Political murder

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A political murder is the intentional , unlawful or illegitimate killing of a person from political motives. As a rule, the victim has an undesirable political influence from the point of view of the perpetrator, or the perpetrator expects the murder to lead to a favorable political development.

Historically, the term almost exclusively refers to the assassination attempt on individual, high-ranking personalities. The crime of political murder can be traced back to antiquity . Differences to an ordinary murder are the politically motivated interests or ideological implications, as well as the fact that the client and the executor ( contract killer ) are mostly different people.

Since ancient times, political murder has also been used time and again to eliminate entire groups of domestic political opponents, up to and including mass murder . In the 20th century this was primarily the domain of dictatorships and authoritarian states , with the number of victims in the millions, especially in ideological conflicts.

Sometimes the politically, ethnically or religiously motivated genocide is also referred to as political murder. The American political scientist Rudolph Rummel led to politically motivated mass murder by a government based on the term genocide of the term politicide one. He defined this as the murder of any person or people by a government because of their politics or for political purposes .

Motives for the crime can be, for example:

  • eliminating a competitor, critic or dissident
  • the elimination of a possible witness / confidante (is informed about illegal and / or politically sensitive activities of the client and could announce or publish this knowledge)
  • Revenge for doing or not doing something
  • Deterrence / intimidation of third parties (politicians, political activists, and, more recently, increasingly journalists )

If the author is a government or an institution close to the government, the murders are sometimes given pseudo-legality or the act is kept completely secret, for example when political opponents disappear . Show trials can demonstrate power or deter third parties.

Murders can provide pretexts for autocratic rulers to intensify their repression and terrorist measures. Examples:

Often they create their own pretexts. For example, in the summer of 1934 the Nazi regime untruthfully claimed that they had reacted to an imminent putsch by SA leader Ernst Röhm ( Röhm putsch ) as a justification for the murder of around 200 people .

history

The murder of Abraham Lincoln . Lithograph around 1865

One of the first known cases is the assassination attempt by the murderers Harmodios and Aristogeiton in 514 BC. BC Hipparchus , the brother of the tyrant Hippias , had killed. Even Philip of Macedon , father of Alexander the Great , was murdered. The most famous victim of a tyrannicide from antiquity, however, is Julius Caesar , who died on March 15, 44 BC. . BC by a group of senators to Brutus and Gaius Cassius Longinus during a Senate meeting in the Theater of Pompey was murdered in Rome with 23 daggers. Numerous Roman emperors had political opponents or rivals murdered (e.g. Britannicus by Nero ) or fell victim to political murders themselves (e.g. Caligula , Britannicus, Domitian , Commodus , Caracalla ).

The wars of religion in the early modern period combined religious with political motives. They claimed several prominent victims, including the French kings Henry III. and Henry IV and the English minister, Duke of Buckingham . In the age of the Enlightenment , ideological motives became increasingly important. One of the most famous murder victims of the French Revolution is Jean-Paul Marat . The assassination of the Swedish King Gustav III. by the revolutionary-minded nobleman Johan Jacob Anckarström provided the material for Verdi's opera Ein Maskenball .

In the 19th century, revolutionaries across Europe, including the Russian Bakunin and the French Paul Brousse , developed the theoretical foundations of anarchism and nihilism under the catchphrase Propaganda , which led to a series of political murders, the victims of which included Tsar Alexander II. (1881) belonged. Also, John Wilkes Booth , the assassin of US President Abraham Lincoln († 1865), was with his assassination driven by political motives, he dissatisfied with the outcome of the Civil War was and refused to grant the citizenship to the former slaves.

Since the beginning of the 20th century, increasingly nationalist motives led to political murders. The victims of nationalists include the French socialist Jean Jaurès (1914) and the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand , whose assassination in the assassination attempt in Sarajevo is regarded as the cause of the First World War, as well as Mahatma Gandhi († 1948).

The increasing violence of representatives of the right-wing spectrum led immediately after the First World War to the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht , which was followed by the feminine murders in the Weimar Republic, whose victims included Matthias Erzberger and Walter Rathenau . In Italy, the murder of the socialist Giacomo Matteotti marks the beginning of Mussolini's fascist dictatorship .

