Otto Kranzbühler

This article deals with the defense attorney for Karl Dönitz. For the naval officer from the Palatinate (1871-1946) see Otto Kranzbühler (captain) .

Otto Heinrich Kranzbühler (born July 8, 1907 in Berlin ; † August 9, 2004 in Tegernsee ) was a German lawyer and the defender of Karl Dönitz at the Nuremberg trials .

Life

Otto was the youngest son of Corvette Captain Heinrich Otto Kranzbühler (born January 17, 1871; † 1946) and had three older siblings: Caroline (1898–1969), Helmuth (1901–1978) and Elisabeth (1904–1981). After graduation in 1925 he studied in Freiburg , Bonn , Geneva and Kiel law . In 1928 he passed his legal traineeship exam. Despite the short period of study, he also found the opportunity to become an enthusiastic sailor and in 1929 - he was now working at the Kiel Institute for International Law - to pass his sea skipper exam at the Maritime School in Flensburg . After the transfer of power to the National Socialists in 1933, he was a candidate for membership in the Reiter-SA from November 1933 to February 1934 .

On January 1, 1934, he volunteered for the Reichsmarine . After participating in the Spanish War in 1937, he was transferred to the High Command of the Navy in Berlin as a consultant . After further activities as general consultant, he became a naval judge in France in 1943 . After the withdrawal he worked from September to December 1944 as the chief naval judge north in Wilhelmshaven .

In April 1945, Kranzbühler and his colleagues were arrested for four weeks. After the unconditional surrender of the Wehrmacht , he went to Wilhelmshaven on the instructions of the British occupying forces to rebuild the naval jurisdiction.

Nuremberg Trials

In October 1945 - he was now serving as a fleet judge with the German mine clearance service - he was asked by Dönitz via the British to defend him at the Nuremberg Trials before the International Military Tribunal . Of the German defense lawyers, he was the one who got along best with the Anglo-Saxon court case and was very good at the technique of cross-examination .

Kranzbühler's client Dönitz was charged with counts 1, 2 and 3, namely conspiracy against world peace , planning, unleashing and conducting a war of aggression, and crimes and violations of martial law . Under count 3, the focus was on Dönitz's "sinking of enemy merchant ships without warning", which violated the London Submarine Protocol of 1936, because according to this agreement merchant ships had to be rioted and the ship's crew brought to safety in their lifeboats become. The fact that this was violated more and more often had a background: Some sea warfare nations increasingly switched to using destroyers as escorts for merchant ships or to convert the merchant ships into warships themselves without the armament appearing outside. Bringing up a merchant ship, in turn, required the submarine to surface. As a consequence, it could happen that the merchant ships turned off as soon as the submarine came to the surface, and the destroyers bombed the submarine or the crew of the merchant ship sank it themselves. Not only the German Navy found itself in such situations, the US Navy was also affected in the war against Japan .

However, for Kranzbühler, “You do it the same way”, i.e. the “ tu quoque ” (Latin: you too ), could in no way be an argument of the defense, because there is no equal treatment in the wrong . He therefore argued that merchant ships that could be used for war purposes to escort destroyers or those that were themselves armed with naval weapons could not be merchant ships within the meaning of the London Agreement. At his request, the International Military Tribunal accepted the submission of a questionnaire, which was intended to determine how the American Navy proceeded in such cases, and forwarded it to the Supreme Admiral of the US Navy, Nimitz , for an answer. Nimitz replied frankly that the American Navy only understands “merchant ships” as those that are not combat ships, that their own submarines would torpedo enemy merchant ships that were not hospital ships without warning, and that only rescuing people in distress at sea would take place if the submarine crew could not be endangered.

With this answer the accusation of “sinking enemy merchant ships without warning” was practically invalidated and the impending death sentence was averted. However, the attacks on neutral ships were convicted on the charges of “crimes and violations of martial law”. Kranzbühler obtained an acquittal and a total of ten years' imprisonment for his client in relation to the charge of the conspiracy against world peace.

