Manfred Roeder (General Judge)

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Manfred Roeder in 1947 as a witness at the Nuremberg legal process

Manfred Roeder (born August 20, 1900 in Kiel , † October 18, 1971 in Glashütten ) was a German military judge at the time of National Socialism . As a Supreme Court Judge, he was investigator and prosecutor and was jointly responsible for at least 45  death sentences by the Reich Court Martial in the proceedings against members of the Rote Kapelle resistance movement . Roeder was also the investigating officer and prosecutor in the so-called “deposit cash” proceedings against Wilhelm Schmidhuber , Dietrich Bonhoeffer , Hans von Dohnanyi and others.

Life

Until 1933

Manfred Roeder was the son of a district court director. After graduating from high school in 1917, he volunteered as a military officer in a field artillery regiment. From 1918 to 1921 he studied law in Berlin, Würzburg and Göttingen. Heinz Höhne mentions in his book about the "Red Orchestra" that Roeder joined the Guard Cavalry Rifle Division as a free corps fighter in 1919 and then joined the Russian Western Volunteer Army in the Baltic States , where he was retired in 1920 as a lieutenant. In 1921 Roeder received his doctorate in the field of labor law in Würzburg. He then worked for the Berlin-Charlottenburg water and industrial works from 1921 to 1924. After Roeder married a noble landowner in 1921, he ran the Estorff estate in Neetze between 1924 and 1927 . From 1928 to 1930 he was the syndic of a purchasing company. In 1930 he resumed his law studies and in 1931 passed the state examination according to the Prussian training regulations of 1923 with the moderate grade "fully sufficient". Then he was a trainee lawyer in Lüneburg, Hanover and Berlin. Roeder's political attitude was right-wing nationalist: 1924-28 and 1931-33 he was a member of the Stahlhelm and 1931-33 in the German National People's Party .

Career in the time of National Socialism

In May 1933 Roeder joined the Association of National Socialist German Lawyers and in November 1933 the SA . In 1934 he became a local judge in Berlin after his assessor examination . In 1935 he switched to the military justice department of the newly formed Air Force . From 1937 to 1939 he was supervisor war judge at various air district commandos. In 1939 he was "Oberstkriegsgerichtsrat", in 1941 "Oberstkriegsgerichtsrat". Roeder had the reputation of being "one of the toughest military judges most loyal to the regime". He was in close contact with Hermann Göring , who showed him particular confidence. When the popular Luftwaffe general Ernst Udet committed suicide in 1941 and there was a risk that the act could be interpreted as political criticism, Goering commissioned Roeder to investigate. That delivered the desired result. Roeder also pursued close relations with the Gestapo boss Heinrich Müller .

"Red Orchestra" processes

Judgment of the Reich Court Martial against Schulze-Boysen u. a.

In autumn 1942, a resistance group around Harro Schulze-Boysen and Arvid Harnack was exposed and 119 people arrested, 79 of whom were indicted before the Reich Court Martial. Roeder, who was considered a "bloodhound of Hitler" due to his ambition, was delegated by Hermann Göring to the Reich Court Martial, where he acted as investigator and prosecutor. Adolf Hitler , who did not consider the previous judgments of the court to be harsh enough, consented to the proceedings only under these conditions . Although the defendants were loosely connected with people of the most diverse political origins and convictions, they were wrongly described by the Abwehr and later by Roeder as the prosecutor as a communist espionage organization uniformly controlled by the Soviet Union and with the name "Rote Kapelle" invented for search purposes " designated. Numerous surviving defendants later unanimously reported of Roeder's callous and inhumane actions. For the co-defendant Adolf Grimme , Roeder was "one of the worst criminals from the scandalous justice system of those years". Axel von Harnack , who wanted to intercede on behalf of his cousin Arvid, reported on his encounter with Roeder: “Never again have I received such a pronounced impression of brutality from a man. He was a person who spread an atmosphere of fear around him. "