In the first few years after taking power , the National Socialists systematically used murder as a means of eliminating internal political opponents, especially communists and social democrats. Many of them were taken into protective custody and interned in concentration camps without trial (see also Concentration Camps # 1933 to 1935 ). In 1933 and 1934 there were numerous fights within the power apparatus. End of June 1934 Hitler staged therefore the so-called Rohm putsch , on 25 July 1934, Engelbert Dollfuss , the founder of the Austro-fascist corporate state , while ultimately unsuccessful July coup murdered in the Chancellery in Vienna. The assassination attempt on Ernst vom Rath by Herschel Grynszpan on November 7, 1938, to which the German secretary of the legation in Paris succumbed two days later, was a reaction to the " Poland Action ", in which Grynszpan's parents and over 15,000 Polish Jews were deported from Germany to Poland were. The act served the Nazi regime as a welcome pretext for holding the “ Reichskristallnacht ” on November 9th. In his book Politischer Mord und Heldenverhrung , published in 1938, the National Socialist and anti-Semitic lawyer Friedrich Grimm justified political murder as "killing in an extraordinary time". Hitler himself escaped attempts to murder a tyrant several times , known are the attacks by Georg Elser in 1939 and the failed assassination attempt of July 20, 1944 .

Memorial march with photos of those murdered on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the military coup in Argentina , March 2006

A few months after the October Revolution , the tsarist family was murdered by the Bolsheviks . The Soviet dictator Stalin had several million political opponents murdered in the Stalinist purges in the 1930s .

In Indonesia , after the "G30S" coup d'état of September 30, 1965, which has not yet been clarified , a mass murder of actual or supposed communists occurred which, according to estimates, killed between 500,000 and three million people.

In the 1970s and 1980s, right-wing South American military dictatorships murdered hundreds of thousands of mostly left-wing oppositionists ( Desaparecidos ) as part of the so-called dirty wars .

The communist Khmer Rouge wanted to use force to transform Cambodia into a kind of agrarian communism. From 1975 to 1978, it is estimated that they murdered around 1.4 to 2.2 million of their compatriots in the genocide in Cambodia .

The concept of the urban guerrilla was developed in the 1960s. It goes back to the Tupamaros in Uruguay , who began as a non-violent trade union movement, but became radicalized from 1970 onwards with the kidnapping and murder of high-ranking personalities and attacks in the big cities. In Europe they found imitators in groups in the Tupamaros West Berlin and Tupamaros Munich as well as in the terrorist organizations RAF and the Italian Red Brigades , which kidnapped and murdered the former Prime Minister Aldo Moro in 1978 .

Even today, murders of high-ranking personalities have had far-reaching political consequences. The assassination attempt on John F. Kennedy and the assassination attempt on Martin Luther King were and still are reasons for conspiracy theories .

The Chilean President Salvador Allende died in a military coup in 1973 . After General Augusto Pinochet came to power, US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said that the United States "did not do it" (the coup itself) but that it "created the greatest possible conditions." Documents show that the US The government and the CIA had sought to overthrow Allende and had given the Chilean military and secret services massive support in the run-up to the coup, see Project FUBELT . The chief of staff, René Schneider, who was loyal to the elected president, was murdered by a killer squad that had been armed with weapons by the CIA. Later, agents of the Chilean secret service DINA murdered former opposition minister Orlando Letelier by a car bomb in exile in Washington, DC , one of the perpetrators being a former CIA employee.

Since the late 1970s, journalists have frequently been the victims of contract killers , among others

Other groups of victims are lawyers (e.g. Stanislav Markelov in Moscow in 2009 ) and human rights activists .

See also: Freedom of the press # Violent repression of freedom of the press

In April 1994 , the assassination of the President of Rwanda Juvénal Habyarimana led directly to genocide in Rwanda ; after the murder of Israeli Prime Minister and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Yitzchak Rabin in November 1995 , the Oslo peace process stalled.

Political murder in literature and film

Literature / theater

Movie

See also

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Entry in Meyer's Großes Konversations-Lexikon , Leipzig 1908
  2. ^ Rudolph J. Rummel: Death By Government. Transaction Publishers, 1997, ISBN 1560009276 , pp. 1f.
  3. ↑ Ulrike Claudia Hofmann: The term "political murder" in: Historisches Lexikon Bayerns
  4. ^ Rudolph J. Rummel: Death By Government. Transaction Publishers, 1997, ISBN 1560009276 , p. 31
  5. ↑ Amnesty International: Nobody is allowed to "disappear"! Retrieved January 24, 2010 .
  6. ↑ Michael Sommer: Political Murders. From ancient times to the present. Scientific Book Society, 2005, ISBN 3534185188 , p. 15
  7. ↑ Grimm: Political murder and hero worship. Deutscher Rechtsverlag, Berlin 1938, p. 32
  8. ↑ Peter Kornbluh: The Kissinger Telcons: Kissinger Telcons on Chile. National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. May 12, 2004, ( online )
  9. ^ Murder in Chile: Kissinger sued. the daily newspaper, September 11, 2001