Legal process

The Nuremberg legal process took place from February 17, 1947 to December 14, 1947 as the third of the twelve Nuremberg follow-up trials against those responsible for the German Reich at the time of National Socialism in the Nuremberg Palace of Justice before an American military court . Officially, the process was named United States vs. Josef Altstötter et al. designated. 16 high-ranking judicial officials and judges of the Nazi regime were charged .

However, the most prominent actors in the Nazi judiciary were no longer alive in 1947. Reich Minister of Justice Franz Gürtner died in January 1941, while the State Secretary in the Reich Ministry of Justice and later President of the People's Court, Roland Freisler , died in an Allied air raid in February 1945. Reich Justice Minister Otto Thierack had committed suicide , as had the President of the Reich Court Erwin Bumke . The "Reichsrechtsführer" and later governor general for the occupied territories of Poland, Hans Frank , had already been sentenced to death and executed in 1946 in the Nuremberg trial of the main war criminals .

The subject of the legal process was the enactment and enforcement of the Nazi terror laws, namely those that related to the areas occupied by the German Wehrmacht during the Second World War . Only those crimes against humanity that were connected with this criminal war of aggression were charged, i.e. not the events between 1933 and 1939. The subjects of negotiation were, for example, the People's Pest Ordinance of September 5, 1939, the Polish Criminal Law Ordinance of December 4, 1941 or the night-time and Nebel decree of December 7, 1941, with which the special courts in particular the criminal war goal of murdering all ideologically unpopular persons (political opponents, Jews, Gypsies, Poles, Russians and Ukrainians, "habitual criminals" and other "anti-social." Elements ”).

The verdicts were pronounced on December 3rd and 4th, 1947. Four defendants were to lifelong prison sentenced four others were acquitted. The court also imposed sentences of five to ten years in prison. In contrast to the trial before the International Military Tribunal and other follow-up trials, no death sentences were passed. The verdict was often felt to be too mild.

The legal process in Nuremberg

Indictment and Legal Basis

The basis of the indictment was the Control Council Act No. 10 , which assigned legal competence for this process with Order No. 7 of the military government to the Military Court No. 1 in Nuremberg and from which the following four counts were derived:

I conspiracy to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity
II war crimes
III crimes against humanity
IV Membership in criminal organizations

Counts I to III were directed against all of the accused, count IV only against individual accused. The core of the indictment was "the Nazi legal system as a criminal institute". Excess criminals were not accused, but those who, as officials of the Ministry of Justice, drafted and helped to shape the criminal laws or executed them as public prosecutors or judges at the People's Court and the special courts and thus embodied the Nazi-unjust state. The accused were those 'lawyers who had carried the dagger under their robes'. The prosecutor was Telford Taylor , who also wrote the January 4, 1947 indictment. At the request of the defense and after examining the legal basis, a court decision was made not to negotiate the charge of the conspiracy independently.

The court

Judge

The court was composed of four American judges:

Carrington T. Marshall , former President of the Ohio State Supreme Court , as presiding judge
James T. Brand , Ohio State Supreme Court Justice, as Judge
Mallory B. Blair , Texas Appeals Court Judge, as Judge
Justin W. Harding , Former Alaska Judge and Assistant Attorney General for Ohio State, serves as assistant judge

After Marshall was eliminated from the trial due to his health condition, Brand was appointed presiding judge and Harding was promoted from assistant judge to judge.