In the trial, Roeder also denigrated the defendants by also accusing them of sexual "immoral and decadent behavior". In his criminal complaints, he called for the death penalty "as if on an assembly line", even for crimes such as keeping money for one of the other defendants. Of the 79 accused, one was beaten to death during the interrogation, and another was hanged. Of the 77 judgments, 45 were death, 12 were sentenced to prison and 17 were sentenced to prison. After the end of the trial, Roeder traveled to Brussels and Paris, as president of a court martial there, where numerous other foreign defendants who were assigned to the “Red Chapel” were “handed over to the executioner”. Later Roeder boasted to a fellow judge that he had "made about 90 heads available to the Führer" and had dissuaded Hitler from "inappropriate leniency towards women".

"Depository" procedure

The process was triggered by the attempt by Heinrich Himmler and the Reich Main Security Office to weaken the Foreign / Defense Office, the Wehrmacht 's intelligence service headed by Wilhelm Canaris , and bring it under their control. The reason for this was the so-called “Depositenkasse case” ('deposit' denoted a kind of deposit), a procedure against Abwehr officer Wilhelm Schmidhuber for violating foreign exchange restrictions , into which Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Hans von Dohnanyi were also drawn. Schmidhuber was arrested in 1942. After Roeder, at that time the supervisory judge at the Air Force Field Court, e.g. V. in Berlin, was appointed investigator in the proceedings in April 1943, Bonhoeffer, Dohnanyi and the later CSU politician Josef Müller were arrested for high treason and treason . Roeder tried to build up the process on a large scale and to introduce the term "black band" for it. Despite threats and tortures, he was unable to substantiate the allegations due to the skillful behavior of the two accused Bonhoeffer and Dohnanyi. The Abwehr General Hans Oster , who is also under suspicion, wrote about him after his first interrogation by Roeder:

"Young, arrogant, pathologically ambitious, instinctively unrestrained ... Criminalist of the latest generation ... He is unrestrained in the choice of his means and methods. You could call him a sadist. "

Due to the lack of investigation results and numerous complaints by the defendants and their lawyers, Roeder was replaced after the indictment had been completed. There was neither a main hearing nor a conviction of Bonhoeffer and Dohnanyi.

Despite the failed “deposit cash” procedure, Roeder's career continued. In 1944 he was appointed chief judge of Luftflotte 4 , first in Lemberg , then in the Balkans . In the last months of the war, he eventually became the general judge appointed. On May 9, 1945, Roeder was captured by US troops in Tyrol , where he had fled.

After 1945

US intelligence informant

US CIC file on Mildred Harnack

Roeder was an American prisoner of war until the end of June 1947, most recently in Nuremberg, then remained interned for further questioning and investigations and was handed over to the American military intelligence service Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC). There he was led under the code name "Othello" as an informal employee. Roeder recognized his chance and tried with his alleged knowledge of a communist infiltration of Germany to accelerate his dismissal. Since the trial documents of the “Rote Kapelle” had allegedly been destroyed, Roeder used his statements to cover up his own deeds and defamed the resistance fighters he had accused. In early 1948 he presented the Americans with a 90-page Gestapo final report. This report is considered authentic. In the summer of 1948 Roeder was released. In 1952 he contacted the CIC again and offered the allegedly re-emerged files of the trial, but had to admit a few days later that the documents did not even exist.

Preliminary proceedings against Roeder

Adolf Grimme had already reported Roeder to the British military government in September 1945 for assault in office and for extortion to testify. There was also a joint complaint for crimes against humanity by Grimme, Günther Weisenborn and Greta Kuckhoff at the International Military Court in Nuremberg. Roeder was questioned by Robert Kempner and the law professor Fred Rodell , but no proceedings were brought against him. After Roeder was released from internment in the summer of 1948, the Soviet Union requested his extradition in vain. The investigation against him was taken over by the German public prosecutor in Nuremberg, which issued an arrest warrant against him in October 1948 . In it, Roeder was suspected of having "used means of coercion or permitted their use in the" Rote Kapelle "and" Depositenkasse "proceedings in order to extort confessions or statements" and "to have allowed the commission of serious bodily harm". Roeder came into custody where he declared: “I feel completely innocent. As a German judge I did my duty ”. The former presiding judge of the trial against the “Red Orchestra”, Alexander Kraell , of all people , appeared as a witness . In January 1949 Roeder was released from custody and traveled from the American zone to his estate in Neetze, which was part of the British zone of occupation. This ended the jurisdiction of the Nuremberg Regional Court.