In the follow-up trials, Kranzbühler defended the company Friedrich Flicks' chief representative Odilo Burkart . He also defended Alfried Krupp von Bohlen and Halbach . In the IG Farben trial , he defended the chairman of the board, Hermann Schmitz .

Kranzbühler after 1945

After the war and the Nuremberg trials, Kranzbühler remained a lawyer and worked in a law firm. He remained connected to the arms manufacturer Rheinmetall : from 1956, Kranzbühler was a member of the supervisory boards of Rheinmetall Berlin AG and Rheinmetall GmbH. In addition, Otto Kranzbühler took over the chairmanship of the supervisory board of Wasag-Chemie Aktiengesellschaft in Essen in 1956 . In 1986, Kranzbühler - now 78 years old - was a member of the Rheinmetall Supervisory Board and advised the community of heirs of the Röchling family, formerly the majority shareholder at Rheinmetall. In 1948/49, Kranzbühler defended the senior of the family, Hermann Röchling , before the French military court in Rastatt. His influence at the parent company Krupp earned him the nickname "Graue Eminenz bei Krupp". Among other things, Kranzbühler coordinated the defense efforts of German industry against the lawsuits of former forced laborers for Krupp in the 1950s . He initiated an (unsuccessful) lobbying campaign to amend Section 8 (2) BEG in such a way that claims by former forced laborers against German industrial companies would be excluded.

Kranzbühler took part in the quarterly meetings of the Heidelberg Jurists' Circle, which coordinated the revision of the judgments from the Allied war criminals and Nazi trials . On January 25, 1952, Kranzbühler headed a delegation from the Heidelberg Jurists' Circle, which handed over their demands for a "solution to the war criminal question" to Konrad Adenauer . He also represented IG Farbenindustrie AG iL in the proceedings of the former slave laborer Rudolf Wachsmann before the American court in Mannheim 1953/54 and Paul Sydow KG, Menden against the claims of a former female slave worker .

In 1969/70 Kranzbühler represented the former Freikorpsleutnant Hermann Souchon in his lawsuit at the Stuttgart Regional Court against the Süddeutscher Rundfunk ; In January 1969, the broadcaster had broadcast a documentary on the murders of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht , in which Souchon was identified as Rosa Luxemburg's shooter. The court ordered the broadcaster to retract Souchon's allegation.

Kranzbühler died on August 9, 2004 in Tegernsee.

In 2009 he was seen in the four-part ZDF documentary The Third Reich in court .

literature

• Hubert Seliger: Political lawyers? The defenders of the Nuremberg trials. Nomos, Baden-Baden 2016, ISBN 978-3-8487-2360-7 , p. 544.

Web links

• Literature by and about Otto Kranzbühler in the catalog of the German National Library
• Counts 1, 2, 3, and judgment of Doenitz 'process , Avalon project of Yale University (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Klaus Drobisch : Case 5: The trial against industrialists in Gerd R. Ueberschär (Ed.): National Socialism in front of the court The allied trials against war criminals and soldiers 1943-1952 . Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1999, ISBN 3-596-13589-3 , page 122
2. ↑ Otto Kranzbühler . In: "Wehrtechnik", Verlag Wehr und Wissen Verlagsgesellschaft, 1981, ISSN  0043-2172 , p. 8.
3. ↑ On the company's 75th anniversary: WASAG. The history of a company from 1891–1966 by Wolfram Fischer - pages 246, 190 fn. And photo on page 228 -, published by WASAG-CHEMIE AG Essen in 1966.
4. ↑ Hans-Otto Eglau : Doubts about loyalty . In: "Die Zeit" No. 2/1986 of January 3, 1986.
5. ↑ Norbert Frei: Politics of the Past . Beck, Munich 1996, pp. 163-167 and p. 248.
6. ↑ This report has since been retransmitted on other channels and has also been available on DVD since 2008: The Liebknecht-Luxemburg case. A semi-documentation by Dieter Ertel and Gustav Strübel. TV game for German television from SDR / SWR.