Judgments

Defendant	rank	function	Guilty on charge	judgment
Josef Altstötter * 1892; † 1979	SS-Oberführer	Ministerial Director and Head of the Civil Law Department in the Reich Ministry of Justice (RMJ)	IV	5 years - released from prison in 1950
Wilhelm von Ammon * 1903; † 1992		Ministerial Councilor for Criminal Justice in the RMJ	II, III	10 years - pardoned January 1951
Paul Barnickel * 1885; † 1966		Reich Attorney at the People's Court		acquittal
Hermann Cuhorst * 1899; † 1991		Senate President and Chairman of the Stuttgart Special Court		acquittal
Karl Engert * 1877; † 1951	SS-Oberführer	Ministerial Director in the RMJ, Vice-President of the People's Court		dropped out of the proceedings due to illness
Günther Joel * 1903; † 1978	SS-Obersturmbannführer	Ministerial Councilor in the RMJ, then Attorney General in Hamm	II, III, IV	10 years - pardoned January 1951
Herbert Klemm * 1903; † 1957		State Secretary in the RMJ	II, III	for life - reduced to 20 years and released in February 1957
Ernst Lautz * 1887; † 1979		Senior Reich Attorney at the People's Court	II, III	10 years - pardoned January 1951
Wolfgang Mettgenberg * 1882; † 1950		Ministerial Director for Criminal Justice in the RMJ with special responsibilities for areas occupied	II, III	10 years - died in 1950
Günther Nebelung * 1896; † 1970		President of the 4th Senate of the People's Court		acquittal
Rudolf Oeschey * 1903; † 1980	Head of the district headquarters of the NSDAP's legal office	District judge at the Nuremberg Special Court	III, IV	for life, reduced to 20 years in 1951, released from prison in May 1955
Hans Petersen * 1885; † 1963		Lay judge of the 1st Senate of the People's Court		acquittal
Oswald Rothaug * 1897; † 1967		Chairman of the Nuremberg Special Court, most recently attorney at the People's Court	III	Lifelong prison, reduced to 20 years and released from prison in December 1956
Curt Rothenberger * 1896; † 1959		President of the Higher Regional Court in Hamburg, then State Secretary in the RMJ	II, III	7 years in prison, released from prison in August 1950
Franz Schlegelberger * 1876; † 1970		State Secretary in the RMJ and temporarily Deputy Minister of Justice	I, III	Lifelong prison, pardoned in January 1951 for incapacity for prison
Carl Westphal * 1902; † around 1946		Ministerial Councilor in the RMJ		Suicide before negotiations begin

The reasons for the judgment

In the grounds of the judgment, the court dealt in detail with the defense's argument that the defendants could not be convicted for offenses that were not punishable at the time of the offense, which is why they lacked awareness of wrongdoing. However, the court rejected these objections, referring to the generally recognized, also unwritten rules of international law that had already applied at the time of the offense, as well as the necessity of a judgment by the civilized world on the "draconian, corrupt and depraved National Socialist legal system".

In the judgment of 250 printed pages, the reasoning stated:

“Simple murder or individual cases of atrocities are not the starting point for the accusation. The defendants are charged with such immeasurable crimes that mere isolated incidents of crime appear insignificant in comparison. The charge, in short, is that of conscious participation in a nationwide and government-organized system of cruelty and injustice and violation of the laws of war and the laws of humanity, committed in the name of the law under the authority of the Justice Department Help the courts. The murderer's dagger was hidden under the judge's robe. "

Enforcement of sentences

On January 31, 1951, following the recommendation of an advisory committee, the American High Commissioner John Jay McCloy decided to grant the pardon requests of Günther Joel, Ernst Lautz, Wilhelm von Ammon and Franz Schlegelberger, who were detained in the Landsberg correctional facility , and to release them from prison. In addition, Herbert Klemm, Rudolf Oeschey and Oswald Rothaug's sentence was reduced from life to 20 years.

Some of the defendants, e.g. B. Lautz, Rothenberger and Schlegelberger received pension payments in the Federal Republic of Germany because of their previous activities. The name Schlegelberger appeared for a long time as the founder of a commentary on the Commercial Code and other legal works, B. The Law of the Present ( ISBN 3-8006-2859-7 ).

reception

The General Justice Office for the British Zone had published the general part of the judgment in Hamburg as early as 1948, while the special part with the explanations on the functioning of the Nazi judiciary and the actions of the individual defendants was published "only for official use" .

The publication of the judgment in the GDR in 1969 was hardly noticed in West Germany.

The 1985 edition by Heribert Ostendorf does not contain the full text of the German version of the judgment either. This was not printed in full in the official translation until 1996 by Lore Maria Peschel-Gutzeit .