Roeder planned to apply for a judge's position in Lower Saxony. But in the British Zone a case of "crimes against humanity" under Control Council Act No. 10 has been opened against him . Both of the public prosecutors involved had already carried out their work during the Nazi era. Although the Lower Saxony Ministry of Justice publicly stated in 1950 that the investigation was nearing completion, the proceedings were delayed and no charges were brought against Roeder. After the Control Council Act expired in September 1951, the proceedings were discontinued in November 1951 without any result. Since the final report evidently repeated the arguments of Roeder and the Gestapo, the Lower Saxony Ministry of Justice kept it under lock and key for years. The final report stated that the proceedings before the Reich Court Martial were not objectionable and that the defendants were rightly sentenced to death, since treason had always been the "most shameful crime" and so were the participants in the assassination attempt on Hitler on July 20, 1944 had engaged in extensive treason and espionage . In 1957, Roeder therefore planned to sue the surviving defendants who reported him after the war for damages under civil law. It was not until 2009 that the German Bundestag overturned the verdicts of the Nazi judiciary for “ war treason” and thus also rehabilitated the members of the Red Orchestra.

Political activities

Despite the ongoing investigations against him, Roeder was already politically active again at the end of the 1940s. As early as 1948 he gave public lectures about the "Red Orchestra", also in 1951 during the state election campaign in Lower Saxony for the right-wing radical Socialist Reich Party (SRP). After the SRP had been banned by the Federal Constitutional Court as the successor organization to the NSDAP in 1952 , Roeder gave his lectures at events of the right-wing German Reich Party (DRP). In numerous newspaper articles and in his book Die Rote Kapelle. Notes from General Judge Dr. M. Roeder (Hamburg 1952), in which he defamed the members of the resistance group as traitors and spies, he continued his campaign of defamation against the members of the "Red Orchestra" as well as Bonhoeffer, Dohnanyi and Josef Müller and thus influenced the historical classification for a long time Representation of this group and people. In the investigation against the former President of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution Otto John , Roeder was even heard by the Federal Public Prosecutor of the Federal Court of Justice as an expert in espionage. And in 1957 he appeared as a witness for the accused in the jury trial against ex-Field Marshal Ferdinand Schörner , who had German soldiers executed without trial.

Last years

Roeder sold the estate in Neetze in 1961 and lived from 1963 in Glashütten in Hesse on his stately pension as general judge. It cannot be proven whether, as reported in some books, he also worked as a lawyer ; he did not work as a lawyer in glassworks. He was not a member of any party; In 1964 Roeder, a victim of the Nazi regime, was elected to the community council with eight out of nine votes from the community council, and in 1968 with five out of nine votes from the community council as first councilor . With this function, which he held for two and a half years, he was also the deputy of the mayor in his absence. After his death on October 18, 1971, Roeder was buried in the Gutsfriedhof in Neetze.

Manfred Roeder had a son of the same name (* 1937), who should not be confused with the right-wing extremist Manfred Roeder, who was born in Berlin in 1929 .

