Kurt Bellmann

Kurt Bellmann (born January 29, 1901 in Kiel ; † unknown) was a German lawyer who became known as the " blood judge of Prague" through his participation in at least 110 death sentences at the Prague Special Court .

Legal career

Bellmann studied law at the University of Kiel and, with his dissertation published in 1924, The Securities Premium Transactions from the Viewpoint of Their Ineffectiveness: A Contribution to the Teaching of Forward Transactions to the Dr. jur. PhD . He began his legal career as an assistant judge at the district , regional and higher regional court in Kiel until October 1, 1938. Immediately thereafter, he was transferred to the Hanover regional court , where he worked as regional court director and chairman of a criminal chamber. On May 1, 1933, he became a member of the NSDAP . In Kiel and Hanover, Bellmann was deployed as block leader of the NSDAP. At the Special Court Hannover Bellmann was formally from April 1940 to 31 December 1943 as chairman of the department.

Worked at the Special Court in Prague

From December 1, 1941 to April 1945, he participated in the case law of the special court at the German Regional Court in Prague . In 1944 he was chairman of a chamber at the Prague Special Court that only dealt with political offenses and was therefore also called the Chamber of Enemies of the Reich . Bellmann distinguished himself through strict conduct of negotiations. He had women who cried during the trial gagged in their mouths. He also prescribed rules of bread supply for the arrested, which were so small that defendants fainted due to weakness during the trial. It was not until many years after 1945 that it became known through records that he had participated in more than 110 death sentences.

Bellmann was awarded the War Merit Cross 2nd Class for his legal activities on March 6, 1942 . In 1944 he was proposed for the award of the War Merit Cross 1st Class. In Pilsen , Bellmann was a member of the board of directors of the Skodawerke, but this did not prevent him from sentencing members of the factory there as "enemies of the Reich" to death. Basically, the chamber, chaired by Bellmann, imposed the death penalty if the accused had hidden a person of Jewish religion from the persecution of the Gestapo. Members of a family were also sentenced to death if they gave their own family members refuge from the Gestapo . There were no legal penalties in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia for granting shelter to Jews.

Imprisonment in Czechoslovakia

On July 25, 1946, he was handed over to the authorities in Pilsen. He was then transferred to the Pankrác prison in Prague . During the trial of his activity at the Special Court in Prague, it was possible to prove that he had participated in four death sentences through the finds of files. He was sentenced to life imprisonment, which he served in a prison in Pilsen. In 1955 he was transferred to the Federal Republic of Germany as a non-amnestied war criminal (registered in Czechoslovakia under number A-38/62).

post war period

As early as March 1, 1956, Bellmann was able to resume his old position as district court director at the Hanover regional court. He achieved this through an advocacy of the Lower Saxony Justice Minister Arvid von Nottbeck ( FDP ). In 1960 the allegations against Bellmann in various documents from the GDR and Czechoslovakia came to a preliminary investigation with the public prosecutor's office at the Hanover regional court. In the hiring decision, which was 165 pages long, the following evaluation was made:

The advertisements ... are nothing more than weapons in the struggle of eastern world communism against the western democracies and must be seen, recognized and evaluated as such.

The allegations relating to the judgments made at the Prague Special Court with more than 110 death sentences in the chambers in which Bellmann presided over were cited in the dismissal order (Az .: 2 Js 209/60) of May 5, 1961 by the Chief Public Prosecutor of the Hanover Regional Court executed:

He did not make the judgments alone. All judgments had been carefully deliberated and given detailed reasons. In some cases he was outvoted. The confidentiality of advice and a lack of memory prevented him from naming these cases. He must therefore invoke the possibility that he was outvoted in each individual case. In addition, he never consented to death sentences against the concerns of an assessor. But he had to refuse to reveal the confidentiality of advice, which he considered to be the foundation of every judicial decision.

In a letter from the Minister of Justice of Lower Saxony to the Federal Minister of Justice on July 2, 1962, it was stated that 21 judges and public prosecutors had left the judicial service. The district court director Bellmann was one of these people.

A short vita of him is listed in the GDR Brown Book .

Fonts

• The Securities Premium Transactions from the Point of View of Their Ineffectiveness: A Contribution to the Doctrine of Forward Transactions , Law and Political Science Dissertation, Kiel 1924

Web links

• Judge in court: the case of Dr. Kurt Bellmann. (Page 11)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Ernst Klee : Das Personenlexikon zum Third Reich , Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 37
2. ↑ Wolff-Dieter Mechler: Everyday Warfare on the "Home Front" - The Hanover Special Court 1939 - 1945 , Hanover 1997, p. 58
3. ↑ Wolff-Dieter Mechler, ibid, p. 58 FN 178
4. ^ Criminals in judges' robes , Prague 1960, p. 60
5. ↑ Helmut Kramer: Judges in front of the court: The legal processing of special jurisdiction , p. 131 online
6. ↑ Helmut Kramer: As if you had never bent the law ( memento of the original from March 30, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
7. ↑ Wolf-Dieter Mechler: Everyday life in the war on the "home front" , ibid, p. 15
8. ↑ Sonja Boss: undeservedly retirement - The personnel policy cleanup of contaminated Nazi jurists in the West German judiciary , Berlin 2009, p 206 ISBN 978-3830514626