Walter Ziegler (judge)

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Walter Ziegler (born November 5, 1912 in Berlin ; † February 20, 1977 there ) was a German lawyer and one of the leading judges in the early GDR . From the 1950s to the early 1960s, as chairman of the 1st criminal senate in the GDR Supreme Court and as a district judge in Frankfurt (Oder), he passed numerous harsh judgments in political trials and against actual and alleged spies.

Life

Ziegler was the son of a saddler and a leather stepper and grew up in Berlin-Neukölln . In 1932 he graduated from the Karl Marx School in Neukölln. From 1931 to 1933 he was a member of the KPD . He studied economics and law and political science in Berlin, and from 1937 gained experience as a trainee lawyer at the Naumburg Higher Regional Court , the Zörbig District Court and the Halle (Saale) Regional Court . In 1942 he passed the state examination.

During National Socialism , Walter Ziegler belonged to the NS Judges 'Association and until the end of World War II of the National Socialist Lawyers' Association . In the Wehrmacht he served as a non-commissioned officer and was awarded the Iron Cross in 1943. From April to June 1945 Ziegler was imprisoned in an American hospital in Bad Lausick (Saxony) and immediately after his release in the same year he took up a position as a judge at the Bitterfeld District Court .

Career in the GDR

In 1946 Ziegler did not rejoin the KPD, but rather the SPD . In a review procedure in 1951 on the occasion of a party purge of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED), he was given negative credit:

"Ziegler comes from the working class, but still has petty-bourgeois tendencies, which were expressed in the vacillating attitude following his entry into the SPD after he had been a member of the KPD in 1931."

Due to the forced union with the KPD , he had become a member of the SED. In 1949 Ziegler went back to the Halle district court, this time as the court president. On February 9, 1950, the People's Chamber elected Ziegler along with seven others to the Supreme Court on the proposal of the government. In his new role as Chief Justice at the Supreme Court of the GDR - which was just being established at the time - Ziegler worked in the immediate vicinity of the later GDR Justice Minister Hilde Benjamin . He was one of her assessors in the 1st Criminal Senate and followed her first as acting Vice-President and Chairman of the 1st Criminal Senate, and in 1954 as Vice-President of the Supreme Court. On February 8, 1953, the Volkskammer elected Ziegler to the constitutional committee of the Volkskammer.

The New York Times reported in 1954 that Walter Ziegler interrogated the alleged Gehlen spy Karli Bandelow .

It was usually the Vice President who directed the proceedings in the highest criminal court in the GDR. In this role, Ziegler imposed severely politically colored punishments, for example

He passed death sentences, among other things

In 1955, Ziegler wrote in the GDR legal newspaper Neue Justiz that the "criminal attacks" on the GDR (meaning spying activities from the West) made high demands on the jurisprudence:

"Regardless of which group of people the enticement is directed against, [...] it always represents a dangerous form of class struggle that has emerged more recently, particularly in recent times . [...] The enticement of engineers and other technically qualified skilled workers is not only an impairment of the accelerated economic development in the German Democratic Republic, rather this form of enticement also serves to promote the armaments industry in West Germany and thus intensified preparation for war. "

In January 1956 alone, the GDR newspapers dedicated several editorials to Ziegler on the occasion of his tough judgments. They carried titles such as "Death penalty for hero and rowing", "Four agents received their just punishment", "Just sentence against saboteurs". Later in the same year, Ziegler once struck a critical note when, in a letter to Attorney General Ernst Melsheimer, he questioned excessively long pre- trial detention periods and the sense of night interrogations of suspects:

“It cannot possibly be tolerated that prisoners are questioned all night long for a week, day and night for three days. If such inmates revoke the statements made in such interrogations, I consider it impossible to regard statements made under such circumstances as conclusive. "

This letter petered out without further notice, because Ziegler had 'only' addressed the generally common interrogation practice. However, the letter may have been the trigger for Hilde Benjamin, who has since risen to become Minister of Justice, to be transferred to the provinces at the Frankfurt / Oder district court in 1958. There Ziegler proved himself with extraordinarily tough, always politically justified judgments. So he condemned something

Even the Supreme Court was no longer comfortable with Ziegler's rule in the province. A letter dated February 12, 1962 to the Attorney General and the District Court of Frankfurt / Oder states:

“The penalties of the district court are almost always excessive, sometimes to an absolutely unacceptable degree. It must be noted in advance that the OG is currently unable to make corrections to the extent that they would actually be necessary. It should therefore be pointed out that changes in the verdict have so far only been made in the most glaring cases, but the judgments confirmed by rejection of the order cannot constitute a certificate that all these confirmed judgments can be regarded as correct. "
Anthology for the 20th anniversary of the GDR Supreme Court with an essay by Walter Ziegler (1970)

In March 1962 the minister called him back to the position of Vice-President of the Supreme Court in Berlin. On December 17, 1962, the State Council Chairman Walter Ulbricht presented him with the Patriotic Order of Merit in silver.

In 1963 Walter Ziegler worked on the administration of justice decree of the State Council and the Judicial Constitution Act of the GDR and was thus one of the leading constitutional lawyers in the GDR. Walter Ziegler died of a heart attack in Berlin in 1977. The cremation took place in the Baumschulenweg crematorium . In an obituary it said:

"His life was filled with the struggle for the realization of revolutionary socialist legalism and justice."

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ SAPMO, cit. n. Fricke: inspection of files. 1996, p. 108.
  2. ↑ The other new judges at the Supreme Court were Helene Drechler, Elfriede Göldner, Heinrich Löwenthal, Wolfgang Melz, Kurt Paschke, Hans Rothschild and Alfred Trapp. Source: Neue Zeit from February 10, 1950
  3. ^ New Germany of October 9, 1953, p. 1
  4. ↑ In this criminal case, Ziegler, who used a very precise expression, made a remarkable slip of the tongue. In the grounds of the verdict (15 years in prison for butchers) he said, reading from the sheet: “The hostile and constructive politics pursued by the government of the German Democratic Republic, with the decisive participation of the party of the working class, the Socialist Unity Party of Germany - peaceful and constructive politics … “BStU tape recording, signature MfS HA IX Tb 2188
  5. ↑ Quoted from Neues Deutschland on December 17, 1955, p. 3: "There is no mildness for the people's enemies". The occasion was the conference of high-ranking GDR judges and public prosecutors in Leipzig, which began on the same day. There is also a tape record of this in the BStU . See SWR 2 archive radio
  6. ↑ Praedel also wrote to Predel and in parts of the trial documents accidentally wrote to Predl. Trial from December 20-21, 1961 at the Frankfurt / Oder district court, death sentence for arson, execution on January 25, 1962
  7. ^ SED, ZPA, IV 2/13/424 of April 1962, quoted in n. Falco Werkentin : Political criminal justice in the Ulbricht era. Ch.links Verlag, Berlin 1995, p. 320.
  8. ↑ Volkskammer decision of March 28, 1962
  9. ↑ See Bernd-Rainer Barth, Helmut Müller-Enbergs: Ziegler, Walter. 2010.
  10. ↑ New Justice. 7/1977
personal data
SURNAME Ziegler, Walter
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German lawyer, Chairman of the Senate at the Supreme Court of the GDR
DATE OF BIRTH November 5, 1912
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH February 20, 1977
Place of death Berlin