Marcel Frenkel

Marcel Frenkel (born May 24, 1907 in Berlin ; died November 18, 1960 in Düsseldorf ) was a German lawyer of Jewish origin, a communist resistance fighter against National Socialism , a ministerial official and chairman of the VVN .

Life

Youth in the German Empire and Weimar

Marcel Frenkel came from a German-Jewish family. His father was a plumber. He went to school in Düsseldorf, completed a commercial apprenticeship there and also took evening classes to prepare for the secondary school leaving certificate, which was followed by the Abitur in 1926. He studied economics , social sciences and law at the University of Cologne , the University of Berlin and the University of Bonn . In 1929 he passed the first state examination in law in Cologne. In 1930 the doctorate to Dr. jur. at the University of Cologne. The subject of the dissertation was "The oath offenses in the future criminal law".

National Socialism

→ Main article : Era of National Socialism

During his legal clerkship (1931–1933) in a firm of two lawyers affiliated with the KPD , Frenkel had made a name for himself as a defender of Nazi opponents whom he had represented on behalf of the Red Aid . He could in April 1933, after the transfer of power to the NSDAP and its German national allies, nor make his second examination, becoming appointed assessor, but it accounted for him because of the Nazi occupation officials law against racially and politically undesirable, the possibility to take over in the public service, and since he had been threatened several times as a defense lawyer, he fled to the neighboring Netherlands with his wife Charlotte ("Lotte"), whom he had met in 1932/33 in Düsseldorf in the "Office for the Defense of Human Rights" . There the two married in December 1932.

The two lived there initially with the help of Jewish refugee committees, then Frenkel sold men's fashion items and opened their own men's fashion store in 1939. In 1940, with the occupation of the country by German troops, this business was expropriated (" Aryanized ") as Jewish property . The Frenkels now joined a communist resistance group. Frenkel also became a member of the Joodschen Raads (Jewish Council) of Amsterdam. In 1942 he joined the illegalized Communist Party of Germany . He was given the code name Hein Riechers. At the end of November 1943, in view of the preparations for the deportation of the remaining Amsterdam Jews to the Westerbork transit camp, the couple went into hiding. Lotte and Marcel Frenkel, who were traveling with false passports from 1943 onwards, escaped deportations by a hair's breadth several times. They lived in Leiderdrop, where they organized an intelligence service.

First post-Nazi stations

After the end of the Nazi regime, Frenkel, who had lost numerous family members in the concentration camps , returned to Germany in September 1945 and initially worked as a legal advisor to the Association of German and Stateless Antifascists (VDSA). He successfully applied to the High Presidium of the Province of North Rhine , where he worked on reparation matters as the successor to Philipp Auerbach in the “People's Welfare” department from January 1946. This made him the leading person for the compensation of those persecuted by the Nazis in the British zone . In November 1946 he was promoted to ministerial director. In April 1949, under Walter Menzel, he became head of the “ reparation ” department of the NRW interior ministry . At the same time, Frenkel remained an active member of his party, the KPD, on whose NRW state list he ran for the Bundestag election in 1949 without success . When the Jewish community in Düsseldorf asked him to run for its chairmanship, he was elected, albeit without being attributed to the religious community, but as an act of solidarity. After the congregation was transformed into a religious congregation, he and his wife resigned there.

Frenkel was particularly committed to the recognition of racially motivated persecution of members of the Roma minority. Within the German post-national socialist society, there was still a broad consensus on the denial of rights to individuals and minorities who were viewed as anti-social . " Gypsies " were traditionally counted among them . The Federal German compensation authorities and courts largely shared this opinion. This resulted in a reversal of the burden of proof in compensation proceedings. "Gypsies" had to prove to the authorities in detail that they were deported to the camps or otherwise persecuted by the Nazi regime, not for "crime-preventive" reasons, but for "racial reasons". In the Kölnische Rundschau , the Frenkel authority was accused of providing "care for anti-social elements".

In NRW, this continuation of a Nazi perspective - not least because of Frenkel's interpretation and application of the law - did not apply. In a letter dated May 21, 1948, he made it clear to subordinate administrative bodies that “Gypsies and mixed gypsies” would come under the group of those who were racially persecuted and that they should be treated as such. According to Gilad Margalit , Marcel Frenkel and his Bavarian colleague Philipp Auerbach , who protested again and again against the attitude of many non-Jewish colleagues, as members of a collective that was also persecuted and against the background of the "trauma of the Shoah " showed a "special sensitivity" and “solidarity” towards the persecuted Roma minority.

