Central office of the state justice administrations for the investigation of National Socialist crimes

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Central office of the state justice administrations for the investigation of National Socialist crimes and Federal Archives branch Ludwigsburg am Schorndorfer Torhaus (2015)

The central office of the state justice administrations for the investigation of National Socialist crimes , generally the central office of the state justice administrations, also known as the central office or Ludwigsburg central office in official dealings, collects information for public prosecutor's preliminary investigations against Nazi criminals, drives the public prosecutor's investigations of the federal states forward and bundles them. Head of the facility has been Chief Public Prosecutor Jens Rommel since October 2015 . It was founded by an administrative agreement of the justice ministers and senators of the federal states on November 6, 1958 , and began its work in Ludwigsburg on December 1, 1958 .

Overall, the number of employees of the Central Office is currently (2013) 19 people, including six department heads in addition to the head of the authority. At the time of the greatest workload between 1967 and 1971, when more than 600 preliminary investigations had to be processed at the same time, the Central Office had 121 employees, including 49 public prosecutors and judges.

The central office itself did not have any autonomous public prosecutor's authority to investigate or issue instructions. The cases dealt with by her were submitted to the locally responsible public prosecutor's office for a decision on an indictment. It was an important institution of the early Federal Republic in punishing National Socialist crimes . Systematic prosecution of the crimes only began when it was founded.

In 1961 the "Central Office" was the model for the " Central Registration Office of the State Justice Administrations " in Salzgitter .

Should not be confused with the "Central Office" which in the prosecutor Dortmund established since 1 October 1961 " central office in the land North Rhine-Westphalia for the processing of National Socialist mass crimes ", which is a priority prosecutor of competent jurisdiction for the area of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia .

Institution and jurisdiction

The Ludwigsburg Central Office was set up against the background of the Ulm Einsatzgruppen Trial of 1957/58, which caused a great stir among the public. It became evident that a large number of Nazi crimes had not yet been punished for which foreign nationals had fallen victim or where the crime scene was abroad.

Under the Control Council Act No. 10 , the occupying powers had limited themselves to prosecuting the crimes of their own nationals as well as the citizens of allied states. Until 1951, German courts were allowed to punish National Socialist crimes in which German citizens were the victims - at times only with special permission. When the Allies withdrew, a jurisdiction gap opened. Often the prosecutors did not feel responsible because the crime scenes were abroad and the jointly acting perpetrators had taken different places of residence. Now this loophole should be closed and the so far hardly identified crimes in the eastern areas should be punished.

When it was set up, responsibility was laid down in guidelines for the administrative agreement of the state ministers of justice. She was supposed to deal with "Nazi crimes", investigating war crimes was not one of her tasks. In this way, two criminal offenses were established by administrative means that were not differentiated in the Criminal Code . The aim was to clear up crimes that were committed in concentration camps, ghettos and in camps for forced labor by Einsatzkommandos and Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police and the SD . When the guidelines for the administrative agreement were reformulated in 1965, it was once again expressly stated that the Central Office had no war crimes to investigate. Nevertheless, the central office initiated over 1,000 investigations against members of the Wehrmacht, especially the army. Not a single trial resulted in charges, and the trial was dropped. The former head of the Central Office, Chief Public Prosecutor Alfred Streim , ruled that the criminal investigation of crimes committed by the Wehrmacht had "not been carried out, particularly for political reasons". The historian Annette Weinke sees in the limits of the Ludwigsburg central office to preliminary investigations and their obligation to then hand the case over to the regional public prosecutor's office, a “cardinal birth defect” of the institution, which has made the prosecution and conviction of the perpetrators much more difficult.

