Rastatt processes

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Rastatt trials were about 20 large criminal proceedings with a total of more than 2000 accused, which were carried out between 1946 and 1954 in the French occupation zone on the basis of the Control Council Act No. 10 against those responsible in the German Reich at the time of National Socialism .

The court

Courtroom in Rastatt Castle during the opening of the war crimes trial in 1946

The French military administration ( Gouvernement militaire français ) set up a tribunal général in Rastatt on March 2, 1946 , which on the basis of its statutes also acted as a court of first instance, court of appeal , court of cassation and international court of justice for the entire area of ​​the French occupation zone . It held this function until it was officially closed on March 5, 1956.

As long as the French occupation zone was under the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF), the courts of law were still occupied by officers from the Allied nations . After France had taken over administrative sovereignty from the British and American allies in accordance with the Berlin Declaration of June 5, 1945 , the court was made up exclusively of judges appointed by the military administration of the zone of occupation. German lawyers , among them Otto Kranzbühler and Karl Heitz, took over the defense . The defendants had the right to be defended by French lawyers, something which Kranzbühler's client Hermann Röchling made use of. Erwin Dold was the camp commandant in the Dautmergen concentration camp and was acquitted as defendant no. 41 on February 1, 1947 by the French military tribunal on the basis of testimony from former prisoners as the only concentration camp commandant for “proven innocence”.

The processes

The defendants in the war crimes trial in Rastatt, December 1946

The chambers of the Rastatt court (Tribunal général, Tribunal supérieur) tried war crimes , crimes against peace and crimes against humanity . Among other things, the following were negotiated:

meaning

The Rastatt trials recorded crimes against foreign workers and prisoners in several of the smaller camps of the National Socialist camp system, especially in southwest Germany , which were not dealt with by other Allied courts. “Classic” war crimes , on the other hand, were hardly dealt with in practice, so that the term war crimes trial is actually not justified. The procedure of the French judges took up impulses from the Dachau trials, which had already been concluded in the American sector . The litigation was an expression of the political and social science-based conviction that the historical responsibility for the National Socialist crimes lay not only with a small clique of ideological perpetrators, but also with broad social support groups, especially the National Socialist functional elites .

Above all, the verdict announced on January 6, 1947 in the Heinrich Tillessen case was significant in view of the judgment of the court, which was binding “for all German courts and administrative bodies” , “that the election to the Reichstag on March 5, 1933 may have come about which constitute an obvious illegality and use of force committed by the government, that the so-called Enabling Act of March 23, 1933, contrary to the assertion that it complies with the constitution, was in fact passed by a parliament that was established as a result of the expulsion of 82 duly elected members had an illegal composition and that by the unification of all powers in the hand of Hitler it violated all essential requirements of a proper and normal government in accordance with legal principles ” and “ that the Hitler government neither before nor after March 21, 1933 on a vote of confidence in a properly together The constitution of August 11, 1919, which was in force at the time, laid down a requirement laid down by the constitution of August 11, 1919. "

The Rastatt trials have so far been largely neglected by science, which may be due to the 100-year lock-up period for French military trial files. The case files in the Archives de l'occupation française en Allemagne et en Autriche of the French Foreign Ministry in Colmar were in 1999 still disorganized and not accessible for scientific analysis. The main sources so far have only been contemporary reports in daily newspapers or references from contemporary witnesses . In the Federal Archives in Koblenz there is only a small collection with only 30 centimeters of documents on events in Rastatt. In 2011 the Rastatt district archive received a total of 23 files with trial documents as part of the estate of the lawyer Helga Stödter, who as a young woman from 1946 to 1950 (under her surname Helga Kloninger) worked as a public defender in 295 cases at the General Tribunal .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Pendaries (1995): Les Procès de Rastatt (1946-1954) , pp. 13-29.
  2. ↑ Pendaries (1995): Les Procès de Rastatt (1946-1954) , pp. 33-38. Also: Hans Horch: Röchlings Verbrechen or: The German Imperialism in Front of a Court , Saarbrücker Hefte No. 92, autumn 2004, pp. 15–28.
  3. ↑ WDR-dok The archive. August 7, 2007, accessed September 12, 2017 .
  4. ↑ Pendaries (1995): Les Procès de Rastatt (1946-1954) , pp. 155-164.
  5. ↑ Pendaries (1995): Les Procès de Rastatt (1946-1954) , pp. 181-209.
  6. ↑ Journal Officiel 1947, pp. 605-635
  7. ↑ Pendaries (1995): Les Procès de Rastatt (1946-1954) , pp. 210-212.
  8. ↑ Pendaries (1995): Les Procès de Rastatt (1946-1954) , pp. 167-170.
  9. ↑ Pendaries (1995): Les Procès de Rastatt (1946-1954) , pp. 171-180.
  10. ↑ Pendaries (1995): Les Procès de Rastatt (1946-1954) , pp. 51-55.
  11. ↑ Pendaries (1995): Les Procès de Rastatt (1946-1954) , pp. 271-277.
  12. ↑ Pendaries (1995): Les Procès de Rastatt (1946-1954) , pp. 278-290.
  13. ^ Moisel (2006): Résistance und Repressalien , pp. 264–265.
  14. ↑ Thalhofer (2007): Dachau in Rastatt , pp. 203-205.
  15. ↑ Priemel (2007): Review of: Annette Weinke: The Nuremberg Trials Munich 2006
  16. ↑ Thalhofer (2007): Dachau in Rastatt , pp. 205–206.
  17. ^ French trials in Germany. Federal Archives, accessed on August 8, 2020 .
  18. ↑ Landkreis Rastatt: "Wissenschaftliche Sensation" - district archive receives documents on the Rastatt war crimes trials ( Memento from December 3, 2013 in the Internet Archive )