Walerian Wróbel
Walerian Wróbel (in German documents from the time of National Socialism, Walerjan Wrobel , born April 2, 1925 in Fałków ; † August 25, 1942 in Hamburg ) was a Polish forced laborer who was executed by the National Socialists when he was only 17 years old .
biography
Childhood and German Occupation
Wróbel was the oldest of three children and grew up with his parents on a farm in Fałków in what is now the Świętokrzyskie Voivodeship . He was mentally retarded compared to his peers and had only reached fifth grade in seven years of attending school. On September 6, 1939 (the sixth day of the attack on Poland ) numerous houses in the village, including those of his parents, were destroyed in a bombing by the Luftwaffe . Those affected then lived in the rubble or stayed with relatives.
Forced labor
Shortly after his 16th birthday in April 1941, the boy was arrested by the German occupiers and sent to Bremen as a so-called “agricultural laborer” for forced labor . There he was assigned to the Martensschen Hof on April 19, 200 m northwest of the "Great Dunge " in Lesumbrok, today the Werderland district . Severe homesickness caused him to flee after just a few days, on April 26th; however, he was caught and taken back to work.
Offense
Hoping to be sent back to his native Poland as punishment , he set fire to the hay store in the barn on April 29th. The fire - discovered by the farmer's wife in time - did no damage and Wróbel himself helped to put it out. Nevertheless, the farmer reported the incident to the police.
Imprisonment and forced labor
After an interrogation, the Gestapo arrested him on May 2nd. The detention in the Neuengamme concentration camp took place on June 28th. As a member of the so-called “Elbe Command”, he had to do heavy work in the following nine months in the construction of the 600 meter long Neuengammer branch canal from the camp to the Dove Elbe and the subsequent widening of the river arm. During this time he made friends with Michał Piotrowski, two years his senior, who reported after the war:
- “Walerek was very young, very naive. He had no experience either. So naive: If you tell him: This and that is true or so and so it is in the concentration camp - he immediately believes it. He believes everything. It's difficult for them in the concentration camp, very difficult. You have to be brutal, but not naive, and Walerek was always naive, very naive. He always talked about his parents, about his sister, about school. "
The forced labor was often fatal and the kapos selected by the SS were also extraordinarily brutal. The cause of long-term health effects or the murder of prisoners were part of everyday life in this detachment.
- “Just water, mud, earth. And hunger (...) That was a death squad, ”said Piotrowski.
process
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On the occasion of the first detention test date , Wróbel was transferred to Bremen on April 8, 1942, where the special court established at the Bremen Regional Court initiated criminal proceedings to hear his offense. The court came to the conclusion that at the time of the offense he was still a youth within the meaning of the Youth Courts Act , but that it was intended exclusively for German citizens and therefore did not apply to him. Only the 14-year limit of criminal responsibility also applies to Poland, since it is legally to be regarded as part of the Criminal Code as such. The Polish Criminal Law Ordinance provided under Section III, 2: “The death penalty is recognized where the law threatens it.” This ordinance would apply to Wróbel on the one hand because he was domiciled in Poland (the court falsified the truth with the allegation that he “volunteered to work in Germany”) and, on the other hand, because the public prosecutor's office had brought charges on the basis of this regulation. Despite minority at the material time the Special Court Walerian Wróbel sentenced on July 8, according to § 306 no. 2 of the Criminal Code for arson and additionally as " public enemy " in accordance with the Regulation against enemies of the people to death . While in custody, the young Pole secretly wrote a farewell letter to his parents, which he enclosed with a drawing of a horse he had made himself. The letter could be smuggled out of prison and delivered to his parents.