Some authors refer to this fact of the lack of documentation of the judgment, e. B. Telford Taylor - for today's jurists and historians, Klaus Bästlein should be mentioned - remarks that German jurisprudence predominantly rejected the judgment because of the alleged violation of the principle " nullum crimen sine lege " or " nulla poena sine lege " subsequently no longer dealt with the judgment.

filming

The judges' trial was 1961, the template for the American feature film Judgment at Nuremberg , German Judgment at Nuremberg with Spencer Tracy , Burt Lancaster and Maximilian Schell in the lead roles.

literature

Books:

Manfred Görtemaker , Christoph Safferling (Hrsg.): The Rosenburg. The Federal Ministry of Justice and the Nazi past - an inventory . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2013, ISBN 978-3-525-30046-6 .
Jörg Friedrich : The cold amnesty. Nazi perpetrators in the Federal Republic. Frankfurt 1984. Extended new edition, List, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-548-60748-1 .
Rudolf Wassermann : Case 3: The Nuremberg Legal Trial. in: Gerd R. Ueberschär (Ed.): The National Socialism in front of a court. The allied trials of war criminals and soldiers 1943–1952 ( Fischer pocket books. The time of National Socialism 13589). Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1999, ISBN 3-596-13589-3 , p. 99 ff.
Lore Maria Peschel-Gutzeit (Ed.): The Nuremberg jurists' judgment of 1947 - historical context and current references. Nomos, Baden-Baden 1996, ISBN 978-3-7890-4528-8 .
Heribert Ostendorf , Heino ter Veen: The “Nuremberg Jurists' Judgment”. An annotated documentation. Campus, Frankfurt am Main / Berlin 1985, ISBN 3-593-33424-0 .
Central Justice Office for the British Zone: The Nuremberg Jurist Judgment (General Part). Production and distribution, legal and political science publisher, Hamburg 1948.

Journal articles:

Klaus Kastner: "What was right then cannot be wrong today", Anwaltsblatt 2017, 1165.
Gustav Radbruch : The Reich Ministry's fame and end. To the Nuremberg legal process. Süddeutsche Juristenteitung 1948, Sp. 57.

Web links

Commons : Legal process - collection of images, videos and audio files

Dörte Hinrichs, Hans Rubinich: From Hitler to Adenauer. In: Die Zeit of November 29, 2007, No. 49, p. 114.
The Nuremberg Trials: The Justice Trial. A Commentary on the Justice Case, Doug Linder by (English)
Klaus Kastner: The Nuremberg Jurists Trial 1947 pdf. Retrieved October 17, 2014.
Video collection on the Nuremberg trials of the Robert H. Jackson Center, including recordings from the legal trial (1947/48)
Complete judgment of the Nuremberg Special Court of March 23, 1942 against Leo Katzenberger and Irene Seiler and affidavit of the former associate judge Dr. Karl Ferber of January 24, 1947 on the Katzenberger case for the purpose of taking evidence against the accused former presiding judge in the Katzenberger case, Oswald Rothaug, in the Nuremberg legal trial.
Stephan Alexander Glienke: The dagger under the judge's robe. The processing of the Nazi justice in society, science and jurisprudence of the Federal Republic . zeitgeschichte-online.de