Development and results

Originally the position was only occupied by ten public prosecutors, later the Ludwigsburg central office temporarily had up to 121 employees, including 49 public prosecutors and judges. The nominal strength was 50 prosecutors and judges. The first head of the agency, Erwin Schüle , "a colorful personality", initially worked successfully. He resigned on September 1, 1966 after his former membership in the SA and the NSDAP had become known. His successor Adalbert Rückerl headed the authority for about twenty years and was replaced in 1984 by Alfred Streim , who headed the office until 1996, before Willi Dreßen took over. From autumn 2000 until his retirement at the end of September 2015, the central office was headed by Kurt Schrimm , who previously worked for the Stuttgart public prosecutor and who was prosecuted in the early 1990s in the proceedings against Nazi war criminal Josef Schwammberger at the Stuttgart regional court represented. On October 13, 2015, the Baden-Württemberg Minister of Justice announced that Jens Rommel Schrimm would succeed him in office. Jens Rommel was appointed federal judge in February 2020 and left Ludwigsburg again.

In 1964 and 1966 the responsibilities of the Central Office were expanded. While the crime scene previously established responsibility abroad, preliminary investigations have now also been initiated against members of the Reich authorities , the police and camp crews of the concentration camps in the Federal Republic of Germany. Later crimes against prisoners of war were also prosecuted.

The central office tried in the early 1970s to follow up on the passing on and implementation of the commissioner's order. At this point, however, the majority of the suspects had already died. Other points of investigation were various central orders of the High Command of the Wehrmacht and the High Command of the Army :

  • the Night and Fog Decree of December 7, 1941 (guidelines for the prosecution of crimes against the Reich or the occupying power in occupied territories)
  • the command order from 7./18. October 1942 (order on the treatment of enemy terror and sabotage groups)
  • the ball decree of 2/4. March 1944 (Order of measures against arrested fugitive prisoner-of-war officers and non-working NCOs with the exception of British and American prisoners of war)
  • the order for measures against defectors and their relatives of November 19, 1944

The punishment of National Socialist crimes during the Nazi era was by no means welcomed or encouraged by all sides. The mayor of Ludwigsburg Anton Saur found the facility to be damaging to the reputation of the city. Government officials forbade employees from visiting archives in Eastern Europe until 1964, ostensibly because they were using forged material. When in 1965 the statute of limitations for murder threatened, and with it the possibility that Nazi criminals in hiding might reappear, the Central Office, whose applications had always been arrogantly and presumptuously rejected by the federal government , were given permission to use archives in Eastern Europe. A large group of investigators traveled to Warsaw, thereby breaking the statute of limitations. In 1968, the former Federal Prosecutor General Max Güde described prosecutors who were collecting material from Moscow as "our idiots".

The preliminary investigations by the Central Office in the 1960s and 1970s resulted in a high number of criminal trials that had not been reached before or later. The Central Office was also instrumental in the investigations into the Auschwitz Trial from 1963 to 1965. In total, almost 7200 preliminary investigations were forwarded to the judicial authorities of the federal states, in which several perpetrators were usually accused by name. In the autumn of 1966 alone, there were 300 preliminary investigations; in September 1967 there were already around twice as many.

The statute of limitations for homicides was extended to 30 years in 1969 and finally lifted in 1979. In 1999 it was decided to continue the Ludwigsburg central office as long as law enforcement tasks arise. In April 2001, 12 preliminary investigations were still pending.

Since the year 2000, the documents of the central office that are no longer required have been accessible to the library through the Ludwigsburg branch of the Federal Archives . A permanent exhibition on the investigators from Ludwigsburg in the nearby Schorndorfer Torhaus provides information about the history and activities of the authority. The Ludwigsburg research center at the University of Stuttgart is responsible for the scientific evaluation.

In 2008, the central office handed over the results of their preliminary investigations against John Demjanjuk , who is said to have worked as an overseer in the Sobibor extermination camp , to the Munich public prosecutor's office . Another alleged Nazi criminal who lives in the United States is still being investigated in cooperation with American authorities. Whether the alleged concentration camp guard Josias Kumpf , who was deported to Austria in March 2009 by the United States, would be investigated was open long before he died in Vienna in October 2009.

In the old Federal Republic of Germany, preliminary investigations and preliminary investigations were conducted against 106,496 people, of which 6,495 were convicted of Nazi crimes.

