Max Fechner
Max Fechner (born July 27, 1892 in Rixdorf , † September 13, 1973 in Schöneiche ) was Justice Minister of the GDR from 1949 . In 1953 he was removed from office as an "enemy of the state and the party" and was imprisoned until 1956. He was later accepted by the SED and honored by Walter Ulbricht .
Life
After attending primary school, Fechner trained as a toolmaker and then worked until April 1920, with interruptions due to participation in the First World War , in the profession he had learned. He joined the SPD in 1910 , was a member of the USPD from 1917 to 1922 and then returned to the SPD. From 1921 to 1925 he was a district councilor for the Berlin district of Neukölln , from 1925 to 1928 a city councilor in Berlin and from 1928 to 1933 a member of the Prussian state parliament . He worked on the party executive committee of the SPD and was responsible editor of the communal political magazine Die Gemeinde since 1924 .
Fechner was active in the resistance group around Franz Künstler and was imprisoned from 1933 to 1934 ( Oranienburg concentration camp ) and 1944 to 1945.
After the war, Fechner was a member of the central committee of the SPD and of the party executive or central committee of the SED . In the course of the forced unification of the SPD and KPD to form the SED , he was one of the supporters of the union. From 1946 to 1948 he was a city councilor for Greater Berlin , a member of the German People's Council until 1949 and the People's Chamber until 1950 .
In 1948, Fechner succeeded Eugen Schiffer as President of the German Central Administration of Justice (DJV) of the SBZ . From 1949 to 1951 he was President of the Association of Democratic Jurists in Germany (VDJD) and from October 1949 until his impeachment in July 1953, Minister for Justice of the GDR.
In an interview with Neues Deutschland on June 30, 1953, Max Fechner announced in connection with the wave of arrests that went through the GDR after the failed uprising of June 17 , that only those "who were guilty of a serious crime", would be punished. Without evidence, there would be no punishment of members of the strike leadership and of ringleaders “on mere suspicion or serious suspicion”. Fechner was removed from office as an "enemy of the state and the party", expelled from the SED and arrested. After two years of pre-trial detention on 14 July 1953 to 24 May 1955 in the remand prison Berlin-Hohenschönhausen he was appointed by the Supreme Court to eight years in prison convicted; Fechner were also accused of homosexual offenses.
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On June 24, 1956, Fechner was released from custody in Bautzen II and two days later, in the course of de-Stalinization, together with Paul Baender and Paul Szillat and 85 other convicts, he was pardoned by the President of the Republic, Wilhelm Pieck . In June 1958 his party membership was restored. Fechner received the Patriotic Order of Merit in silver in 1965 and in gold in 1967 and the Karl Marx Order in 1972 . His urn was buried in the memorial of the socialists in the central cemetery Friedrichsfelde in Berlin-Lichtenberg . In 1982, the GDR's Deutsche Post issued a special postage stamp in his honor .
Publications
- Open letter to Schumacher , Berlin 1946
- How did it happen? Excerpts from the diaries and confessions of a war criminal , Berlin 1946
- Youth and Politics , Berlin 1946
- The social task of the people's judges , Potsdam 1947
- Nature and tasks of the new democratic self-government , Berlin 1948
literature
- Rudi Beckert: Dear Comrade Max. The rise and fall of the first Minister of Justice in the GDR, Max Fechner . Series of publications on justice research and legal sociology, 5; BWV - Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, Berlin 2003; ISBN 3-8305-0149-8 .
- Ernst Kienast (Ed.): Handbook for the Prussian Landtag , edition for the 5th electoral period, Berlin 1933, p. 320.
- Werner Breunig, Andreas Herbst : Biographical handbook of the Berlin city councilors and representatives 1946–1963 (= series of publications of the Berlin State Archives. Vol. 14). Landesarchiv Berlin, Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-9803303-4-3 , p. 94.
- Andreas Herbst, Helmut Müller-Enbergs : Fechner, Max . In: Who was who in the GDR? 5th edition. Volume 1. Ch. Links, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-561-4 .
- Max Fechner's biography . In: Wilhelm H. Schröder : Social Democratic Parliamentarians in the German Reich and Landtag 1876–1933 (BIOSOP)
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Berlin-Hohenschönhausen Memorial: Biography of Fechner ( Memento from October 27, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ All detainees come before an ordinary court. In: Neues Deutschland from June 30, 1953, No. 150, p. 5.
- ^ Karl Wilhelm Fricke : Historical revisionism from an MfS perspective ( Memento from June 27, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 132 kB)
- ↑ Pure education. New records show that the SED and the Stasi harassed homosexuals until the 1980s. Der Spiegel, June 24, 1996
- ↑ Bernd-Ulrich Hergemöller : Man for man. Biographical lexicon on the history of love for friends and male sexuality in the German-speaking area . LIT-Verlag, Münster 2010, ISBN 978-3-643-10693-3 , page 220
- ^ President Pieck pardoned 88 people. In: Neues Deutschland from April 27, 1956, No. 102, p. 1.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Fechner, Max |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German politicians (SPD, USPD, SED), MdL, MdV, Minister for Justice of the GDR |
| DATE OF BIRTH | July 27, 1892 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Rixdorf |
| DATE OF DEATH | September 13, 1973 |
| Place of death | Schöneiche near Berlin |