Otto Grünewald

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Otto Grünewald (born March 29, 1897 in Bad Wimpfen , † July 29, 1980 in Murnau ) was a German judge and general judge in the Wehrmacht during the Second World War

Grünewald was a war volunteer from 1915 to 1918. He studied law in Giessen with the completion of his doctorate (Dr. jur.) In 1922 (dissertation: The development of the certainty of punitive threats in German criminal law since the 18th century ). From 1925 he was in the Hessian Ministry of Justice and from 1926 to 1934 a judge (1926 district judge in Oppenheim , 1928 district judge and 1929 regional judge in Darmstadt ). For political reasons he was dismissed in Hesse and transferred to the Prussian civil service. From October 1935 he was a district judge in Berlin and from 1937 in the Wehrmacht. In 1937 he became a councilor and a year later a senior councilor. He was a divisional judge , from 1938 to 1940 an advisor for criminal law at the OKH in Berlin and in 1940 a judge at the Supreme Command of the Wehrmacht in France. In 1940 he became a judge-martial. He was then a judge at the OKH until 1942 and was then transferred to the OKH's judicial department. He was involved in the commissioner 's order. In 1942 he became a Reich judge and in August 1944 general judge. From November 1942 to May 1945 he was head of the field jurisdiction department at OKH. From 1945 to 1947 he was a US prisoner of war. In 1947/48 he was one of the defenders of Chief Staff Judge Rudolf Lehmann in the Nuremberg Trials , the former head of the legal department of the Wehrmacht, who was the only military judge charged in the Nuremberg Trials. Lehmann was sentenced to seven years in prison but released in 1950. In 1948 he was again in the Hessian state services and from 1952 assigned to the Blank office, where he was involved in the laws on military service and military law of the newly founded Bundeswehr (plans for a separate military jurisdiction were not fulfilled, however). In 1952 he sat with another former army judge, Elmar Brandstetter (formerly chief judge), in the EVG interim committee in Paris. 1955 to 1957 he was department head in the Ministry of Defense. From 1957 until his retirement in 1964 he was a judge (Senate President) at the Federal Disciplinary Court in Munich, who dealt with disciplinary proceedings of the Bundeswehr.

He was a member of the federal board of the German Association of Judges.

In the trial of Ferdinand Schörner in 1957, he was not questioned on suspicion of complicity.

literature

  • Wolfgang Koppel: Justice in Twilight, Documentation - NS Judgments - Personnel Files, Catalog of Accused Lawyers, Self-published, Karlsruhe 1963
  • M. Messerschmidt: Die Wehrmachtjustiz 1933–1945, 2005, p. 456
  • Hubert Seliger: Political Lawyers ?, The Defenders of the Nuremberg Trials, Nomos 2016

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d DFG-VK Darmstadt "From nobility to forced labor - keywords on the military and National Socialism in Darmstadt", see web links
  2. ↑ Gerhard Koebler, Giessen lawyers
  3. ↑ Wolfram Wette, Joachim Perels (ed.), "With a pure conscience": Wehrmachtrichter in der Bundes Republik and their victims , Aufbau Verlag 2011
personal data
SURNAME Grünewald, Otto
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German judge
DATE OF BIRTH March 29, 1897
PLACE OF BIRTH Bad Wimpfen
DATE OF DEATH July 29, 1980
Place of death Murnau