Paul Vogt (lawyer)

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Paul Vogt (born April 27, 1877 in Burg (near Magdeburg) , † after 1964) was President of the Senate at the Imperial Court . He was the examining magistrate in the Reichstag fire trial .

Life

The evangelical son of a royal music director passed the legal exams in 1900 and 1906 with the grade “sufficient”. In 1906 he was appointed court assessor. In 1909 he was promoted to prosecutor in Insterburg and transferred to Berlin in 1912 . He took part in the First World War as a captain in the artillery. In 1920 he was promoted to the Public Prosecutor's Office and became first prosecutor at the General Prosecutor's Office. In 1922 he moved to the bench as district court director at the district court Berlin I. During this time he was investigating judge at the State Court for the Protection of the Republic in the Cheka Trial 1924/25. In 1931 he came to the Reichsgericht as an assistant judge. In 1932 he was appointed Reich judge. He was continuously active in the Second Criminal Senate and was therefore jointly responsible for the Senate's rulings on racial abuse that were loyal to the regime. In the Reichstag fire trial he replaced the former examining magistrate Braune on personal intervention by Adolf Hitler and Hermann Göring . According to Hans Mommsen he belonged to the "generation of German lawyers who believed that they had to protect the abstract state system with ruthless sharpness from a Marxist overthrow, and who were inclined to apply double standards in political matters" and, according to Mommsen, it was "Vogt's fault, that the trial before the Reichsgericht went so poorly. ”In 1937 he was appointed President of the Senate. In 1944 he was retired. After the occupation of Leipzig by the Red Army , he was arrested by the NKVD . After stays in the special camps in Mühlberg and Buchenwald , he was sentenced to 20 years in prison in 1950 as part of the Waldheim trials . He was released in 1952 and lived near Stade in Lower Saxony for decades .

" Vogt is later to be considered a" hero "by commentators on the events (e.g. Radbruch [...] : that there were" upright men "at the Reichsgericht even in the worst of times ...") because he spoke up against Justice Minister Thierack in 1944 refused to reject two revisions - a process that shows that resistance was possible without danger to life and limb. See also Vogt's special mention by Eberhard Schmidt [...] . Vogt's participation in the particularly disgusting [racial disgrace] judgments of the 2nd Senate (Vogt was there from the start) did not affect his heroic role. "

- Regina Ogorek

Literary processing

In the 1935 novel "The General's Daughter" penned by Arkadij Maslow , Vogt appears as an examining magistrate at the Imperial Court. There he interrogates several characters in the style of an inquisitor, including Marie Louise von Bimmelburg - a character modeled after the daughter of the Reichswehr General Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord . Maslow characterized his figure as a prime example of the subordinate Nazi technocrat:

"Mr. Vogt did his job well when it came to light cases, but Mr. Vogt was always just a tool, a transmission mechanism, a kind of sewage field that is pelted with the most unsavory rubbish, which it processes to produce nutritious vegetables, consume the other "

Party memberships

Honors

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Hans-Georg Breydy: The Reichstag Fire Trial in Leipzig 1933 ( Central and State Library Berlin ), accessed on September 5, 2011.
  2. ↑ Hans Mommsen : The Reichstag Fire and its Political Consequences (PDF; 6.9 MB), VfZ year 12 (1964), issue 4, pp. 351-413.
  3. ↑ Kaul gives October 31st as the retirement date , Fritz Hartung : Jurist unter vier Reichen, Cologne, Berlin, Bonn, Munich 1971, p. 616 gives June 6th.
  4. ↑ Ingo Müller : The Reichstag fire trial before the Reichsgericht, in: Dieter Deiseroth (Ed.) The Reichstag fire and the trial before the Reichsgericht, Berlin 2006, p. 41.
  5. ^ "Rassenschande" and legal method. The argumentative grammar of the Reichsgericht when applying the Blood Protection Act of 1935, in: KritV 2003, p. 298 fn. 61.
  6. ↑ Arkadij Maslow, The General's Daughter, BeBra Wissenschaftsverlag, Berlin 2011, p. 114, ISBN 978-3-937233-76-5
personal data
SURNAME Vogt, Paul
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German lawyer, President of the Senate at the Reich Court
DATE OF BIRTH April 27, 1877
PLACE OF BIRTH Castle (near Magdeburg)
DATE OF DEATH after 1952