Despite many obstacles, the Ludwigsburg Central Office processed around 45% of all preliminary investigations counted from 1945 onwards, thus triggering a considerable number of proceedings. In many cases there were mild judgments or acquittals. Parts of the public took note of this with incomprehension.

On April 6, 2013 it was announced that the Central Office would initiate preliminary investigations against 50 former overseers at the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in the weeks following this date . The allegation was aiding and abetting murder. Since the verdict against John Demjanjuk (he was a security guard in the Sobibor extermination camp ), the head of the Central Office, Kurt Schrimm, has considered it promising to bring trials against concentration camp guards as well. Demjanjuk was sentenced to five years in prison in Munich in 2011 for aiding and abetting murder in 20,000 cases. The verdict against Demjanjuk did not become final as both the public prosecutor and the defense appealed against this verdict. However, the Federal Court of Justice did not negotiate a revision until Demjanjuk's death.

On February 19, 2014, the apartments and houses of 30 former SS members from the Auschwitz concentration camp were searched by members of various state criminal investigation offices . This happened on the basis of investigations by the Central Office. There were 24 men and six women who served in the lower ranks, from SS-Sturmmann to SS-Rottenführer , in Auschwitz concentration camp as security guards, accountants , paramedics and teleprinters. These former members of the concentration camp team, aged between 88 and 99, had been identified by the ZSt. Three of these people were temporarily arrested. In August 2014, only eight people in this group were seriously investigated. The other proceedings were discontinued because the suspects died or were unable to stand trial. In one case it turned out that the suspect was not part of the concentration camp team. Another had already been convicted in Poland. Of 6,500 SS men who worked in Auschwitz, only 29 were convicted in the Federal Republic and only 20 in the GDR. This inaction by the German judiciary is now referred to by observers as Germany's second fault . Among other things, Der Spiegel writes about the reasons for the failure of the legal appraisal : "Many Germans did not care about the mass murder of Auschwitz before 1945 - after that either." There were simply no lawyers who wanted to convict and punish the perpetrators.

criticism

The expert on Nazi crimes Christiaan F. Rüter criticized the work of the Central Office in part. Although this has sometimes done a good job, it was originally founded "to let the mass of the aid people get away with it". Just in order to be in a better position for its 50th anniversary, a trial is being brought against John Demjanjuk . It is "completely a mystery to him how anyone who knows the German case law up to now can think that one ... Demjanjuk can be convicted with this evidence."

The then head of the Central Office, Kurt Schrimm, admitted to Rüter's criticism that “objectively everything was not done to legally come to terms with the Nazi era” and that mistakes were made at the beginning. The accusation "to work for the sake of the headlines and therefore to sacrifice a little man", he firmly rejected.

As early as 1959, the Bielefeld Regional Court had ruled against an SS man that the Central Office had “expressed in correspondence with the court that the law enforcement authorities did not intend to initiate an investigation against anyone involved in such crimes involved persons ”. Subordinate recipients of orders, such as members of firing or blocking squads, should "generally not be charged". The then head of the authority, Alfred Streim, confirmed this procedure in 1966. There was no need for orders; however, the lower ranks were granted an "assumed imperative to command" because they "had subjectively believed that they were subject to imperative orders due to their level of education and their lower rank".

Rüter renewed his criticism in 2013. More than 50 years after its founding, the central office lapsed into "actionism" after decades of barely investigating low-level Nazi thugs, making itself untrustworthy. The legal scholar Cornelius Nestler called the cause for this procedure "legal blindness". The numerous trips made by employees of the Central Office to South America since 2004, in particular 20 first-class trips by Kurt Schrimm, are pointless in Rüter's opinion: It is clear to every layperson that "the alleged perpetrators hiding there have been dead for years". The Ecuadorian historian Francisco Núñez del Arco Proaño , who dated the death of the last alleged Nazi perpetrator in Ecuador to 2008, also thought the trips were a waste of money. None of these trips, which Schrimm only made as a visitor to the archives, without submitting a request for legal assistance, led to an investigation. In 2016, the historian Klaus Bästlein described the activities of the Central Office for the Prosecution of John Demjanjuk and Oskar Gröning as “staging” or “Ludwigsburg activities that got out of hand”, which from the actual fact that of 6,500 SS henchmen not even 50 of German courts were prosecuted, would now be distracted by a "symbolic condemnation" of individual old men who were at the bottom of the SS hierarchy at the time, without concrete evidence of the crime.

