Valentina Archipova

Valentina Archipowa (* 1918 ; † August 22, 1943 in the Preungesheim prison , Frankfurt am Main ) was a Soviet foreign worker during World War II and a victim of Nazi war justice.

The Archipova case

Archipova was imprisoned in Stalingrad around 1942 after a fight in front of a bread shop. After the German armies marched in, she was released from prison and volunteered to work as an agricultural foreign worker in Germany in May 1942, probably due to the horrendous supply situation in her hometown at that time. It was given to a 78-year-old farmer in Frankfurt-Sindlingen .

After Archipowa stole two or three meters of scorched cloth (Damas and Linon) from a pile of rubble after an air raid on August 13, 1942, in which the house of the farmer's wife was hit by a bomb, she was arrested and tried in a special court Frankfurt am Main charged. According to the legal opinion of the time, a theft was considered looting and therefore particularly serious if the thief took advantage of the disruption of normal order and the failure of the security organs, which characterize the situation immediately after an air raid, in order to illegally take material assets . Although the public prosecutor denied the well-founded accusation of looting, since there had been too long a period of time between the air attack and the removal, and only accused her of a simple theft in accordance with Section 4 of the People's Pest Ordinance , the judge in charge ruled on July 21 1943 verdicts proclaimed that the incident was to be considered looting and sentenced to death .

The case gained prominence in the Federal Republic of Germany in the early 1970s through the documentary film Sondergerichtsakte 86/43 - Jurisdiction in the name of the German people by Reinhard Ruttmann , in which this eyewitness and the judicial clerk Irmagard Kohlhaas, who had refused at the time, to sign the judgment (and was threatened with a special court for this), and brought the still living special judge who had pronounced the verdict against Archipova in front of the camera and questioned her about the events of 1943. The film was first broadcast on ARD in 1972 . In 2014 it was shown again in the Jewish Museum in Frankfurt.

The special judge later referred to the fact that his judgment had been based on an instruction from the Reich Minister of Justice , whereby Ruttmann opposed this view with reference to the contrary view of the public prosecutor's office that had been preserved in the files and assessed the judgment as extraordinarily harsh even according to National Socialist legal practice.

literature

• Archive for Frankfurt's History and Art , issue 65, 1999, pp. 137 and 464.
• Horst Henrichs : A Century of Frankfurt Justice: Courthouse A: 1899–1989. 1989.