Requests for mercy
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There were no appeals against this decision, but only one day after the verdict was pronounced, the special court itself issued an opinion on the mercy issue. Due to the fact that Wróbel was only 16 years old at the time of the crime, still left a youthful impression, did not belong to any secret organization and committed the act out of homesickness, those responsible advocated a merciful conversion of the death penalty into a detention camp of a reasonable length. It cannot be seen that the offense was committed with the intention of harming resilience. Wrobel's defense filed on July 20, a plea for clemency , and referred to the mental and physical deficits, and the non-existent knowledge of the German language of his client and also that the consequences of the act were insignificant. Wróbel would certainly not have made the considerations suspected by the special court about damaging the resistance of the German people. In addition, there was no damage or weakening at all. One day later, on July 21, the chief public prosecutor, as head of the prosecution at the special court, also recommended to the acting Reich Minister of Justice Franz Schlegelberger that the death penalty should be changed into a long-term, more stringent prison camp. He pointed out that the main hearing had not revealed any evidence that Wróbel had acted out of anti-German sentiments or as a member of a Polish secret organization. He was also credible in explaining his motives. The letter from the Chief Public Prosecutor concluded with the following lines:
- “The undersigned is aware that judgments on the death penalty against Poland must as a rule be ruthlessly carried out. On the other hand, he does not consider it feasible to carry out a death sentence on a boy. The motive for the crime (which is not rooted in anti-German sentiments) and the fact that the damage done is minor must also be taken into account. The undersigned is convinced that the State Police would have refrained from transferring the convicted person to the StA and would have ordered the execution itself if they had considered him worthy of death. "
The last sentence refers to the stay in the concentration camp ended in favor of pre-trial detention under the supervision of the public prosecutor's office. However, the then State Secretary in the Justice Ministry, Roland Freisler , refused on August 15 to comply with the requests for clemency.
execution
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On the morning of August 25, 1942, executioner Friedrich Hehr carried out the sentence at 6:15 a.m. in Hamburg with the guillotine . In more than 250 places in the Bremen city area, posters were then hung up to publicize the execution of Wróbel and to act as a deterrent. On the posters of the chief public prosecutor as head of the prosecution at the special court to announce his execution, he is euphemistically described as a "farm worker" and not - correctly - as a person deported to Germany for forced labor. His minority, however, was clearly evident from the posters.
Processing and commemoration
The trial against Walerian Wróbel took place in room 145 (today room 231 ) on the 2nd floor of the regional court. It ended after two and a half hours with the juvenile's conviction "for a crime under Section 3 of the People's Pest Ordinance as a punishment for death." Wrobel's conviction is an example of the practice of the Bremen Special Court . From April 1940 until the end of the war it had spoken injustice for a total of five years as a “court martial of the inner front” in the sense of the Nazi state.
It was not only in Bremen that the name Walerian Wróbel became a symbol for the Nazi injustice justice. Only since 1984 has a plaque in front of the criminal chamber of the regional court commemorates him and the 54 people sentenced to death by the special court. On the 45th anniversary of his death sentence, a memorial service was held in this room in 1987 in the presence of Wróbel's sister, on whose application the Bremen Regional Court had overturned the death sentence as a "typical case of National Socialist injustice" in the same year. As a reminder for the future, the court regularly commemorates this cruel chapter of the Bremen judiciary with public commemorative events and lectures.
The proceedings against Walerian Wróbel are now the best known and most frequently viewed by the Bremen Special Court. In the mid-1980s, the lawyer Heinrich Hannover had the process reopened. At the request of Sister Wróbels and the Bremen Public Prosecutor's Office, the Bremen Regional Court ruled on the legality of the judgment at the time and overturned it by decision of November 26, 1987 (file number 16 AR 59/87).
In order to exemplify the fate of the many forced laborers deployed in Bremen, the "Walerjan Wróbel Association" was founded at this time.
The story of Walerian Wróbel was filmed in 1990 under the direction and script by Rolf Schübel . Ingeborg Janiczek took over the editing. The 94-minute film Das Heimweh des Walerjan Wróbel won the prize of the Dutch youth film festival “ Cinekid ” and was nominated in 1991 for the German Film Prize.
On August 29, 2007, almost 65 years after Wróbel's execution, the dyke path on the southern bank of the Lesum near the Lesum barrage in the Werderland district of Bremen was renamed Walerian-Wróbel-Weg.
Legal evaluation of the court judgment
In principle, the Polish Criminal Law Ordinance was not yet applicable at the time of the offense. This regulation also did not provide for retrospective application at all. Obviously, the view of the court was not offended by these circumstances. From the outset, the Juvenile Court Act prohibited the imposition of the death penalty on minors. For the first time a court formulated something like this in its judgment:
“The accused is still a youth within the meaning of the JGG [...], but (this) does not apply to Poland. The provisions of the Youth Courts Act are only created for young Germans in order to educate them to become a decent national comrade. "
There was no legal basis for the application of the regulation. The court ruling contained a total of five infractions , with which the court came to impose the death penalty. However, this is an assessment of the judgment according to legal standards, which the judges involved rejected as " normativistic " and " Jewish-liberalistic ". The laws cited by the court were not designed to be interpreted according to their wording. The procedure was aimed at killing Wróbel for reasons of deterrence, and the fact that laws were even cited on this occasion was more because of the disguise of the whole process.
