Ludwig Martin

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Markus Ludwig Martin (born April 25, 1909 in Martinszell im Allgäu ; † March 31, 2010 in Karlsruhe ) was a German lawyer . From April 7, 1963 until his retirement on April 30, 1974, he was Attorney General at the Federal Court of Justice .

Life

Martin, the son of a dairy worker, was able, contrary to his father's wishes and with the intercession of his religion teacher, to do his Abitur at the Kempten Humanist High School . From 1929 he studied law and economics at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich , and in 1932 he passed the first state examination in law with distinction. In 1933/34 he completed an additional course in philosophy at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome . In 1937 he passed the 2nd state examination in Munich and joined the Bavarian judicial service as an assessor at the higher regional court district there.

1939 Martin was - although not a member of the Nazi party  - Jour judge , later criminal judge and a research associate in the kingdom of advocacy at the Imperial Court in Leipzig . In October 1939 in Nuremberg - Fürth as well as in February 1940 in Leipzig he was appointed public prosecutor , but never took up these offices because he was doing military service in the Wehrmacht from 1939 .

After the end of the Second World War and his release from captivity, he became a district judge in Sonthofen in 1946 , and in 1950 he joined the civil law department of the Federal Ministry of Justice . From there he was seconded to the federal prosecutor's office in January 1951, where he was appointed senior public prosecutor just five months later and promoted to federal prosecutor in June 1952. In 1953 he was appointed federal judge and worked for ten years - until 1963 - primarily in criminal panels at the 1st and 4th criminal panels of the Federal Court of Justice . As an associate judge, Martin was involved in the 1956 BGH judgment against Nazi criminals Otto Thorbeck and Walter Huppenkothen , through which they were acquitted of allegations of complicity in murder. Because of Martin's activity as a lawyer during the Nazi era, this judgment is viewed very critically today. In contrast to this BGH ruling, the lower instance, the Augsburg Regional Court, had convicted the defendants Huppenkothen and Thorbeck for aiding and abetting murder in six and five cases respectively.

Martin, who was close to the CSU , was appointed Attorney General on April 7, 1963 at the suggestion of the Federal Minister of Justice Ewald Bucher (FDP) . The Central Council of Jews in Germany raised political concerns about the appointment because of its previous work with the Reich Attorney General. Martin's administration was characterized as dogmatic-conservative. During his term of office there were cases such as the legal processing of the Spiegel affair (1963-65), the exposure of spies active in the Federal Republic and the trial of the founding member of the Red Army faction Horst Mahler (1970).

In 1969, Martin was criticized for the apparently controversial decision, also within his authority, to have the population called on the popular ZDF television program Aktenzeichen XY ... unsolved to provide information on the murder of Lebach soldiers , which the program portrayed as likely by an international criminal organization has been. However, a pseudonym used by the perpetrators, which was mentioned in the program that was followed by around 25 million people, actually led to a viewer reference to the perpetrators who were later caught. Because of his “ultra-conservative” political views, there was resistance to Martin during his tenure as Attorney General, especially from the SPD, which has been part of the federal government since 1966. Martin had a particularly tense relationship with Gerhard Jahn , SPD Federal Minister of Justice, who has been in office since 1969 .

In 1972, Martin failed in the trial against Horst Mahler before the Berlin Superior Court with his controversial application to exclude criminal defense attorney Otto Schily from the main proceedings on suspicion of complicity. At the end of April 1974, Martin retired when he reached the age limit. Shortly before, he had filed an application with the Stuttgart Higher Regional Court for a preliminary investigation against Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof , who had been imprisoned since 1972 , as a result of which the Federal Prosecutor's Office was officially assigned the lead role in the investigation. Martin's successor was Siegfried Buback , who was murdered in 1977 by an RAF commando.

In an article published in the Deutsche Richterzeitung in 1975, Martin glorified the role of the Reich Attorney General during the Nazi era. He characterized senior Reich attorney Emil Brettle and the Reich attorneys Carl Kirchner and Hans Richter as opponents of National Socialism, which is actually untenable. Martin falsely claimed that the Reich Attorney General had only given an extensive interpretation of the “ Blood Protection Act ” after his secondment ; in fact, this was already the case under Brettle from 1936 onwards.

Ludwig Martin was married and the father of four children. He last lived in Karlsruhe- Rüppurr .

Memberships and honors

Martin had been a member since 1956 and later chairman and honorary president of the German section of the International Jurists Commission. V. and Honorary President of the German-Italian Lawyers Association.

In 1977 he joined the International Society for Human Rights . V. (ISHR) and was President of the Board of Trustees and its Honorary President.

Martin was an avowed conservative and Catholic . He was Commander of the Equestrian Order of the Holy grave in Jerusalem and was on 7. May 1983 in Paderborn by Cardinal Franz Hengsbach in the Equestrian Order of the Holy grave in Jerusalem invested . In addition to various national and international awards, he was awarded the Commander's Cross with Star of the Papal Order of Gregory (1969) and the Great Federal Cross of Merit with Star of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany .

In April 2009, the city of Karlsruhe honored Martin with a celebratory event in the town hall on his 100th birthday, at which the incumbent Attorney General Monika Harms spoke.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ralf Lienert: One of the oldest schools in Bavaria: The Carl-von-Linde-Gymnasium celebrates its 200th anniversary on October 2nd. In: all-in.de, August 30, 2004 (accessed January 10, 2016)
  2. ↑ Malte Wilke: Public Prosecutors as State Lawyers? The prosecution practice of the Reich Attorney's Office and the Federal Attorney's Office from the German Empire to the early Federal Republic. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2016, p. 240.
  3. ↑ a b Malte Wilke: Public Prosecutors as State Lawyers? The prosecution practice of the Reich Attorney's Office and the Federal Attorney's Office from the German Empire to the early Federal Republic. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2016, p. 241.
  4. ^ Joachim Fink: Zimmermann's nocturnal hunts. In: Die Zeit vom May 2, 1969, accessed on August 5, 2015
  5. ↑ File number XY of April 11, 1969 (video), accessed on YouTube on August 5, 2015
  6. ↑ Happy manhunt . In: Der Spiegel . No. 47 , 1969 ( online ).
  7. ↑ Just laughed at . In: Der Spiegel . No. 28 , 1971 ( online ).
  8. ↑ Soot in the pants . In: Der Spiegel . No. 5 , 1972 ( online ).
  9. ↑ Hans Schueler: The Schily case: A piece of Weimar in Karlsruhe. In: Die Zeit from September 29, 1972, accessed on August 5, 2015
  10. ↑ Whipping boys only . In: Der Spiegel . No. 13 , 1974 ( online ).
  11. ↑ Malte Wilke: Public Prosecutors as State Lawyers? The prosecution practice of the Reich Attorney's Office and the Federal Attorney's Office from the German Empire to the early Federal Republic. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2016, p. 242.
  12. ↑ Harms pays tribute to “Witnesses of the Century” (PDF). In: Menschenrechte 2/2009, p. 26, accessed on August 5, 2015
  13. ↑ City of Law: A Life for Justice. Message on the website of the city of Karlsruhe about the reception on Martin's 100th birthday, from April 30, 2009, accessed on August 5, 2015
personal data
SURNAME Martin, Ludwig
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Martin, Markus Ludwig (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German Attorney General
DATE OF BIRTH April 25, 1909
PLACE OF BIRTH Martinszell in the Allgäu
DATE OF DEATH March 31, 2010
Place of death Karlsruhe