Individual evidence

^ Rudolf Wassermann : Case 3: The Nuremberg Legal Trial. in: Gerd R. Ueberschär (Ed.): The National Socialism in front of a court. The allied trials of war criminals and soldiers 1943–1952 ( Fischer pocket books. The time of National Socialism 13589). Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1999, ISBN 3-596-13589-3 , pp. 103/104.
^ Rudolf Wassermann : Case 3: The Nuremberg Legal Trial. in: Gerd R. Ueberschär (Ed.): The National Socialism in front of a court. The allied trials of war criminals and soldiers 1943–1952 ( Fischer pocket books. The time of National Socialism 13589). Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1999, ISBN 3-596-13589-3 , p. 101.
^ The Nuremberg Jurists' Judgment, Military Courts of the United States, Justizpalast zu Nürnberg, Germany. Session of the Military Court No. III on December 3 and 4, 1947 in Nuremberg, reasons for the judgment
↑ judgment in Peschel-Gutzeit, pp. 64–66; see: Klaus Bästlein: The Nuremberg Legal Trial and its Reception in Germany. In: Peschel-Gutzeit (Hrsg.): The Nuremberg Jurists' Judgment of 1947. 1996, pp. 9–35, here: p. 11 and for the subsequent reception in German jurisprudence p. 23 ff.
^ Judgment in the Nuremberg legal process, in: BA, All. Proc. 1, XVII, S1 p. 56.
^ Hennig von Alten: Right or Wrong? The State Secretary's administrative litigation a. D. Prof. Dr. Dr. hc Franz Schlegelberger for his civil service pension payments. Books on Demand, Norderstedt 2013, ISBN 978-3-8391-1582-4 .
^ PA Steiniger ; K. Leszczyński Ed .: Case 3- The judgment in the legal process. Liked on December 4, 1947 by the United States Military Tribunal III. VEB Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften, Berlin (GDR) 1969.
↑ Joachim Perels : The Nuremberg Legal Trial in the Context of Post-War History: Exclusion and Late Reception of an American Judgment . Critical Justice 1998, pp. 84–98.
↑ Heribert Ostendorf, Heino ter Veen: The "Nuremberg Jurists' Judgment". An annotated documentation. Campus, Frankfurt am Main / Berlin 1985, ISBN 3-593-33424-0 .
^ Lore Maria Peschel-Gutzeit (Ed.): The Nuremberg jurists' judgment of 1947 - historical context and current references. Nomos, Baden-Baden 1996, ISBN 978-3-7890-4528-8 .
↑ Klaus Bästlein: The Nuremberg legal judgment and its reception in Germany. In: Lore Maria Peschel-Gutzeit (Hrsg.): The Nuremberg jurists judgment of 1947: historical context and current references, Nomos, Baden-Baden 1996, ISBN 978-3-7890-4528-8 , p. 26.

[1] Rudolf Wassermann : Case 3: The Nuremberg Legal Trial. in: Gerd R. Ueberschär (Ed.): The National Socialism in front of a court. The allied trials of war criminals and soldiers 1943–1952 ( Fischer pocket books. The time of National Socialism 13589). Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1999, ISBN 3-596-13589-3 , pp. 103/104.

[2] Rudolf Wassermann : Case 3: The Nuremberg Legal Trial. in: Gerd R. Ueberschär (Ed.): The National Socialism in front of a court. The allied trials of war criminals and soldiers 1943–1952 ( Fischer pocket books. The time of National Socialism 13589). Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1999, ISBN 3-596-13589-3 , p. 101.

[3] The Nuremberg Jurists' Judgment, Military Courts of the United States, Justizpalast zu Nürnberg, Germany. Session of the Military Court No. III on December 3 and 4, 1947 in Nuremberg, reasons for the judgment

[4] udgment in Peschel-Gutzeit, pp. 64–66; see: Klaus Bästlein: The Nuremberg Legal Trial and its Reception in Germany. In: Peschel-Gutzeit (Hrsg.): The Nuremberg Jurists' Judgment of 1947. 1996, pp. 9–35, here: p. 11 and for the subsequent reception in German jurisprudence p. 23 ff.

[5] Judgment in the Nuremberg legal process, in: BA, All. Proc. 1, XVII, S1 p. 56.

[6] Hennig von Alten: Right or Wrong? The State Secretary's administrative litigation a. D. Prof. Dr. Dr. hc Franz Schlegelberger for his civil service pension payments. Books on Demand, Norderstedt 2013, ISBN 978-3-8391-1582-4 .

[7] PA Steiniger ; K. Leszczyński Ed .: Case 3- The judgment in the legal process. Liked on December 4, 1947 by the United States Military Tribunal III. VEB Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften, Berlin (GDR) 1969.

[8] Joachim Perels : The Nuremberg Legal Trial in the Context of Post-War History: Exclusion and Late Reception of an American Judgment . Critical Justice 1998, pp. 84–98.

[9] Heribert Ostendorf, Heino ter Veen: The "Nuremberg Jurists' Judgment". An annotated documentation. Campus, Frankfurt am Main / Berlin 1985, ISBN 3-593-33424-0 .

[10] Lore Maria Peschel-Gutzeit (Ed.): The Nuremberg jurists' judgment of 1947 - historical context and current references. Nomos, Baden-Baden 1996, ISBN 978-3-7890-4528-8 .

[11] Klaus Bästlein: The Nuremberg legal judgment and its reception in Germany. In: Lore Maria Peschel-Gutzeit (Hrsg.): The Nuremberg jurists judgment of 1947: historical context and current references, Nomos, Baden-Baden 1996, ISBN 978-3-7890-4528-8 , p. 26.