Kin liability

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The clan liability or guilt by association is a form of collective liability . Kinship liability in the original sense meant the duty of closer or wider relatives to answer for the guilt of one or more relatives, especially if the guilty party could not be held responsible.

Germany

German law in the Middle Ages

According to a widespread view, the older German law, that is, the law in the German states before the reception of Roman law , was based on the idea that the relatives (stomach, clan ) would have to be held liable for offenses of a family member. The basis of this system was that even the most serious criminal offenses could be regulated by paying a fine to the clan of the injured or killed. When his clan paid for the (pecuniary) damage, the case was over.

In a more recent study, however, Harald Maihold pointed out that Roman canon law was also aware of joint liability of the family in certain cases, especially those of the crime of majesty, and that the sources of "old German law" in the scope of family liability hardly talked about Roman law. go beyond canon law .

National Socialism

In the so-called Third Reich , clan liability was a clan liability enforced by force, which was used as a means of pressure against the further relatives of a culprit and made relatives liable with freedom, property or life. Kinship usually meant admission to a concentration camp .

As one of the first examples of this kind of clan liability, the Gestapo arrested four relatives of Philipp Scheidemann on July 13, 1933 , after the former Chancellor had published an "abusive article" against Germany in the New York Times . In November 1939, after the failed attack on Adolf Hitler in the Bürgerbräukeller , the Gestapo also arrested the family of the confessed assassin Johann Georg Elser .

The father of the Gustloff assassin David Frankfurter , Chief Rabbi Dr. Moritz Frankfurter, was captured by the SS on April 6, 1941 after the invasion of Yugoslavia and publicly tortured.

After the assassination attempt on Heydrich in May 1942, the family members of the former Czechoslovak minister Ladislav Karel Feierabend , who was now a member of the government in exile in London, who remained in occupied Czechoslovakia , were deported to concentration camps : his wife, his father, his brother, his wife and sons .

After the assassination attempt on July 20, 1944 , the children of the assassins were deported to Bad Sachsa , and adult relatives such as Nina Schenk Countess von Stauffenberg were imprisoned in concentration camps. Numerous members of former or current opponents of the Nazi regime were arrested or subjected to other forms of repression as part of the grating campaign .

On February 5, 1945, the liability was in a decree with wealth, liberty, or life for members of German prisoners of war placed in captivity have their troops on strength, armor and location made and therefore for treason had been convicted to death.

In the spring of 1945 there was a particularly dramatic case of clan imprisonment: A group of over 100 clan prisoners was collected in the Buchenwald concentration camp, including twelve family members from Stauffenberg, but also politically less burdened, as from the family of the former chief of army command Kurt von Hammerstein and before all relatives for foreign policy important foreigners. On April 3, 1945, this group was first transported to the Dachau concentration camp , then on April 17, 1945 to Innsbruck . The trek of now almost 140 prisoners then moved on foot through the Dolomites in the direction of South Tyrol , guarded by the SS . On April 30, 1945 the prisoners were released from the violence of the SS by the officer Wichard von Alvensleben, billeted in a hotel in Niederdorf and liberated by German troops on May 4, 1945 and housed on Capri until the end of June 1945 . Christian Frey filmed this story for ZDF in the docu-drama Wir, Geiseln der SS .

Federal Republic of Germany

In the legal system of the Federal Republic of Germany, family liability would not be compatible with the criminal guilt principle . The civil law liability for fault also requires personal reproach. This also applies to administrative sanctions such as a reduction in unemployment benefit II .

International

In many non-Western cultures, clan liability has historically been partially viewed as normal and has also been generally practiced by non-totalitarian governments. An example of this is Japan until the mid- 19th century .

In North Korea to this day the view is held that if a family member is convicted, the entire family is guilty. The strictest application of this principle was during the 1958 Purges under Kim Il-sung . The sentence was extended to include members of the third generation.

literature

  • Dagmar Albrecht: I cannot quarrel with my fate. Kinship in the Albrecht von Hagen family . Dietz, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-320-02018-8 .
  • Ekkehard Kaufmann : "Kinship" and "Kinship criminal law". In: Concise dictionary on German legal history . Edited by Adalbert Erler and Ekkehard Kaufmann with philological assistance from Ruth Schmidt-Wiegand. Co-founded by Wolfgang Stammler , Red. Dieter Werkmüller. Volume IV. Berlin 1990, pp. 1668-1672.
  • Dr. Johannes Salzig: Kinship imprisonment as a measure of repression by the National Socialist regime. Ideological foundations - implementation - impact. (= Series of publications of the research community July 20, 1944 eV ). Wißner-Verlag, 2015, ISBN 978-3-95786-043-9 .

Individual evidence

  1. Harald Maihold: Die Sippenhaft: Well-founded doubts about a principle of "German law" . In: Mediaevistik , January 2005, pp. 99–126, JSTOR 42586257 .
  2. Manuel Becker, Christoph Studt (ed.): The handling of the Third Reich with the enemies of the regime: XXII. Königswinterer Conference (February 2009). (= Series of publications of the research community July 20, 1944 eV Volume 13). LIT Verlag, Münster 2010, ISBN 978-3-643-10525-7 .
  3. Johannes Salzig: The Phenomenon of “Kinship Liability” in National Socialist Germany Website of the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung , accessed on August 29, 2019
  4. Horst Möller: Kinder des July 20, 1944 Website accessed on March 3, 2019.
  5. Telex from Wilhelm Keitel to Erich Kuby : The end of the horror. List books, 1961, p. 50f.
  6. Peter Koblank: The Liberation of Special Prisoners and Kinship Prisoners in South Tyrol . Online edition Myth Elser 2006.
  7. ^ Hans-Günter Richardi, Caroline M. Heiss, Hans Heiss: SS hostages in the Alpine fortress. The deportation of prominent concentration camp prisoners from Germany to South Tyrol. Raetia Verlag, 2005, ISBN 88-7283-229-2 .
  8. SS documentary game on Arte - 139 prisoners on the journey into the unknown. faz.net
  9. Hartz IV: No kin liability. In: The daily newspaper . July 22, 2009.
  10. Landessozialgericht Niedersachsen-Bremen, decision of July 8, 2009 - L 6 AS 335/09 B ER
  11. Crime and Terror in North Korea , International Society for Human Rights