Anti-communist campaign and exclusion from public service

At the beginning of the 1950s, some high officials who ran the state compensation authorities had to leave them. With Philipp Auerbach (Bavaria), Curt Epstein (Hesse), Alphonse Kahn (Rhineland-Palatinate), Ludwig Loeffler (Hamburg) and Marcel Frenkel, it was a group of “Jewish officials who were themselves victims of Nazi persecution”. In 1950, Frenkel was still rated within the ministerial bureaucracy as "one of the main initiators and experts on the law of reparation". But as early as April 1949, the British military authorities, who were pushing for communists to be removed from the German authorities, internally described him as “the most important and dangerous of these people”.

The first public attack on Frenkel took place in 1949, the year the Federal Republic was founded, by a CDU member of the state parliament who criticized the interior minister's decision on appeal. He publicly equated Frenkel with the leading Nazi judge Roland Freisler and assumed the goal of transferring all Jewish property without heirs - "billions" - from Germany to Israel. Frenkel also intends to "bring us here in the form of the State of Israel a fifth occupying power". Frenkel's legal handbook on reparation was unnecessary, bad and overpriced. The member of the state parliament used a “classic anti-Semitic cliché” (Spernol) when he stated that Frenkel's book arose from his “business acumen”. In the following year, the Rheinische Post and Düsseldorfer Nachrichten claimed that Frenkel had declared that he would take “any oath” without further ado, which was reminiscent of a popular Nazi children's book, which in turn took up a Martin Luther word in its title ( Elvira Bauer ' Don't trust a fox on green heath and not a Jew on his oath! ). Frenkel then recalled the various oaths of office of numerous civil servants colleagues since the empire.

At the end of 1950 Frenkel was then dismissed from the service by the NRW Interior Minister Adolf Flecken (CDU) because he had acted “against the basic democratic order”. He is a member of the KPD and in "pro-Soviet" organizations. This was preceded by denunciations from the Bund der VVN, a CDU-affiliated Nazi victims' association in competition with the VVN, and above all from its chairman Peter Lütsches , who was personally deeply involved in a corruption affair. The BVN regarded the "activities of Frenkel and all [sic!] Communists still in official positions" as "particularly dangerous". He called for a "purge of public enemies from the authorities". Frenkel, it was said, was providing communists with compensation, pensions and subsidies from public funds with which they undermined the Federal Republic. They should not receive any compensation for persecuting them. According to the BVN, the recall of Frenkel is urgent, since the budget of his state office for reparation is "spent to 70% for religious Jews, communists, socialists". The accusations against Frenkel, as the State Audit Office and the Ministry of the Interior jointly determined in 1950 "expressly" after a thorough investigation, were "completely eliminated". Lütsches and the BVN were nevertheless not without success, since Frenkel, as the same statement noted, "was on leave in a different context because of his KPD membership".

Frenkel saw himself exposed to "snooping and ideological terror" and argued against his compulsory leave of absence that, unlike many other state employees, he had campaigned for "democracy, freedom and justice" during the Nazi era. The questionable leave of absence was followed by years of legal proceedings that were never decided. The compulsory leave of absence of the lifelong civil servant lasted until the end of 1959 and ended with the transfer of the seriously ill Frenkel into early retirement on January 1, 1960. The Frenkel biographer Boris Spernol sees the removal of Frenkel from his position as a "professional ban", the " the first administrative anti-communist measure ”was“ which came from German authorities alone ”. This is the basis for the further removal of communists from the public administration, who have met right-wing extremists twice, but mostly communists. In the Frenkel case, "anti-communism ... was not only (used)" to scandalize reparations to communists, "but also to legitimize anti-Semitic and antigypsy attacks against reparations" (Spernol).

Activities in the VVN and other associations

In 1954, as a victim of Nazi persecution, Frenkel submitted an application for compensation, which prompted an anonymous letter to “deny him any right to reparation”. That did not prevail, but in 1959 the Ministry of the Interior demanded the revocation of the reparation with the accompanying report of the State Office for the Protection of the Constitution . Frenkel is an enemy of the constitution and therefore not entitled to compensation. This was rejected because of the pending leave of absence procedure.

After leaving the public service, Frenkel was chairman of the West German association of those persecuted by the Nazi regime - Bund der Antifaschisteninnen und Antifaschisten (VVN) (1952 ff.) Or together with a second Düsseldorf resident, the Catholic priest Joseph Cornelius Rossaint , a member of the presidium of VVN (1959 ff.). When, in the wake of the prohibition (1951) of a referendum against the remilitarization of Germany, Oskar Neumann , Karl Dickel , Emil Bechtle and other members of the VVN were arrested, charged with high treason and sentenced to prison terms, Frenkel, as chairman of the VVN, was initially among those arrested and Defendants. After protests at home and abroad, however, he "soon had to be released".