Films, film contributions

  • Christoph Weber: File D (1/3). The failure of the postwar justice system. (No longer available online.) November 16, 2016, archived from the original on November 16, 2016 ; Retrieved on January 13, 2019 (Documentation, 2014, 45 min; collaboration by Norbert Frei ; in the film, employees of the central office are accused of a partially inadequate search for former suspects, using the example of Friedrich Engel). )

See also

literature

  • Rüdiger Fleiter: The Ludwigsburg Central Office - a law enforcement agency as an instrument of legitimation? Founded and responsible from 1958 to 1965 . In: Critical Justice . 35th vol., 2002, pp. 253-272.
  • Norbert Frei (ed.): Transnational politics of the past. How to deal with German war criminals in Europe and after the Second World War. Göttingen: Wallstein 2006. ISBN 3-89244-940-6 .
  • Michael Greve: The judicial and legal-political handling of Nazi violent crimes in the sixties . Frankfurt / M .: Lang 2001, ISBN 3-631-38475-0 .
  • Kerstin Hofmann: "Just an attempt - at least an attempt". The central office in Ludwigsburg under the direction of Erwin Schüle and Adalbert Rückerl (1958-1984) , Berlin: Metropol [2018], ISBN 978-3-86331-414-9 .
  • Heike Krösche: 'The judiciary has to show its colors'. The public reaction to the establishment of the Central Office of the State Justice Administrations in 1958. In: Zeitschrift für Geschichtswwissenschaft . Vol. 56, 2008, H. 4, pp. 338-357.
  • Marc von Miquel: Punish or amnesty? West German Justice and Politics of the Past in the Sixties. Göttingen: Wallstein 2004, ISBN 3-89244-748-9 .
  • Hans H. Pöschko (ed.): The investigators from Ludwigsburg. Germany and the investigation of national socialist crimes. Published on behalf of the Association of Central Office e. V., Berlin: Metropol 2008. ISBN 978-3-938690-37-6 .
  • Adalbert Rückerl: Prosecution of Nazi crimes 1945–1978. A documentation . Karlsruhe: Juristischer Verlag Mueller 1979, ISBN 3-8114-0679-5 .
  • Andrej Umansky: unwilling historian? Insight into the sources of the "Extraordinary State Commission" and the "Central Office" , in: A. Nußberger u. a. (Ed.), Conscious Remembering and Conscious Forgetting. The legal handling of the past in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe , Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2011, ISBN 978-3-16-150862-2 , pp. 347–374.
  • Annette Weinke: The persecution of Nazi perpetrators in divided Germany. Paderborn u. a .: Schöningh 2002, ISBN 3-506-79724-7 .
  • Annette Weinke: A society determined against itself. The history of the central office in Ludwigsburg 1958-2008 , Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft 2008, ISBN 3-534-21950-3 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Nazi crimes: Jens Rommel becomes head of the Nazi prosecutors. In: Spiegel Online . October 13, 2015, accessed June 9, 2018 .
  2. ^ Central office of the state justice administrations for the investigation of National Socialist crimes. Occupation. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on December 2, 2014 ; accessed on January 13, 2019 .
  3. ^ An injustice border in Europe - the central registration office in Salzgitter. (No longer available online.) In: uni-hildesheim.de. Archived from the original on December 8, 2015 ; accessed on January 13, 2019 (presentation winter semester 2008/09).
  4. ↑ Wolfram Wette: The Wehrmacht. Enemy images, war of extermination, legends. Frankfurt 2005, ISBN 3-596-15645-9 , p. 240.
