officer for scientific work. From the beginning of 1935 he was a shop steward at the Law and Political Science Faculty of the University of Göttingen for the Nazi Lecturer Association and was accepted into this Nazi organization the following year. In this role he influenced the staffing of the faculty. By means of his relationships with the NS ministerial bureaucracy and the Reich Office management of the NS Lecturer Association, he successfully removed non-Aryan and / or liberal colleagues from the teaching body and replaced positions with convinced National Socialists. He became dean in 1937 and worked at the Academy of Sciences of the Nazi Lecturer Association. In the previous year he had written the work “Judaism in criminal justice proceedings” and called for the “extermination of all Jewish spirits from our criminal justice system”.

From 1937 Siegert belonged to the NS-Altherrenbund . In May 1938 he became a Gaufachspeaker for legal issues , in June 1938 the head of the court yard and head of the main office for legal policy and in July 1938 he took over provisional editing in the Reich Legal Office of the NSDAP.

World War II and post-war period

After the beginning of the Second World War , Siegert did military service. From autumn 1941 he was a judge-martial in the Luftwaffe . After the end of the war he was banned from teaching in Göttingen in July 1945. From August 1945 to August 1947 he was interned by the Allies. After a judicial tribunal procedure , it was classified in the context of denazification in 1949, initially in Category III and in the following year in Category IV. As the so-called 131 he became a professor for reuse in 1952, but could not return to his chair. He retired in 1957 according to § 131 GG . From 1955 he worked for lawyers at the Federal Court of Justice for many years , mainly in the context of appeals. He also worked as an author of articles in legal journals.

Siegert had been married to Erika, nee Grützmacher, since 1926. The couple had six children.

Fonts (selection)

• On the right of reclaim (right of prosecution) of the seller and purchasing agent according to § 44 of the bankruptcy code , Plettenberg o. J., (at the same time legal and state science dissertation, Münster 1923).
• The procedural acts their revocations and their catch-up. A contribution to the teachings of general procedural law, with special consideration of the law of criminal procedure , O. Liebmann, Berlin 1929.
• Emergency and Putativnotstand , Mohr, Tübingen 1931 (also habilitation thesis).
• Fundamentals of criminal law in the new state , Mohr, Tübingen 1934.
• German commercial criminal law , industrial publ. Spaeth & Linde, Berlin / Vienna 1939.
• Basic lines of the reform of civil procedure law in post-war Europe , Heymann, Berlin / Cologne 1952 = Annuario di diritto comparato e di studi legislativi , Vol. 28 (1952), pp. 1-58 ( content ).
• Reprisals, requisitions and higher orders. A contribution to the justification of those convicted of war , Göttinger Verlagsanstalt, Göttingen 1953.
• Basic lines of international criminal procedure law , Musterschmidt, Göttingen 1953.
• The misuse of sound recording devices under current law , Göttinger Verlagsanstalt, Göttingen 1953.

literature

• Anikó Szabó: eviction, return, reparation. Göttingen university professor in the shadow of National Socialism, with biographical documentation of the dismissed and persecuted university professors: University of Göttingen - TH Braunschweig - TH Hannover - University of Veterinary Medicine Hannover. Wallstein, Göttingen 2000, ISBN 978-3-89244-381-0 (= publications of the working group History of Lower Saxony (after 1945), Volume 15, also dissertation at the University of Hanover 1998).
• Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich . Who was what before and after 1945 . 2nd Edition. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-596-16048-8 .
• Lieselotte Steveling: Lawyers in Münster. A contribution to the history of the law and political science faculty of the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster / Westf. Lit, Münster 1999, ISBN 3-8258-4084-0 .
• Frank Halfmann: A "nursery of the best National Socialist legal scholars": The legal department of the law and political science faculty . In: Heinrich Becker, Hans-Joachim Dahms, Cornelia Wegeler (eds.): The University of Göttingen under National Socialism , KG Saur Munich 1998, ISBN 3-598-10853-2 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Who is who? , Volume 27, Schmidt-Römhild, 1988, p. 1285.
2. ↑ Louis Lange (Ed.): Kyffhäuser Association of German Student Associations. Address book 1931. Berlin 1931, p. 213.
3. ↑ ^{a b c d} Lieselotte Steveling: Lawyers in Münster. A contribution to the history of the law and political science faculty of the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster / Westf. Münster 1999, p. 400.
4. ↑ ^{a b c} Anikó Szabó: Expulsion, Return, Reparation - Göttingen University Lecturers in the Shadow of National Socialism , Göttingen 2000, p. 146.
5. ↑ Anikó Szabó: Expulsion, Return, Reparation - Göttingen University Lecturers in the Shadow of National Socialism , Göttingen 2000, p. 146 f.
6. ↑ ^{a b c} Ernst Klee: Das Personenlexikon zum Third Reich , Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 582.
7. ^ Eva Schumann : Continuities and caesuras: jurisprudence and justice in the “Third Reich” and in the post-war period , Wallstein, 2008, p. 89.
8. ↑ Anikó Szabó: Expulsion, Return, Reparation - Göttingen University Lecturers in the Shadow of National Socialism , Göttingen 2000, p. 152.