Until 1953 Frenkel was managing director of the working group of democratic lawyers he co-founded and in the central council for the protection of democratic rights. Both associations were banned in 1958 as anti-constitutional. Most recently he worked as a lawyer in Düsseldorf.

Lotte Frenkel

Marcel Frenkel was married, the couple had a son Michael. His wife Charlotte ("Lotte") geb. Kunke was active in resistance circles under the names "Louise Bals" and "Anke Bruinsma". After returning from the Netherlands, she was active in antifa committees, co-founder of women's self-help groups and member of the Düsseldorf municipal women's committee. She was a board member of the Democratic Women's Association of Germany (DFD) . In the 1970s she was Deputy President and Deputy Chairwoman of the North Rhine-Westphalian State of the VVN.

reception

As a person of contemporary history, Frenkel has a firm place in the literature on the history of compensation (Frei / Brunner / Goschler, Margalit, Lehmann-Richter and others) as well as the NRW emigration (Lissner). In 2011 a remarkable publication by the Rhineland Regional Association was published, which is intended as a “didactic tool” in school and extracurricular facilities and contains a text by Frenkel as a source in the section “Between Commemoration and Repression”. It is an address for the inauguration of a Nazi memorial at the Bocklemünd Jewish cemetery on June 6, 1948. In it, the speaker explains that the memorial is not only “honoring and commemorating” “our” dead, but is also “a memorial to them German population ”. Many members of the synagogue community, Jewish organizations, the VVN, the Catholic Church, representatives of the city and the country and political parties attended the inauguration. All speakers called for “a democratic renewal of Germany”.

Fonts

• The oath offenses in the future penal code. Quakenbrück 1930.
• as editors with Philipp Auerbach , Alphonse Kahn , Leo Zuckermann as Mithrsg .: Handbuch der Wiedergutmachung. Koblenz 1949 ff.
• with Arnold Hardenberg : The Right to Compensation for Victims of National Socialist Persecution. Frankfurt am Main 1957.
• The Federal Restitution Act. Frankfurt (Main) 1957.

