Leonhard Drach

Leonhard Josef Hubert Drach (born March 9, 1903 in Aachen ; † January 12, 1996 in Ludwigshafen am Rhein ) was a German lawyer and war criminal . During the German occupation of Luxembourg by the Wehrmacht , he obtained numerous death sentences there as a public prosecutor.

Life

Prosecutor in the time of National Socialism

Leonhard Drach grew up in his hometown Aachen and graduated from school there, then he studied law in Cologne and Bonn . In 1928 he passed his second state examination in law and initially worked as an assessor in Aachen. From 1932 he worked as an " unskilled worker" for the public prosecutor's office in Trier and from April 1933 was a clerk for press and political criminal matters. In the same year he joined the NSDAP , the NS-Rechtswahrerbund and the SA and became a supporting member of the SS . In 1934 he got a regular job as a public prosecutor and from 1937 to 1940 he was also a member of the Gaurechtsamt .

In August 1940, Drach was seconded to the head of civil administration in German-occupied Luxembourg and, from 1941, at the same time as the first public prosecutor in Koblenz . In Luxembourg, he was a clerk and representative of the public prosecutor's office at the newly formed special court there and acted as a prosecutor in numerous court proceedings in which he successfully demanded the death penalty . He was awarded the War Merit Cross 2nd Class without Swords for his “development work” and his “objective handling of political criminal proceedings” .

Announcement of the death sentences by the court martial in which Leonhard Drach had participated as a representative of the prosecution.

On August 30, 1942, a general strike was called in Luxembourg to protest against the forced recruitment of Luxembourg men into the Wehrmacht . 20 alleged masterminds were arrested by the German occupiers. Drach was representative of the prosecution, and, according to his requests was from a court martial chaired by Gestapo boss Fritz Hartmann imposed the death sentence on all defendants. A little later, the convicted men were executed by shooting near the SS special camp in Hinzert .

When Luxembourg was liberated by the Allies in early September 1944 , the German authorities brought their files to Trier . The judicial files that Drach threw out of the window of his office for this purpose were burned in the courtyard of the judicial building.

Charge and career after the war

After the end of the war , Drach was interned and transferred to Luxembourg. In the so-called "Luxembourg Jurists' Trial" of 1948/49 and in the so-called "Standgerichtshof" of 1951 he was sentenced to a total of 15 years of forced labor due to the "Law for the Punishment of War Criminals" , but was pardoned in 1954. Luxembourg's Minister of State and Foreign Affairs, Pierre Werner : "Drach was pardoned and released to his home country using humanity standards that were completely alien to him in his own work." The then Justice Minister Victor Bodson , who had signed the pardon, put it more drastically : "We pushed the dirt over the Moselle."

After his release from custody in Luxembourg, Drach was accepted into the judicial service of the state of Rhineland-Palatinate despite knowledge of his activities during the Nazi era and his conviction . Initially he was First Public Prosecutor for Reuse , then Assistant Public Prosecutor in Frankenthal , later he was instructed in his previous legal status as First Public Prosecutor and permanent representative of the head of the Frankenthal Public Prosecutor's Office. In 1960 he was promoted to senior public prosecutor.

The Nowack Affair

In December 1961, the Frankenthal Regional Court sentenced the former Finance Minister of Rhineland-Palatinate, Wilhelm Nowack , to six months in prison and a fine of 2,000 marks for unfaithfulness in office. In 1955, as chairman of the supervisory board of the mostly state-owned Frankenthaler Schnellpressenfabrik, he helped to decide that 50 new shares were sold to "established employees" well below the price, Nowack himself had acquired 20 shares and the Minister of Education of Rhineland-Palatinate, Eduard Orth , received 16 shares. The prosecutor in this trial was Leonhard Drach. After Drach had brought a second charge against Nowack - this time for perjury - Nowack, who already felt he had been wrongly convicted, obtained additional material in Luxembourg, including from former Minister Bodson, and wrote an open letter to Frankfurter Neue Press : "They did not dumbfounded to make this notorious helper of National Socialist terrorist justice the prosecutor against me." The judiciary had "put this Leon Drach ... back into the circle of their judges and prosecutors, as if nothing or, in the worst case, a pensioner 'Cavalier offense' would exist ”. Nowack: "I refuse to be accused by a war criminal." Nowack probably had knowledge of Drach's past much earlier, as his defense attorney, Edmund Dondelinger , was also convicted in a Luxembourg war criminal trial and had with Drach together in custody sat.

The Rhineland-Palatinate Justice Minister Fritz Schneider defended Leonhard Drach and defended his authority's decision to have him reinstated. Although he was convicted, he had served his sentence and was pardoned. Die Zeit reported: “Meanwhile, Schneider added, Drach was not to be blamed for these war crimes committed. A court proceedings had shown that he had acted in good faith in the legality of his conduct. The chairman of the CDU parliamentary group in the Rhineland-Palatinate state parliament, Helmut Kohl , was of the opinion that the spirit of denazification could not be constantly evoked. "If we do not succeed in integrating the generation that once supported the Third Reich into democracy, there will never be a living democracy." Die Zeit called this statement "embarrassing".

The Luxembourg Foreign Minister Werner, however, declared: The 62-year-old senior public prosecutor Leo Drach was a war criminal. His rescue of honor by the Mainz Minister of Justice "represents a complete misunderstanding of the inhumane persecution measures that were taken in Luxembourg during the war". In an interview, former Justice Minister and now Speaker of Parliament Bodson named Leonhard Drach "the worst accuser during the war in Luxembourg". This had already demanded the death penalty for trivial offenses. He himself only pardoned Drach in 1954 out of human considerations and “not because he deserved it”.

After the whole matter had been uncovered and a parliamentary committee of inquiry was set up, Leonhard Drach was retired on April 30, 1966 at his own request. Drach was listed in the GDR Brown Book . In old age he was interviewed in a video in which he said, "I was only acting according to the law."

Web links

• Entry on Leonhard Drach in the Rhineland-Palatinate personal database
• Praise in September . In: Der Spiegel . No. 19 , 1965 ( online ).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d e f} Entry on Drach, Leonhard Josef Hubert / 1903–1996 in the Rhineland-Palatinate personal database , accessed on April 16, 2016 .
2. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g} The lintel . In: Der Spiegel . No. 6 , 1965 ( online ).
3. ↑ ^{a b c d e} L. F., Mainz: A prosecutor is charged. In: zeit.de . February 5, 1965, accessed July 11, 2015 . 
4. ^ National Council of the National Front of Democratic Germany - Documentation Center of the State Archives Administration of the GDR (ed.): Braunbuch - War and Nazi criminals in the Federal Republic and in West Berlin. ( Memento from November 19, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) State publishing house of the German Democratic Republic, Berlin 1968.
5. ^ Offenders in the "Third Reich" - Biographical approaches to men from the region. In: gedenkstaette-osthofen-rlp.de. March 19, 2009, accessed July 12, 2015 .