Walter Schwarz (lawyer)

Walter Schwarz 1958

Walter Schwarz (born February 11, 1906 in Berlin ; † August 17, 1988 in Zurich ) was a German-Israeli lawyer who, after emigrating as a lawyer and author , dealt with questions of reparation for National Socialist injustice .

Life

In his hometown of Berlin, Walter Schwarz studied law as a student trainee with Professor Martin Wolff and the tutor Dr. Siegbert Springer , a "gifted law teacher". Shortly after Schwarz was admitted to the bar in 1933, it was withdrawn from him by the National Socialists because of his Jewish origins. He temporarily emigrated to France, but returned to Germany in 1934 for family reasons. Until 1938 he kept himself afloat here financially by advising Jews willing to emigrate on legal and official matters relating to property transfers.

At the last minute, Walter Schwarz was able to escape himself in 1938. His father, whom he had to leave behind, was later murdered in the Theresienstadt concentration camp. The November pogroms organized by the National Socialists took place in Germany only one day after Walter Schwarz set off for Palestine by ship . Schwarz lived in Haifa in the house of his Israeli wife Hadassah, whom he had met and married in Germany. He first worked as a lawyer in Palestine, which was then under a British mandate, before applying as a volunteer with the Royal Air Force . He served mainly in North Africa for a news unit. After the war he worked as a lawyer in Israel. Together with Siegfried Moses , the former chairman of the Zionist Association for Germany , he wrote a commentary on income tax law in Palestine.

For the Jewish Agency , the Israeli immigration authority, Walter Schwarz returned to Germany as an Israeli in 1950. He observed developments in the field of reparations for the organization's German branch . In 1952, Schwarz received his doctorate from the Heidelberg legal scholar Eugen Ulmer and settled in Berlin as an independent lawyer specializing in reparation cases. His clients included the singer Fritzi Massary , the actress Helene Thimig , the theater director Max Reinhardt , the publisher Samuel Fischer and the philosopher Ernst Bloch .

Since 1949 Walter Schwarz worked for the Neue Juristische Wochenschrift (NJW) of the CH Beck publishing house , in particular the supplement Jurisprudence for reparation (RzW), which was transformed into a full-fledged magazine under his direction in 1957. It was published until 1981. Schwarz became editor of this organ and also contributed a gloss to every issue under the pseudonyms Sagittarius and Selbaldus Steinbrech. The glosses were so popular that they were published as a collection in a book called Into the Wind in 1969 .

At this point, Walter Schwarz had already given up his practice and apartment in Germany and moved to Switzerland. There he lived first in Wettswil , later in Zurich. He now intensified the work on a project that he had undertaken since 1963 - the publication of a comprehensive work that was to deal with the history of reparation in the Federal Republic of Germany. After difficult negotiations and only after Schwarz had finished the manuscript for the first volume of the project on his own, he won the Federal Ministry of Finance as (co-) editor for the seven-volume work The reparation of National Socialist injustices by the Federal Republic of Germany (CH Beck Verlag). The first volume, written by Schwarz himself, was Restitution According to the Laws of the Allied Powers . It was not until the year 2000 that all of the volumes in the edition planned by Schwarz were published. More than 30 authors contributed to it. According to Schwarz, the purpose of the mammoth company was to leave behind “an overall representation of reparation” as a “historical source of knowledge for future generations”.

In 1981 Walter Schwarz was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit 1st Class by the German Ambassador in Zurich. On his 80th birthday in 1986, Federal President Richard von Weizsäcker thanked him in a personal letter for the fact that Schwarz "as a Jew helped us Germans", "that our rights today rest on the indestructible basis of humanity".

bibliography

author

• On the question of the reimbursement law financial liabilities of the German Reich. Humanitas-Verlag, Koblenz 1951
• Refund and Compensation. A demarcation of the forms of reparation . CH Beck, Berlin 1952 (Dissertation Heidelberg with Eugen Ulmer ).
• Law and reality. Considerations on reparation in the mirror of practice and jurisprudence . Supplement to the Neue juristische Wochenschrift, Volume 11, Issue 47, CH Beck, Munich 1958
• Spoken to the wind? Glossaries on the reparation of National Socialist injustice . With a foreword by Martin Hirsch , Member of the Bundestag. CH Beck, Munich 1969
• The reparation of National Socialist injustice by the Federal Republic of Germany. Overall assessment in individual presentations . Volume 1: Refunds under the laws of the Allied Powers . CH Beck, Munich 1974
• Late fruit. Report from unsteady years (memories). Hans Christians Verlag, Hamburg 1981
• Final consideration . Supplement to Volume VI and later part of Volume VII of the work The reparation of National Socialist injustice by the Federal Republic of Germany , CH Beck, Munich 1985/2000

editor

• The reparation of National Socialist injustice by the Federal Republic of Germany. Overall assessment in individual presentations . Volumes 1 to 7, CH Beck, Munich 1974-2000

literature

• Otto Küster : Walter Schwarz. In: A portrait of lawyers. Publisher and authors in 4 decades. Festschrift for the 225th anniversary of the CH Beck publishing house . CH Beck, Munich 1988, pages 677-682

Web links

• Literature by and about Walter Schwarz in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Walter Schwarz: Late fruit. Report from unsteady years (memories). Christians Verlag, Hamburg 1981, page 39.
2. ^ Christian Poss: reparation. The guerrilla war against the victims. Athenäum Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1988, page 24
3. ↑ Horst Göppinger : Jurists of Jewish descent in the "Third Reich". Disenfranchisement and persecution. 2nd, completely revised edition, CH Beck, Munich 1990, pages 360/361.
4. ↑ Walter Schwarz: Late fruit. Report from unsteady years (memories). Christians Verlag, Hamburg 1981, page 134.
5. ↑ See Schwarz, In den Wind spoken ?, SX
6. ↑ Walter Schwarz: Conclusion. Supplement to Volume VI and later part of Volume VII of the work The reparation of National Socialist injustice by the Federal Republic of Germany, CH Beck, Munich 1985/2000
7. ↑ Walter Schwarz: Late fruit. Report from unsteady years (memories). Christians Verlag, Hamburg 1981, page 151
8. ↑ quoted from: Helmut Buschbom , Member of the Bundestag: Walter Schwarz † , obituary in the Neue Juristische Wochenschrift (NJW), issue 19/1989, pages 1208f