literature

• Institute for Contemporary History Munich and Research Foundation for Jewish Immigration Inc. New York (ed.): Biographical manual of German-speaking emigration after 1933. Volume I: Politics, economy, public life. KG Saur, Munich / New York / London / Paris 1980, general management Werner Röder and Herbert Strauss, ISBN 3-598-10087-6 .
• Julia von dem Knesebeck: The Roma Struggle for Compensation in Post-War Germany. Hatfield (UK) 2011.
• Cornelia Lissner: "In the judiciary I live like in exile" - On the return of Jewish lawyers. In: Anne Klein, Jürgen Wilhelm (eds.): Nazi injustice before Cologne courts after 1945. Cologne 2003, pp. 75–88.
• Patrick Major: The Death of the KPD. Communism and Anti-Communism in West Germany, 1945–1956. Oxford Historical Monographs, Oxford 1998.
• Gilad Margalit: The post-war Germans and "their gypsies". The treatment of the Sinti and Roma in the shadow of Auschwitz. Berlin 2001.
• Max Oppenheimer (Ed.): Antifascism. Tradition, politics, perspective. History and goals of the VVN-Bund der Antifaschisten. Frankfurt am Main 1978.
• Boris Spernol: In the “cross fire” of the Cold War. The Marcel Frenkel case and the repression of the communists. In: Norbert Frei , José Brunner , Constantin Goschler (Hrsg.): The practice of reparation. History, experience and impact in Germany and Israel. Wallstein, Göttingen 2009, pp. 203-236.
• Boris Spernol: The “Communist Clause ”. Reparation Practice as an Instrument of Anti-Communism. In: Stefan Creuzberger, Dierk Hoffmann (eds.): "Spiritual danger" and "Immunization of society". Anti-Communism and Political Culture in the Early Federal Republic. Munich 2014, pp. 251–274.
• Elfi Pracht-Jörns (arr.): Jewish worlds in the Rhineland. Annotated sources from the early modern period to the present. Cologne / Weimar / Vienna 2011.
• Stephanie Wolfe: The Politics of Reparations and Apologies. Heidelberg / Dordrecht / London 2014.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ All information according to: Marcel Frenkel: The oaths in the future criminal law. Quakenbrück 1930.
2. ↑ Cordula Lissner. In the judiciary I live like in exile. On the return of Jewish lawyers. In: Anne Klein, Jürgen Wilhelm: Nazi injustice before Cologne courts after 1945. Cologne 2003, pp. 75–88, here: p. 83.
3. ↑ Cordula Lissner: Go back the escape route. Remigration to North Rhine-Westphalia 1945–1955. Essen 2006, p. 328.
4. ↑ Cornelia Lissner: “In the judiciary I live like in exile” - On the return of Jewish lawyers. In: Anne Klein, Jürgen Wilhelm (eds.): Nazi injustice before Cologne courts after 1945. Cologne 2003, pp. 75–88, here: pp. 82 f.
5. ↑ Unless otherwise stated up to this point: Boris Spernol: In the crossfire of the cold war. The Marcel Frenkel case and the repression of the communists. In: Norbert Frei , José Brunner , Constantin Goschler (Hrsg.): The practice of reparation. History, experience and impact in Germany and Israel (= series of publications by the Minerva Institute for German History at Tel Aviv University. Volume 28). Göttingen 2009, pp. 203-236, here: pp. 207 f.
6. ↑ ^{a b c} Biographical manual of German-speaking emigration after 1933 , Volume 1: Politics, economics, public life. Munich 1980, p. 192.
7. ↑ Frenkel, Marcel, Dr. In: Martin Schumacher (Ed.): MdB - The People's Representation 1946–1972. - [Faber to Fyrnys] (=  KGParl online publications ). Commission for the History of Parliamentarism and Political Parties e. V., Berlin 2006, ISBN 978-3-00-020703-7 , pp. 325 , urn : nbn: de: 101: 1-2014070812574 ( kgparl.de [PDF; 253 kB ; accessed on June 19, 2017]).
8. ↑ Boris Spernol: In the crossfire of the cold war. The Marcel Frenkel case and the repression of the communists. In: Norbert Frei, José Brunner, Constantin Goschler (Hrsg.): The practice of reparation. History, experience and impact in Germany and Israel (= series of publications by the Minerva Institute for German History at Tel Aviv University. Volume 28), Göttingen 2009, pp. 203–236, here: p. 210.
9. ↑ Boris Spernol: In the crossfire of the cold war. The Marcel Frenkel case and the repression of the communists. In: Norbert Frei, José Brunner, Constantin Goschler (Hrsg.): The practice of reparation. History, experience and impact in Germany and Israel (= series of publications by the Minerva Institute for German History at Tel Aviv University. Volume 28), Göttingen 2009, pp. 203–236, here: p. 219.
10. ↑ All information according to: Gilad Margalit : The post-war Germans and "their gypsies". The treatment of the Sinti and Roma in the shadow of Auschwitz. Berlin 2001, passim, in particular p. 127 ff., 151.
11. ↑ Recognition of politically, racially, religiously persecuted persons etc. a. Gypsies, forced sterilization, foreigners etc. (1948–49). Main State Archive Düsseldorf, holdings NW 114, WGM general. - Quoted from: Julia von dem Knesebeck: The Roma Struggle for Compensation in Post-War Germany. University of Hertfordshire Press, Hatfield / Hertfordshire 2011, p. 80.
12. ↑ All information according to: Gilad Margalit: The post-war Germans and "their gypsies". The treatment of the Sinti and Roma in the shadow of Auschwitz. Berlin 2001, passim, especially p. 165.
