Kurt Bode

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Kurt Bode (born February 6, 1895 in Posen , † December 21, 1979 ) was a German judge.

Life

1920 Bode at the University of Greifswald Dr. jur. PhD . He later made a career in the judiciary of the Free City of Danzig . At the beginning of January 1934 he was appointed director of the Danzig Regional Court and at the beginning of August 1934 he was appointed senior judge. In early April 1938 he became Vice President of the Danzig Higher Court.

At the beginning of May 1933, Bode joined the NSDAP (membership number 2.840.968) and also became a member of the NSV and the NS-Reichskriegerbund . Furthermore, he was a member of the Nazi legal guardian association, for which he temporarily acted as legal counsel for the Reichsgau Danzig-West Prussia . From August 1939 to February 1940 he worked for the Reichsführer SS security service .

Shortly after the start of the Second World War , on September 8, 1939, he chaired a court martial against the defenders of the Polish Post Office in Gdansk (see Battle for the Polish Post Office in Gdansk ) and pronounced death sentences against all 28 accused, on September 29 against another ten. Later he experienced a further rise in the Nazi jurisdiction. On February 1, 1942, he became Attorney General of the Reichsgau Danzig-West Prussia at the Danzig Higher Regional Court. In this role he was involved in around 350 death sentences. At Christmas 1944, Bode had the guillotine and gallows removed from the Danzig court prison and instructed Walter Wohler , President of the Higher Regional Court, to destroy the files of the special courts and the criminal senate. His last indictments were dated March 3 and 7, 1945, shortly before Danzig was taken by the Red Army . On March 15, 1945, Bode closed his office and served as a first lieutenant as a reservist . He got into Soviet captivity , from which he was released on January 8, 1949 to the British occupation zone .

On February 16, 1949, Bode filled out the British Military Government's questionnaire on denazification and added nine letters of recommendation, which were popularly known as “ clean bill of health ”. In the subsequent proceedings at the main denazification committee for the district of Oldenburg in Holstein , five days later on February 22, 1949, Bode was initially classified as a fellow traveler (category IV), but then after a reclassification due to the prisoner of war as an exonerated person (category V). In Schleswig-Holstein, denazification was handled particularly generously. His resumption in the civil service in 1950 reached Bode with letters of recommendation u. a. of the public prosecutor Heinz Heinrich Anton Wolf subordinate to him in Danzig , who had meanwhile managed to become the first public prosecutor in Frankfurt / Main.

So he was able to join the Bremen judicial service and make another career, his past played no decisive role due to a lack of personnel. In 1951 Bode became a judge at the Hanseatic Higher Regional Court in Bremen . In 1955 Bode was appointed Senate President at the OLG, in 1957 he became Vice President of the court. He also became a deputy judge at the State Court of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen in the 4th legislative period 1955/59 (election on January 18, 1956), after which he was a deputy member of the same court for another year. In 1960 he retired. From about this point on, the public prosecutor's offices in Hamburg, Bremen and Lübeck investigated a total of nine times against Bode until Bode's death in 1979 because of the death sentence he had passed against the defense lawyers of the Polish Post. However, all proceedings were closed. It was not until long after his death that efforts to overturn the 1939 sentences were successful.

The death sentence and its history

At the beginning of the Second World War , German police officers from the 2nd police station in Danzig, reinforced by forces from the Danzig SA and SS , stormed the Polish post office on September 1, 1939 and encountered resistance from post officials defending their post office. At the end of a fierce battle, 14 defenders had lost their lives and 38 were arrested. The German military tribunal, chaired by Judge Kurt Bode condemned the 28 prisoners ready for negotiation due to partisan activities to death, three weeks later, the other ten. It was the first military court judgment of World War II. The prosecutor was Hans-Werner Giesecke . The convicts were shot on October 5, 1939.

On May 25, 1998, this Bode judgment of the Nazi military court was overturned by the large criminal chamber of the Lübeck Regional Court. According to the criminal chamber, there were not only formal violations of the law, rather the presiding judge Kurt Bode was guilty of willful perversion of the law because he had a conviction of the postal defenders “at any price” in mind.

In December 2000, the federal government paid compensation to the 53 applicants whose husbands and fathers in Gdansk lost their lives defending the post office.

Günter Grass described the battle for the Danziger Post in his novel The Tin Drum .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Kurt Bode: Constitution and administration of the city of Danzig under Polish rule: (1454 to 1793) . Greifswald, dissertation 1920.
  2. ↑ Ernst Klee: What they did - What they became. Doctors, lawyers and others involved in the murder of the sick or Jews , Frankfurt am Main 2004, p. 342
  3. ↑ Ernst Klee: What they did - What they became. Doctors, lawyers and others involved in the murder of the sick or Jews , Frankfurt am Main 2004, p. 245
  4. ↑ a b c Dieter Schenk: The post office of Danzig . History of a German judicial murder. With a foreword by Horst Ehmke , supported as a research project by the Philipps University of Marburg. 1st edition. Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 1995, ISBN 3-498-06288-3 ; (a) p. 205; (b) p. 209; (c) p. 216 ff.
  5. ↑ Denazification files Bode, Schleswig State Archives, preliminary. Sign. 460.15 No. 299.
  6. ^ Cf. Friedrich Buschmann: Official report on the denazification in Bremen . In: Wiltrud Ulrike Dreschel; Andreas Röpcke (Ed.): "Denazification" . Contributions to the social history of Bremen, Issue 13. Edition Temmen, Bremen 1992, ISBN 3-926958-42-1 , p. 31 .
  7. ↑ Dieter Schenk: The post office of Danzig - history of a German judicial murder . Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1995, ISBN 3-498-06288-3 , p. 220 .
  8. ^ State Court of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen: Former members of the court. Pp. 12–13 , accessed October 7, 2017 .
  9. ^ Preliminary proceedings against Kurt Bode for murder to the detriment of Kazimir R .; 10a Js 87/60 (connected with StA Hamburg 141 Js 576/60).
  10. ↑ Preliminary proceedings against Kurt Bode for murder to the detriment of N. Fuz, 2 Js 394/66.
  11. ↑ Dieter Schenk: The post office of Danzig - history of a German judicial murder . Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1995, ISBN 3-498-06288-3 , p. 232-252 .
personal data
SURNAME Bode, Kurt
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German judge
DATE OF BIRTH February 6, 1895
PLACE OF BIRTH Poses
DATE OF DEATH December 21, 1979