Kurt Schumann (lawyer)

Kurt Schumann on December 7, 1949

Kurt Schumann (born April 29, 1908 in Eisenach , † May 14, 1989 in Berlin ) was a German lawyer and party functionary of the GDR block party NDPD . He was President of the Supreme Court of the GDR .

Life

The son of a post office clerk attended primary and secondary school in Neustadt an der Orla and graduated from high school. From 1927 to 1931 he studied law at the universities in Jena and Göttingen . During his studies in 1927 he became a member of the Germania Jena fraternity . From 1931 to 1935 he was an employee in the Thuringian judicial service. In 1935 he joined the army justice service and on May 1, 1937 the NSDAP . During the Second World War he was drafted into the Wehrmacht in 1942 and appointed as a judge-martial . In January 1943 he was taken prisoner by the Soviets near Stalingrad , became a member of the NKFD and co-founder of the Association of German Officers . He signed the “Appeal to the German Generals and Officers! To the people and the Wehrmacht! ”Of September 12, 1943 and was an employee of the newspaper“ Free Germany ”.

Schumann returned to Germany in 1948 in the Soviet occupation zone and became co-founder of NDPD in Altenburg . From 1950 to 1989 he was a member of the main committee of the NDPD.

He first worked as a district judge, later as district court director in Altenburg. In 1949 he became chairman of the large criminal chamber at the Erfurt Regional Court and was then President of the GDR Supreme Court from 1949 to April 1960. In 1955 he was chairman of the RIAS process . From 1960 to 1963 he worked as a professor of civil law at the DASR in Potsdam and from 1963 to 1973 as a professor at the Humboldt University in Berlin . In 1973 he retired.

Schumann was a member of the NDPD district committee in Berlin, was a member of the central committee of the Association of Lawyers of the GDR and, since 1977, has been vice president of the GDR-India friendship society .

Awards

• Patriotic Order of Merit

literature

• Olaf Kappelt : Brown Book DDR - Nazis in the GDR , Elisabeth Reichmann Verlag, Berlin 1981, p. 364.
• Andreas Herbst (eds.), Winfried Ranke, Jürgen Winkler: This is how the GDR worked. Volume 3: Lexicon of functionaries (= rororo manual. Vol. 6350). Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1994, ISBN 3-499-16350-0 , p. 310.
• Helmut Müller-Enbergs :  Kurt Schumann . In: Who was who in the GDR? 5th edition. Volume 1. Ch. Links, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-561-4 .
• Harry Waibel : Servant of many masters. Former Nazi functionaries in the Soviet Zone / GDR. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main et al. 2011, ISBN 978-3-631-63542-1 , p. 307.
• Helge Dvorak: Biographical Lexicon of the German Burschenschaft. Volume I: Politicians. Sub-Volume 5: R – S. Winter, Heidelberg 2002, ISBN 3-8253-1256-9 , pp. 369-370.

Web links

• Martin Donath audio biography , accessed October 22, 2014.