13. ↑ Constantin Goschler, reparation. West Germany and the Persecuted by National Socialism 1945–1954, Munich 1992, pp. 85, 90, 95.
14. ↑ Gilad Margalit: The post-war Germans and "their gypsies". The treatment of the Sinti and Roma in the shadow of Auschwitz. Berlin 2001, p. 122.
15. ↑ Boris Spernol: The "Communist Clause ". Reparation Practice as an Instrument of Anti-Communism. In: Stefan Creuzberger / Dierk Hoffmann (eds.): "Spiritual danger" and "Immunization of society". Anti-Communism and Political Culture in the Early Federal Republic. Munich 2014, p. 224.
16. ↑ Boris Spernol: In the crossfire of the cold war. The Marcel Frenkel case and the repression of the communists. In: Norbert Frei, José Brunner, Constantin Goschler (Hrsg.): The practice of reparation. History, experience and impact in Germany and Israel (= series of publications by the Minerva Institute for German History at Tel Aviv University. Volume 28), Göttingen 2009, pp. 203–236, here: p. 214.
17. ↑ Boris Spernol: In the crossfire of the cold war. The Marcel Frenkel case and the repression of the communists. In: Norbert Frei, José Brunner, Constantin Goschler (Hrsg.): The practice of reparation. History, experience and impact in Germany and Israel (= series of publications by the Minerva Institute for German History at Tel Aviv University. Volume 28), Göttingen 2009, pp. 203–236, here: p. 216.
18. ↑ Boris Spernol: In the crossfire of the cold war. The Marcel Frenkel case and the repression of the communists. In: Norbert Frei, José Brunner, Constantin Goschler (Hrsg.): The practice of reparation. History, experience and impact in Germany and Israel (= series of publications by the Minerva Institute for German History at Tel Aviv University. Volume 28), Göttingen 2009, pp. 203–236, here: pp. 216, 223.
19. ↑ All information according to: Gilad Margalit: The post-war Germans and "their gypsies". The treatment of the Sinti and Roma in the shadow of Auschwitz. Berlin 2001, passim, here: p. 154ff.
20. ↑ Cordula Lissner, Going back the escape route: Remigration to North Rhine and Westphalia 1945–1955 , Essen 2006, p. 280.
21. ^ Peter Hüttenberger: North Rhine-Westphalia and the emergence of its parliamentary democracy. Siegburg 1973, p. 487.
22. ↑ The last two citations: Minutes of the 200th cabinet meeting on September 25, 1950, in: Landesarchiv NRW, Edition Protocols, see: archive.nrw.de .
23. ↑ Boris Spernol: The "Communist Clause ". Reparation Practice as an Instrument of Anti-Communism. In: Stefan Creuzberger / Dierk Hoffmann (eds.): "Spiritual danger" and "Immunization of society". Anti-Communism and Political Culture in the Early Federal Republic. Munich 2014, p. 259ff.
24. ↑ Cornelia Lissner: “In the judiciary I live like in exile” - On the return of Jewish lawyers. In: Anne Klein, Jürgen Wilhelm (eds.): Nazi injustice before Cologne courts after 1945. Cologne 2003, pp. 75–88, here: pp. 82 f.
25. ↑ So the information put on the net by the State Archive of North Rhine-Westphalia: 3rd cabinet meeting on September 10, 1946 .
26. ↑ Boris Spernol: In the crossfire of the cold war. The Marcel Frenkel case and the repression of the communists. In: Norbert Frei, José Brunner, Constantin Goschler (Hrsg.): The practice of reparation. History, experience and impact in Germany and Israel (= series of publications by the Minerva Institute for German History at Tel Aviv University. Volume 28), Göttingen 2009, pp. 203–236, here: p. 225.
27. ↑ Boris Spernol: In the crossfire of the cold war. The Marcel Frenkel case and the repression of the communists. In: Norbert Frei, José Brunner, Constantin Goschler (Hrsg.): The practice of reparation. History, experience and impact in Germany and Israel (= series of publications by the Minerva Institute for German History at Tel Aviv University. Volume 28), Göttingen 2009, pp. 203–236, here: p. 235.
28. ↑ Boris Spernol: In the crossfire of the cold war. The Marcel Frenkel case and the repression of the communists. In: Norbert Frei, José Brunner, Constantin Goschler (Hrsg.): The practice of reparation. History, experience and impact in Germany and Israel (= series of publications by the Minerva Institute for German History at Tel Aviv University. Volume 28), Göttingen 2009, pp. 203–236, here: pp. 230 ff.
29. ↑ Max Oppenheimer (ed.): Antifaschismus. Tradition, politics, perspective. History and goals of the VVN-Bund der Antifaschisten , Frankfurt am Main 1978, p. 19.
30. ↑ Boris Spernol: In the crossfire of the cold war. The Marcel Frenkel case and the repression of the communists. In: Norbert Frei, José Brunner, Constantin Goschler (Hrsg.): The practice of reparation. History, experience and impact in Germany and Israel (= series of publications by the Minerva Institute for German History at Tel Aviv University. Volume 28), Göttingen 2009, pp. 203–236, here: pp. 207 f.
31. ↑ Cordula Lissner: Go back the escape route. Remigration to North Rhine-Westphalia 1945–1955. Essen 2006, p. 328.
32. ^ Streiflichter from 50 years of unification of those persecuted by the Nazi regime in North Rhine-Westphalia. Wuppertal 2002, p. 52 ( nrw.vvn-bda.de PDF).
33. ↑ Elfi Pracht-Jörns (arr.): Jüdische Lebenswelten in Rheinland. Annotated sources from the early modern period to the present. Vienna 2011, p. 345 ff.