Richard shoe

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Richard Schuh (born October 2, 1920 in Remmingsheim , † February 18, 1949 in Tübingen ) was a convicted robbery and the last criminal executed by the West German judiciary (except West Berlin ).

Schuh was a trained mechanic , had served in the Air Force in World War II and was later taken prisoner by the Americans . After his release, he got by with odd jobs. Since he was struggling to make a living in this way, he murdered a truck driver near Herrenberg on January 28, 1948 in order to get the new tires on his vehicle and sell them on the black market.

Schuh's act was quickly cleared up. He was arrested and sentenced to death by the Tübingen regional court in May 1948 . Schuh's appeal, as well as requests for clemency from close relatives and even from the director of the prison in which Schuh was imprisoned, remained ineffective: a conversion of the sentence to life imprisonment was in the hands of the President of Württemberg-Hohenzollern , Gebhard Müller , an advocate of the death penalty .

The execution was carried out with a guillotine on February 18, 1949 at six in the morning in the courtyard of the prison at Doblerstrasse 18 in Tubingen . During the execution the small town hall bell was rung. The delinquent himself only found out the evening before what fate was in store for him. Schuh's body was handed over to the anatomical institute of the University of Tübingen . The guillotine is exhibited in the Ludwigsburg Prison Museum.

To the context

Around 16,000 people were executed during the Nazi era . In the years between the end of the war and the entry into force of the Basic Law on May 24, 1949, German courts in the three western occupation zones imposed a total of 34 death sentences; 15 of them were executed. Schuh's beheading was the last civil execution on West German territory.

In West Berlin , where the Basic Law only applied to a limited extent, the death penalty was not abolished until 1951; the last to be executed there on May 12, 1949, was the robbery murderer Berthold Wehmeyer . The Parliamentary Council moved with the abolition of the death penalty a lesson from the Nazi era.

On June 7, 1951, American soldiers hanged seven German war criminals who had been sentenced to death in Landsberg War Crimes Prison .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Raimund Weible: The guillotine falls for the last time. In: Schwäbisches Tagblatt . February 18, 2009, accessed May 8, 2019 .
  2. ↑ a b Rüdiger Soldt: The last course of Richard Schuh. In: faz.net . February 17, 2019, accessed May 8, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Schuh, Richard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German robbery and the last criminal executed in West Germany (except West Berlin)
DATE OF BIRTH October 2, 1920
PLACE OF BIRTH Remmingsheim
DATE OF DEATH February 18, 1949
Place of death Tübingen