Socialist collective of lawyers

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The Socialist Lawyers' Collective was a collectively run law firm in West Berlin , which mainly defended students of the 1968 movement in criminal matters and was known in public especially for defending several members of the Red Army Faction (RAF) in the Stammheim trial . The socialist legal collective was founded on May 1st, 1969 by Horst Mahler , Klaus Eschen , Hans-Christian Ströbele and Ulrich K. Preuß . It existed until 1979.

The employees of the collective of lawyers later made very different careers: Horst Mahler was a founding member of the left-wing extremist terrorist organization RAF in 1970 , later turned to right-wing extremism , Hans-Christian Ströbele became a member of the Bundestag and party spokesman for the Greens , Klaus Eschen held the office of judge from 1992 to 2000 Constitutional Court of the State of Berlin and Ulrich K. Preuss became a law professor.

Ulrich K. Preuss (2011)

prehistory

Horst Mahler was a member of the SDS and was therefore expelled from the SPD after the latter decided in 1961 that the two memberships were incompatible. From 1964 he became involved in the extra-parliamentary opposition, particularly as a lawyer for students who were prosecuted. He was considered a star lawyer and was the focus of media interest. In 1968 Mahler and Eschen, together with the later Federal Minister of the Interior Otto Schily and Ernst Heinitz , defended the later co-founders of the Red Army Fraction, Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin , in the sensational trial of the department store arson on April 2, 1968 .

Hans-Christian Ströbele joined Mahler's office as a trainee lawyer on June 2, 1967 - the day on which the student Benno Ohnesorg was shot by the police officer Karl-Heinz Kurras during the anti-Shah demonstration .

Activity of the socialist collective of lawyers

On May 1, 1969, Horst Mahler, Klaus Eschen, Hans-Christian Ströbele and Ulrich K. Preuss founded the socialist lawyers' collective. The designation as a collective of lawyers followed the practice in the GDR . This provocation was tried before the Federal Constitutional Court .

Hans-Christian Ströbele (1987)

From 1970 Ströbele took over the defense of RAF terrorists, including Andreas Baader , in the Stammheim trial. In 1975 he was expelled from the defense before the court in Stuttgart-Stammheim for abuse of the lawyer's privileges before the trial began . In 1980, Ströbele was sentenced to a suspended prison sentence of 18 months by the 2nd Large Criminal Chamber at the Berlin Regional Court for supporting a criminal organization, because he had worked on building the RAF after the first wave of arrests in 1972 and was involved in the RAF's illegal information system . This judgment was reduced to 10 months in 1982 by the 10th Large Criminal Chamber of the Berlin Regional Court. Ströbele denies the allegations and stated that the information system was only used as a defense lawyer for the captured members of the RAF in the years 1970 to 1975.

Mahler's immersion into the underground

In April 1970, Mahler was involved in the liberation of Baader , went into hiding and, along with other RAF members in Jordan, was trained by Fatah for armed struggle. With that he left the socialist lawyer collective. After Mahler was arrested on October 8, 1970 in Berlin, the first of two trials against him, Irene Goergens and Ingrid Schubert , began on March 1, 1971 in the Moabit Criminal Court . The charges against Mahler were aiding and abetting attempted murder and the release of prisoners. He was defended by Otto Schily, the two wives by Klaus Eschen and Hans-Christian Ströbele. Mahler was acquitted, but remained in custody on other charges. He was later charged bank robbery and captives sentenced to 14 years in prison.

The later careers of lawyers

After the dissolution of the Socialist Lawyers 'Collective in 1979, Klaus Eschen and other lawyers, including Otto Schily, Werner Holtfort , Rupert von Plottnitz and Gerhard Schröder , founded the Republican Lawyers' Association (RAV). Eschen was chairman of the RAV until 1991. From 1992 to 2000 he was a judge at the Constitutional Court of the State of Berlin .

In 1979 Ströbele was one of the founders of both the Green Party and the left-wing alternative daily taz . As early as 1978 he was one of the co-founders of the Alternative List for Democracy and Environmental Protection , which later became the state association of the Greens in Berlin . In 1990/91 he was the spokesman, that is, one of two equal chairmen, of the federal party.