The minor was executed as a “public pest” for a minor offense. The Wróbel case was classified as "historically valuable" by the Nazi regime. The file was to be kept permanently for Nazi research purposes in order to later document an alleged “cleansing of Germany from pests of the people”.
Farewell letter to his family
His farewell letter to his family was published, among other things, in connection with coming to terms with the circumstances of his death. While in custody in Bremen, the boy wrote a farewell letter to his family - obviously secretly and with references to his Catholic denomination. In translation from the Polish language it reads:
Dear Mum and Dad, I am writing these last words to you that I will never come back home because I have such a difficult matter. But I still ask God Almighty to help me at this last moment so that I can go to Confession and Holy Communion. But if I still live, I will write to you as quickly as possible, dear parents, that you are not worried about me. I will still have one more trial, and what the judge will decide about me, whether I will be in prison for a long time or whether death [awaits], I don't know yet. And I ask you once again not to worry, because this letter was sent on its way before the trial. And if I am not alive, then I only ask for a Holy Mass and I say goodbye to you, parents, in Last moment, you should live as long as possible and ask God, then he will help you [to stay] in good health. Good night dear mom, dad, brother, little sister.
Walerian Wróbel , appropriate sentence completions in brackets, source: Justice in National Socialism. About crimes in the name of the German people. Articles and catalog for the exhibition , Baden-Baden 2002, pp. 86, 141, 143.
Individual evidence
- ↑ https://www.stiftung-denkmal.de/jugendwebsite/r_pdf/walerjan.pdf
- ↑ after: Halina Piotrowska, Warsaw
- ↑ https://www.senatspressestelle.bremen.de/detail.php?id=18410
- ↑ http://media.offenes-archiv.de/ha3_4_1_3_thm_2391.pdf
- ^ Repeal of the National Socialist judgment by the Bremen Regional Court on the Bremen Regional Court website. accessed on April 19, 2018
- ↑ Hans Wüllenweber: Special Courts in the Third Reich. Frankfurt / Main 1990, ISBN 3-630-61909-6 , p. 249.
- ↑ Press release of the Bremen Senate Press Office of November 29, 2007 on the book presentation of Christoph Schminck-Gustavus' Das Heimweh des Walerian Wróbel - A boy in court . Retrieved September 18, 2010
- ↑ https://www.stiftung-denkmal.de/jugendwebsite/r_pdf/walerjan.pdf
- ↑ https://www.landgericht.bremen.de/sixcms/detail.php?gsid=bremen136.c.1587.de
- ↑ https://de.wiktionary.org/wiki/bem%C3%A4nteln
- ↑ Volker Friedrich Drecktrah, Dietmar Willoweit: Jurisprudence and Justice: Festschrift for Götz Landwehr on the 80th birthday of colleagues and doctoral students , Böhlau Verlag, Cologne / Weimar, 2015, p. 301.
- ↑ https://www.petrakellystiftung.de/nc/programm/veranstaltungsdetails/article/das-heimweh-des-walerian-wrobel.html
literature
- Christoph Schminck-Gustavus : The homesickness of Walerjan Wróbel. A special court case in 1941/42. Verlag JHW Dietz Nachf. , Bonn 1986, ISBN 3-8012-0117-1 .
- The judicial murder of a "pest". The Walerjan Wróbel case. In: Heinrich Hannover : The Republic in front of the court 1975–1995. Memories of an uncomfortable lawyer. 2nd Edition. Aufbau-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-7466-7032-2 , pp. 279-306.
Web links
- Walerjan Wróbel from the Polish village of Fałków. on: holocaust-mahnmal.de
- Children and young people as victims of Nazi crimes - Walerjan Wróbel from the Polish village of Fałków 1925-1942. (PDF; 1.1 MB) at: stiftung-denkmal.de
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Wróbel, Walerian |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Polish slave laborer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | April 2, 1925 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Fałków , Świętokrzyskie Voivodeship |
| DATE OF DEATH | August 25, 1942 |
| Place of death | Hamburg |