literature

  • Ingrid Berg: Local politics with a Nazi past? Manfred Roeder as an alderman in Glashütten. In: Yearbook Hochtaunuskreis 26 (2018), pp. 205–219.
  • Hiska D. Bergander: The investigation against Dr. jur. et rer. pole. Manfred Roeder, a "general judge" of Hitler - An investigation into the unresolved legal history of the Nazi judiciary. Dissertation University of Bremen , microfilm State and University Library of the University of Bremen, Bremen 2007.
  • Elke Endrass: Bonhoeffer and his judges. A process and its aftermath. Kreuz, Stuttgart 2006, ISBN 3-7831-2745-9 .
  • Heinrich W. Grosse: Prosecutor of resistance fighters and apologist for the Nazi regime after 1945 - Judge-Martial Manfred Roeder. (PDF; 133 kB). In: Kritische Justiz 38 (2005), 36 - 55 readable online.
  • Heinrich W. Grosse: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, his prosecutor Manfred Roeder and the Lüneburg post-war justice system. In: Yearbook of the Society for Church History in Lower Saxony. Volume 93, 1995, 243-244.
  • Heinrich Grosse: “Nobody can serve two masters.” On the history of the Protestant Church during National Socialism and in the post-war period. Blumhardt Verlag, Hanover, 2nd edition 2010, ISBN 978-3-932011-77-1 .
  • Helmut Kramer : As if you had never bent the law. In: Ossietzky. 2002, issue 23. Verlag Ossietzky (see web link).
  • Lower Saxony Main State Archives: 56 volumes from the investigative proceedings of the Lüneburg public prosecutor's office, fully available in the Der Spiegel house archive , Hamburg.
  • Nicolas Freund: Just a stone's throw. The place Glashütten has a long history with an ugly brown spot. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung, January 10, 2020 (features section); also SZ.plus

