Leo Katzenberger

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Memorial plaque on Leo-Katzenberger-Weg in Nuremberg

Lehmann "Leo" Katzenberger (born November 25, 1873 in Maßbach ; † June 3, 1942 in Munich ) was a German businessman of Jewish origin . He was executed during the Nazi era because of an alleged relationship with a non-Jewish woman . This judicial murder later also became the subject of two feature films and one television film.

Life

Katzenberger was one of 13 children of a Jewish family from Lower Franconia . He later founded a shoe store with two brothers in Nuremberg , which eventually became the “Springmann shoe store” with several branches in southern Germany. He operated this until the pogroms of 1938 . He was involved in the Israelite religious community in Nuremberg and was first its deputy and from 1939 to 1942 its first chairman.

The daughter of a business friend, Irene Seiler , born in 1932, lived in the rental apartments belonging to his property . Scheffler, with whom Katzenberger had a paternal-friendly relationship. Due to a denunciation by the orthopedic mechanic Paul Kleylein and his wife Babette (Betty), geb. Taubmann, Katzenberger was accused by Public Prosecutor Hermann Markl of extramarital relations with the non-Jewish Irene Seiler and thus of violating the Blood Protection Act. The offense was denied by the woman on oath , whereupon the district court director Oswald Rothaug took the proceedings and opened the trial against both of them before the notorious Nuremberg Special Court .

In a blatant case of violation of the law Irene Seiler was the perjury accused and to two years ' imprisonment convicted. The indictment against Leo Katzenberger was quickly extended to violate the People's Pest Ordinance , which made the death penalty possible for particularly reprehensible behavior under war conditions . In a show trial before the Nuremberg Special Court, chaired by Rothaug, the defendant was sentenced to death in March 1942. On June 3, 1942, Leo Katzenberger was guillotined .

The former district court director Oswald Rothaug was sentenced to life imprisonment for crimes against humanity in the Nuremberg legal process after the war and released early in 1956. The two assessors, Karl Josef Ferber and Heinz Hugo Hoffmann , were sentenced in the 1960s in the first instance; after a revision, the proceedings were discontinued in 1976 for reasons of age and health. In the course of the appeal proceedings, however , the Federal Court of Justice found that the three judges involved in the special court proceedings had committed manipulations that were unusual for the judiciary even during the time of the Hitler dictatorship and the war. Furthermore, came the Supreme Court to consider also that the assessors of the special court of pure caprice had made themselves masters of life and death and therefore, contrary to the first-instance judgment of the Regional Court of Nuremberg-Fuerth in 1969 not only for manslaughter , but because murder to were punished. In a discussion of the BGH ruling in 1971, the legal scholar Günter Spendel described the decision of the special court as judicial murder by perversion of justice in indirect perpetration.

Movie

The subject was recorded on film for the first time in this film drama about the Nuremberg legal trials. The testimony of Irene Seiler, played by Judy Garland, in which she denounces the unjust judgment, is a dramatic climax of the film.

Following suggestions from the book and with the collaboration of the author Christiane Kohl , this film was made, which not only deals with the trial, but also with the couple Leo and Claire Katzenberger, the other residents and the witnesses and their behavior.

  • In “Portrait of a Judge” from 1996, directed by Norbert Kückelmann, the Katzenberger case is woven like a parable into a contemporary story about neo-Nazis in court.

literature

  • Christiane Kohl : The Jew and the Girl. Spiegel, Hamburg 1997, ISBN 3-455-15018-7 (The author describes not only the judicial murder, but also the history of those involved before and after as well as the general environment and the mood at the time of National Socialism).
  • Thomas Bahr: Irene Seiler and the "Judgment of Nuremberg" , in: Apoldaer Heimat. Contributions to the nature and local history of the city of Apolda and its surroundings, 1997, p. 17ff.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Complete judgment of the Nuremberg Special Court of March 23, 1942 in the wording and affidavit of the former Associate Judge Dr. Karl Ferber of January 24, 1947 on the Katzenberger case for the purpose of taking evidence against the accused former presiding judge in the Katzenberger case, Oswald Rothaug, in the Nuremberg legal trial .
  2. ↑ BGH NJW 1971, 571-575.
  3. ↑ Spendel, NJW 1971, 537 ff.
personal data
SURNAME Katzenberger, Leo
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Katzenberger, Lehmann
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German businessman
DATE OF BIRTH November 25, 1873
PLACE OF BIRTH Maßbach , Germany
DATE OF DEATH June 3, 1942
Place of death Munich , Germany