Otto Pecher

Otto Pecher (born April 29, 1903 in Cottbus ; † May 2, 1996 ) was a judge at the Federal Labor Court in Kassel from 1956 to 1971 .

job

After graduating from high school in 1921, Pecher began studying law in Berlin and Marburg, which he completed in 1924 with a doctorate and first state examination. After the second state examination in 1928, he was initially a court assessor in Cottbus and was appointed regional court advisor there in 1934. During the war he was repeatedly drafted into the Wehrmacht from 1939 for a short time, from 1943 permanently until the end of the war, from which he was released as a lieutenant. During his time in the Wehrmacht, he was promoted to district court director in October 1944. From April 1945 to March 1946 he was in American captivity, then he was interned as a former senior civil servant until early 1947 . He then worked first as an agricultural worker, then as a legal assistant in a law firm in Kiel. After completing his denazification proceedings in 1949, he became an assistant judge, then a commissioned district judge and finally, at the end of 1952, a district judge and civil servant for life. On April 1, 1953, he changed to the state labor court director of Schleswig-Holstein in Kiel. He was appointed a judge at the Federal Labor Court in December 1956, where he remained until his retirement in April 1971.

Attitude to National Socialism

Pecher joined the NSDAP in 1933, where he held the office of block leader from 1937 to 1938 and from 1939 to 1940. From May 1938 he was an assessor in the Cottbus district court of the NSDAP. In his free time he held a leading position in the musical life of Cottbus, including as conductor of the oratorio and music association and as director of large concerts, and was therefore a member of cultural organizations of the NSDAP. In the Braunbuch published by the National Council of the National Front of the GDR in 1968, Pecher is referred to as a district judge at the Cottbus special court. This assertion, also repeated by Marc von Miquel, is likely to be wrong. There was no special court in Cottbus, rather the special court in Berlin was responsible for the district of the regional court in Cottbus until 1940, afterwards the newly established special court in Frankfurt / Oder, which also held court days in Cottbus. Neither in the personal files of the Berlin Chamber of Justice and the Reich Ministry of Justice, nor in the collections of judgments of the Frankfurt / Oder special court, there are any indications of Pecher's activity at a special court. He himself also denied in the denazification proceedings that he had worked at a special court, which was confirmed by several witnesses. However, his activities as a block leader, as the founder of the NS cultural community in Cottbus and as a judge at the district party court of the NSDAP indicate that he was not just a card member.

Publications

• Otto Pecher, The new default right, Diss. Marburg 1924.
• Handbook of international legal and administrative language: Criminal proceedings German / French, compiled by Otto Pecher and Jacques Heck, Cologne 1985.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Werner Kind-Krüger, The Reconstruction of Labor Courts in Schleswig-Holstein after 1945, in: Democratic History 30 (2019), pp. 211f.
2. ↑ Personnel file of the Reich Ministry of Justice, Federal Archives Koblenz PERS 101/74291.
3. ↑ Braunbuch, War and Nazi Criminals in the Federal Republic of Germany, Berlin (East) 1968, p. 225.
4. ↑ Marc von Miquel, Ahnden or amnesty? West German justice and politics of the past in the sixties, Göttingen 2004, p. 394.
5. ↑ See Wolfgang Schimmler, “Mood of the population and political situation”. The situation reports of the Berlin judiciary 1940-1945. Berlin 1986, p.13.
6. ↑ Kind-Krüger, loc. Cit., P. 212.
7. ↑ Schleswig-Holstein State Archives Section 460.19 No. 2137
8. ↑ Kind-Krüger, loc. Cit., P. 212.