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Heinrich Grosse: Prosecutor of resistance fighters and apologist for the Nazi regime after 1945 - Judge-Martial Manfred Roeder. In: Kritische Justiz 38, Heft 1 (2005), pp. 36–55, here: pp. 36 f.
  2. ^ Heinz Höhne: Password: Director. The story of the Red Chapel. Frankfurt / M. 1972, p. 312.
  3. ↑ a b c Heinz Höhne: ptx calls moscow . In: Der Spiegel . No. 28 , 1968, p. 60-72 ( Online - July 8, 1968 ).
  4. ↑ a b c d Heinrich Grosse: Prosecutor of resistance fighters and apologist for the Nazi regime after 1945 - Judge-Martial Manfred Roeder. In: Kritische Justiz 38, Heft 1 (2005), pp. 36–55, here: pp. 38–40.
  5. ↑ Elisabeth Chowaniec: The "Dohnanyi Case" 1943–1945. Resistance, military justice, SS arbitrariness. Munich 1991, p. 42.
  6. ↑ SPY / RED CHAPEL: Password: Director . In: Der Spiegel . No. 21 , 1968, p. 78-90 ( Online - May 20, 1968 ).
  7. ↑ Quoted from Adolf Grimme: Briefe. Heidelberg 1967, p. 162; More reviews of Roeder's defendants and their relatives in Heinz Höhne: ptx calls Moscow. The story of the spy ring “Red Chapel.” 7. Continuation. In: Der Spiegel No. 28 v. July 8, 1968, pp. 60-72.
  8. ↑ Quoted from Heinrich Grosse: Prosecutor of resistance fighters and apologist for the Nazi regime after 1945 - Judge-Martial Manfred Roeder. In: Kritische Justiz 38, Heft 1 (2005), p. 40.
  9. ^ Stefan Roloff (with Mario Vigl): The Red Orchestra. The resistance group in the Third Reich and the history of Helmut Roloff. Munich 2002, pp. 195, 263.
  10. ↑ Quoted from Stefan Roloff (with Mario Vigl): Die Rote Kapelle. The resistance group in the Third Reich and the history of Helmut Roloff. Munich 2002, p. 330.
  11. ↑ Elisabeth Chowaniec: The "Dohnanyi Case" 1943–1945. Resistance, military justice, SS arbitrariness. Munich 1991, p. 31.
  12. ↑ Bernd Rüthers: Traitor, chance hero or conscience of the nation? Facets of the resistance in Germany. Tübingen 2008, p. 105; Alphons Matt: Conversations and documents about the resistance in Europe from 1930 to 1945. Zurich / Munich 1980, p. 164.
  13. ^ A b Heinrich Grosse: Prosecutor of resistance fighters and apologist for the Nazi regime after 1945 - Judge-Martial Manfred Roeder. In: Kritische Justiz 38, Heft 1 (2005), pp. 36–55, here: pp. 41–44.
  14. ^ Quoted from Heinrich Grosse: Prosecutor of resistance fighters and apologist for the Nazi regime after 1945 - Judge-Martial Manfred Roeder. In: Kritische Justiz 38, Heft 1 (2005), p. 43.
  15. ↑ Elisabeth Chowaniec: The "Dohnanyi Case" 1943–1945. Resistance, military justice, SS arbitrariness. Munich 1991, pp. 64-70.
  16. ^ Stefan Roloff (with Mario Vigl): The Red Orchestra. The resistance group in the Third Reich and the history of Helmut Roloff. Munich 2002, p. 293.
  17. ↑ a b Peter Koblank: Red Orchestra. 90-page Gestapo report on the rolling up of the espionage and resistance groups , online edition Mythos Elser 2014. With facsimile of the report.
  18. ^ A b c d e f Heinrich Grosse: Prosecutor of resistance fighters and apologist for the Nazi regime after 1945 - Judge-Martial Manfred Roeder. In: Kritische Justiz 38, Heft 1 (2005), pp. 36–55, here: pp. 44–53.
  19. ^ Stefan Roloff (with Mario Vigl): The Red Orchestra. The resistance group in the Third Reich and the history of Helmut Roloff. Munich 2002, pp. 297-305.
  20. ^ Johannes Tuchel : The Gestapo special commission "Red Chapel" . In: Hans Coppi, Jürgen Danyel, Johannes Tuchel (eds.): The Red Orchestra in the resistance against National Socialism . Berlin 1994, p. 152.
  21. ^ Stefan Roloff (with Mario Vigl): The Red Orchestra. The resistance group in the Third Reich and the history of Helmut Roloff. Munich 2002, p. 337 f.
  22. ↑ quoted from Stefan Roloff (with Mario Vigl): Die Rote Kapelle. The resistance group in the Third Reich and the history of Helmut Roloff. Munich 2002, p. 325.
  23. ^ Quoted from Heinrich Grosse: Prosecutor of resistance fighters and apologist for the Nazi regime after 1945 - Judge-Martial Manfred Roeder. In: Kritische Justiz 38, Heft 1 (2005), p. 47.
  24. ↑ a b Stefan Roloff (with Mario Vigl): The Red Orchestra. The resistance group in the Third Reich and the history of Helmut Roloff. Munich 2002, pp. 324-333.
  25. ↑ Helmut Kramer: As if you had never bent the law ( memento of the original from March 30, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.sopos.org archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , In: Ossietzky , Vol. 2002, Issue 23, pp. 808-811.
  26. ^ Heinz Höhne: Password: Director. The story of the Red Chapel. Pp. 16–18 & 287, note 73.
  27. ↑ Johannes Tuchel: You have to celebrate Christmas properly. In: Die Zeit No. 51 BC December 13, 2007.
  28. ↑ Assessment in the Roeder short biography in The Cabinet Protocols of the Federal Government .
  29. ^ Gerhard Ritter : Carl Goerdeler and the German resistance movement. Stuttgart 1954; s. a. That was the Red Orchestra! In: FAZ v. April 27, 1951, Red agents among us. In Stern , issue 18–26, May 6 - July 1, 1951.
  30. ^ Stefan Roloff (with Mario Vigl): The Red Orchestra. The resistance group in the Third Reich and the history of Helmut Roloff. Munich 2002, pp. 324, 334-337.
  31. ↑ Ingrid Berg: Local politics with a Nazi past? Manfred Roeder as an alderman in Glashütten . In: Yearbook Hochtaunuskreis . tape 26 , 2018, ISBN 978-3-95542-272-1 , pp. 205-219 .
personal data
SURNAME Roeder, Manfred
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German lawyer, military judge at the time of National Socialism
DATE OF BIRTH 20th August 1900
PLACE OF BIRTH Kiel
DATE OF DEATH 18th October 1971
Place of death Glassworks (Taunus)