Max Plaut (lawyer, 1888)

Maximilian Friedrich Plaut (born June 1, 1888 in Kassel ; † March 31, 1933 there ) was a German lawyer and notary .

Life

Maximilian Friedrich Plaut was born in Kassel as the son of the banker Leopold Plaut. His father was a deeply religious Jew and for a long time the elder of the Jewish community in Kassel .

After graduating from the Wilhelmsgymnasium Kassel , he studied law at the Universities of Göttingen , Jena and Geneva . He put the state examination on 18 June 1910 off and on 11 April 1911, he was with a thesis entitled The transition of the business of a partnership on one of its members graduated .

Although he was drafted into the military during the First World War , he was able to complete his legal traineeship on January 15, 1916 with the second state examination. Towards the end of 1918 he returned to Kassel and was admitted as a lawyer at the regional and local court of Kassel on December 7, 1918 , and appointed as a notary on January 12, 1927. His office was located in downtown Kassel in Wolfsschlucht 24a in the Henschelhaus .

When the National Socialists gained strength, Plaut was already in their focus because he was often their opponent in litigation. B. published propaganda articles against him in the Nazi newspaper Hessische Volkswacht . For example, the removal of the notary's office and professional measures by the bar association were requested against him. A leading National Socialist in Kassel was the lawyer Roland Freisler , a member of the Prussian state parliament since 1932 and later president of the People's Court . After Hitler was appointed Reich Chancellor in January, the Kassel National Socialists waited for the Enabling Act to be passed on March 23, before proceeding to “personal accounting”. On the evening of March 24, 1933 at around 6 p.m., an SA troop broke into Plaut's office and dragged him into the citizens' halls , a restaurant that was popular with party supporters of the NSDAP and members of the SA and is now a place of torture and mistreatment has been. Plaut was then taken to his apartment at Wilhelmshöher Allee 55, and the doctor who was called had to put him under permanent anesthesia due to the most serious injuries he had sustained during the abuse, including a crushing of the kidneys and lungs . He succumbed to his injuries a week later. The public prosecutor's office then investigated “against unknown persons” because of a homicide. After the autopsy of the body, however, the medics did not want to pinpoint a clear cause of death, and the case was eventually dropped. His burial in the new Jewish cemetery in Kassel-Bettenhausen took place under police surveillance, and his widow was only allowed to post an obituary notice afterwards. Plaut is considered the first to be killed by the National Socialists in Kassel. The lawyer Julius Dalberg also suffered this mistreatment in the same place on March 24th, which he only barely survived. Dalberg was murdered in Sobibor in 1943 .

On April 10, 1933, the President of the Regional Court informed the Prussian Minister of Justice that the lawyer and notary Max Plaut had died, and he was deleted from the list of lawyers kept by the Regional Court on the same day.

Stumbling block for Max Plaut

Grave of Max Plaut in the new Jewish cemetery in Kassel-Bettenhausen

effect

Since Plaut was quite a prominent person, the days of “excesses of violence”, during which other people were also mistreated, became known nationwide. Kassel was then visited by American newspaper correspondents who were accredited in Frankfurt am Main to investigate these rumors. However, they left the city again after being deceived by statements about temporarily arrested Jews, and since “law and order” seemed to prevail in Kassel itself.

At the former location of the citizens' halls near the Kassel town hall, a memorial plaque was set up, which among other things reminds of the fate of Max Plaut.

Family and personal life

Max Plaut was married to Elsa Plaut from Switzerland and had three children with her. After the husband's death, the widow returned to her homeland and her children were first told that their father had died in an accident.

Plaut played the violin and was active in the musical life of Kassel. Between around 1921 and 1931 he wrote music reviews for the Kasseler Neuesten Nachrichten that received national attention.

Appreciations

• Stumbling block at his last residence
• His grave has been an honorary grave of the city of Kassel since 2015 .

literature

• Martina Schröder-Teppe, Kassel Bar Association (ed.): When injustice becomes right ... The fate of Jewish lawyers in the Kassel Bar Association after 1933. Wartberg , Gudensberg-Gleichen 2006, ISBN 978-3-83131-433-1 .
• The Brown Book of The Hitler Terror and the Burning of the Reichstag, Prepared by the World Committee for the Victims of German Fascism . Victor Gollancz, London 1933, p. 239, p. 344, book excerpt, p. 239.

Web links

• On the persecution in the “citizens' halls” in the spring of 1933 and on how society dealt with what happened in the post-war period (PDF), address at the commemoration of the city of Kassel on January 27, 2009 by Gunnar Richter

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Dissertation by Max Plaut on Google Books.
2. ↑ Weisenborn gives here, first in 1953, erroneously on March 27, see: Günther Weisenborn (Ed.): The silent uprising: Report on d. Resistance movement d. German people 1933–1945 . Frankfurt / Main: Röderberg-Verlag, 1981, p. 280.
3. ↑ Dietfrid Krause-Vilmar : On the expulsion and extermination of the German-Jewish population in North Hesse during the Nazi dictatorship . In: Mitteilungen '98 of the Naumburg History Society. V. Naumburg 1999, pp. 19-28. PDF manuscript (145 kB).
4. ^ The Brown Book of The Hitler Terror, 1933, p. 240.
5. ↑ Julius Dahlberg ( Memento of the original from October 28, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. [sic!], at Vöhl synagogue .