Mahler renounced terrorism in prison. With the help of his attorney at the time, later Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, he was released early in 1980 after two thirds of his prison sentence had expired. His probation officer was the evangelical theologian Helmut Gollwitzer . In 1987 the Federal Court of Justice allowed Mahler to be re-admitted to the bar; Gerhard Schröder represented him again as a lawyer. Since around 1997 Mahler has turned to right-wing extremism . From 2000 to 2003 he was a member of the NPD and represented the party in the NPD ban proceedings in 2002 . There he met Otto Schily, who was an applicant as Federal Minister of the Interior. The proceedings ended with the termination of the proceedings. He received further fines and imprisonment for unconstitutional activities, including Holocaust denial , threats of murder and violence, anti-Semitic and neo-Nazi statements. A provisional professional ban from 2004 was confirmed in 2009 with the withdrawal of his legal license.

Reception and aftermath

The documentary The Lawyers - A German Story by Birgit Schulz , published in 2009, traces the biographies of the lawyers Schily, Ströbele and Mahler. The socialist collective of lawyers plays a central role in this.

A table from the premises of the Socialist Lawyers' Collective became known because it later became a symbol for other protagonists of the 1968 movement and their successors. Ströbele bought the table, which could seat at least 30 people, from a second-hand dealer. It was later taken over by Kommune 1 in Berlin's Stephanstrasse and then it became the editorial desk of taz. Eventually it ended up in an occupied house where it was burned.

literature

  • Stefan Aust : The Baader-Meinhof complex . Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 1985. - 3rd edition, expanded and updated in 2008. ISBN 978-3-455-50029-5 .
  • Martin Block, Birgit Schulz: The lawyers - Ströbele, Mahler, Schily. A German story. Torch bearer, Cologne 2010, ISBN 978-3-7716-4456-7
  • Hellmut Brunn, Thomas Kirn: Lawyers, Linksanwälte , Eichborn, 2004
  • Hanno Hochmuth: "Only idiots don't change". Biographical change and historical construction of meaning in the documentary “The Lawyers” . In: Zeithistorische Forschungen / Studies in Contemporary History 7 (2010) H. 1, pp. 137–144 ( online version )
  • Jan Philipp Reemtsma , Wolfgang Kraushaar : Trust and violence. Attempt on a special constellation of modernity , Hamburger Edition, 2008
  • Stefan Reinecke : Otto Schily. From RAF lawyer to interior minister , Hoffmann and Campe, 2003. ISBN 978-3455094152

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Martin Block, Birgit Schulz: The lawyers - Ströbele, Mahler, Schily. A German story, Cologne 2010, p. 125.
  2. ↑ Cf. Christopher Tenfelde, The Red Army Fraction and the Criminal Justice. Anti-terror laws and their implementation using the example of the Stammheim process ; Osnabrück: Jonscher Verlag, 2009; ISBN 978-3981139938 ; P. 158 f.
  3. ↑ Gereon Asmuth: fallen out of time , taz, June 6, 2009.
  4. ↑ Martin Block, Birgit Schulz: The lawyers - Ströbele, Mahler, Schily. A German story, Cologne 2010, p. 123 f.
  5. ↑ Martin Block, Birgit Schulz: The lawyers - Ströbele, Mahler, Schily. A German story, Cologne 2010, p. 126.
  6. ↑ See Ströbele's activity in the Stammheim trial, as well as his exclusion as defense counsel: Christopher Tenfelde, The Red Army Fraction and the Criminal Justice. Anti-terror laws and their implementation using the example of the Stammheim process ; Osnabrück: Jonscher Verlag, 2009; ISBN 978-3981139938 ; P. 200; 204 ff.
  7. ↑ a b focus.de on July 18, 2009: 1980s: the court saw Ströbele as an RAF construction worker , accessed on May 14, 2010
  8. ↑ If you don't want it any other way , Der Spiegel, 11/1971, pp. 100-103.
  9. ↑ Shot in the basket , Der Spiegel, 22/1971, p. 87.
  10. ↑ He was ready to take considerable risks , interview with Hans-Christian Ströbele in the Tagesspiegel (July 7, 2010)