  5. ^ Annette Weinke: A society determines against itself. The history of the central office in Ludwigsburg 1958–2008 ( Forschungsstelle Ludwigsburg ; 13), Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 2008, ISBN 978-3-534-21950-6 , p. 28.
  6. ^ Note from: Rudolf Wiethölter, Jurisprudence, Fischer, Frankfurt / M. 1968, p. 151 f.
  7. ↑ Wolfram Wiesemann, 50 Years of Investigating Nazi Crimes, in: Insight 01, Bulletin of the Fritz Bauer Institute, 1 (2009), p. 61.
  8. Jump up ↑ Andreas Mix: NS processing: Nazi hunters with a past. In: Spiegel Online . November 28, 2008, accessed January 13, 2019 .
  9. ↑ See: Annette Weinke, A society investigates against itself. The history of the central office Ludwigsburg 1958–2008, Darmstadt 2008.
  10. ↑ Micha Brumlik, Doron Kiesel, Cilly Kugelmann : Jewish life in Germany since 1945 . Athenaeum Vlg., Frankfurt 1986 ISBN 3-7610-0396-X .
  11. ^ Note from: Rudolf Wiethölter, Jurisprudence, Fischer, Frankfurt / M. 1968, p. 151 f.
  12. ↑ Verena Mayer: "Our mission is education". In: wienerzeitung.at. January 22, 2010, accessed January 13, 2019 .
  13. ↑ Michael Martens: With chance and meticulousness in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, May 13, 2009, p. 2.
  14. ↑ Johannes Rauch : Are Nazi crimes statute-barred? In: rauch.twoday.net. July 14, 2009, accessed January 13, 2019 .
  15. ↑ Rauch: Disclose all details about the Kumpf case. In: vbgv1.orf.at. ORF Vorarlberg, July 13, 2009, accessed on January 13, 2019 .
  16. ↑ Suspects live in Germany. Investigators are on the trail of 50 concentration camp guards. (No longer available online.) In: tagesschau.de . April 6, 2013, archived from the original on April 8, 2013 ; accessed on January 13, 2019 .
  17. ↑ Searching for Nazi criminals: Investigators are on the trail of 50 concentration camp guards. In: Spiegel Online . April 6, 2013, accessed January 13, 2019 .
  18. ↑ John Demjanjuk. Nazi henchman dies in old people's home. In: stern.de. March 17, 2012, accessed January 13, 2019 .
  19. ↑ Klaus Wiegrefe : The shame after Auschwitz . Der Spiegel 35/2014, pp. 28–35.
  20. ^ New investigations into Auschwitz: Judicial failure instead of later justice. In: rbb, contrasts. May 16, 2013, accessed January 13, 2019 .
  21. ↑ a b Objectively not done everything. Belated search for Nazis. In: n-tv.de. December 30, 2009, accessed January 13, 2019 .
  22. ^ Frank Gutermuth, Sebastian Kuhn, Wolfgang Schoen: Review: The case of Ivan Demjanjuk (SWR). Nazi crimes in court. (No longer available online.) In: SWR. November 30, 2009, archived from the original on January 3, 2010 ; accessed on January 13, 2019 (documentation).
  23. ↑ Per Hinrichs: German Nazi hunters on a pleasure trip in South America? In: tagesanzeiger.ch. August 3, 2015, accessed January 13, 2019 .
  24. ↑ Legal scholars criticize the German judiciary for arresting a former concentration camp guard. In: Der Spiegel . May 12, 2013, accessed January 13, 2019 .
  25. ↑ Per Hinrichs: Questionable journeys of the Nazi hunters from Ludwigsburg. In: morgenpost.de. August 2, 2015, accessed January 13, 2019 .
  26. ^ Klaus Bästlein: Zeitgeist and Justice. The prosecution of Nazi crimes in a German-German comparison and in the historical course . In: Journal of History . 64th year 2016, issue 1, pp. 5–28. 64th year 2016, issue 1, pp. 5–28, here pp. 23–28.
  27. ↑ Claudia Steur: Collective review: The Nazi past in court. In: H-Soz-u-Kult . July 3, 2009, accessed January 13, 2019 .

Coordinates: 48 ° 53 '43.4 "  N , 9 ° 12'11.3"  E