Wilhelm Bruner

Bruner at the ceremonial opening of the People's Court on July 14, 1934 on the gallery to the right of President Fritz Rehn.

Bruner's workplace from 1917 to 1921: Bavarian War Ministry

Bruner's workplace from 1921 to 1934: Munich Regional Court

Bruner was Vice President at the Reichsgericht Leipzig from 1936 to 1939

Wilhelm Bruner (born January 19, 1875 in Vohenstrauss ; † after 1939) was a German judge who was the executive president of the People's Court between 1934 and 1936 at the time of National Socialism and vice-president of the Imperial Court from 1936 to 1939 .

Life

After graduating in 1902, Bruner entered the Bavarian civil service. During the First World War he was a war veteran from 1914 to 1918, initially as a front officer and from September 1917 in the Bavarian War Ministry in Munich. After the end of the war, he worked as a major in the successor authority, the "Heeresabwicklungsamt Bayern", until 1921. He then became a judge and reached the position of district court director at the Munich I district court . After the re-establishment of the special courts in the 26 higher regional court districts of the German Reich, Bruner became its deputy chairman in Munich in 1933.

When the Reichstag fire trial in the Supreme Court in Leipzig was not run in the sense of the Nazis, was in addition to the special courts on April 24, 1934, the Act to amend provisions of criminal law and criminal procedure adopted an independent People's Court, the treason - and treason processes should take , supplemented by an ordinance of June 12, 1934, in which the seat in Berlin was determined and the three senates were each made up of a chairman (Senate President), an associate judge (Higher Regional Court Council) and three lay judges. The prosecution initially remained with the Reich Attorney's Office in Leipzig. For the appointment of the judge, Bruner was proposed by the National Socialist Bavarian Justice Minister Hans Frank , because in his eyes he had proven himself as "deputy chairman of the Munich Special Court". In order to meet the job requirements of the Reich Ministry of Justice , Bruner in Bavaria first had to be promoted from the District Court Director to the Senate President at the Munich Higher Regional Court , which was arranged by Frank. The other requirements of the Reich Ministry of Justice were "political vision, determination and a rich measure of life experience". The personnel proposal with a total of 33 names, including 21 honorary judges, who were appointed by the Reichswehr , Aviation, Interior Minister and SA , was also checked by the "Deputy Leader", Rudolf Hess . The latter objected to Fritz Rehn as well as a number of names "who are not known as National Socialists", meanwhile "only National Socialists come into question", such as the names of the aviator commodores Hans-Jürgen Stumpff and Hellmuth Felmy , who were interested in being appointed as assessors had tried the People's Court, but not Bruner's. State Secretary Hans Georg Hofmann also accompanied him from Bavaria .

Frank was also present at the opening of the People's Court by Reich Justice Minister Franz Gürtner in the Prussian House on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse on July 1, 1934, where Bruner was sworn in as chairman of the Second Senate . He would have been "Vice President of the People's Court" according to the custom. However, the posts were only created with a second law in early 1936, so that it is not clear whether Fritz Rehn was actually allowed to bear the title of "President of the People's Court" and Bruner the title of "Vice President"; From the point of view of business distribution, it was in fact like that. After President Rehn had died on September 18, 1934, Bruner was now the highest ranking judge “entrusted with the administration of the business of the People's Court President,” Frank had tried to place Hermann Schroer as Rehn's successor in Berlin.

At Bruner's first court hearing in the People's Court on August 1, 1934, the Reich Attorney's representative , Chief Public Prosecutor Wilhelm Eichler, demanded a sentence of two years and three months for the accused 32-year-old Communist functionary Max Theiss for " decomposing the Reichswehr ", the verdict under Bruners Leadership failed accordingly with a year and nine months in prison . The indictment, verdict and sentence were still in the tradition of the right-wing political judiciary of the Weimar Republic . The communist, who "had carried out his disruptive activity for many years", was punished with "prison". "The level of sanctions but clearly shows that even the mediocre cases of offenses against the security of the state are persecuted severely." The first rulings by the People's Court. Penitentiary and prison sentences for high treason , Völkischer Beobachter , August 2, 1934. The verdict was still based on the case law of the Reich Court, as it had passed judgments in this area for a year and a half after the “ seizure of power ”. In addition, there was also a connection to Leipzig via the Oberreichsanwalt.

In order to get the intended tightening of the sentence by the People's Court going without international resistance, it initially concentrated on the “mediocre” cases. The trial against Ernst Thälmann , for whom the complaint had been lodged with the Second Senate since December 17, 1934, was called off clandestinely, since a judicial death sentence was politically wanted but not internationally enforceable, a conceivable prison sentence of “only” 15 years politically not was desired. Thälmann was granted exemption from custody by Bruner on November 1, 1935 , while Thälmann had received the protective custody order the day before. Thälmann was henceforth in protective custody of the Gestapo .

The ruling practice of the People's Court under Rehn and Bruner's leadership also served as a model function for the criminal panels entrusted with high treason matters at the higher regional courts and for the special courts at the higher regional courts. However, since the number of published judgments was small, copies of the judgment were passed on internally via the state ministries of justice. Under Bruner's presidency, the People's Court settled 80 cases from August 1934 and 210 cases in 1935, and passed four death sentences in 1934 and nine in 1935. One was not carried out. Bruner's share of ten death sentences in 1936 has not been established. Nonetheless, the Reich Ministry of Justice criticized the People's Court for “lack of rigor”.

Under Bruner's leadership, the People's Court moved from the Prussian House on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse to the building of the provisional Reich Economic Council at Bellevuestrasse 15, which has since been forcibly dissolved .

With the reorganization of the People's Court through the "Law on the People's Court of April 18, 1936" Otto Georg Thierack became President on May 1, 1936, Karl Engert took over the Senate presidency in the Second Senate from Bruner and became Vice President, headed the Third Senate for treason cases also Eduard Springmann , who came from the Düsseldorf Higher Regional Court in 1934 . Bruner switched to Thierack's position at the Reichsgericht, where he became vice-president under its president Erwin Bumke on May 1, 1936 . Bruner's share in the judgments made there, for example regarding race laws , has not yet been determined. He left the judge's service there on March 31, 1939.

At the time of his transfer to the Reichsgericht, Bruner was, according to his personal file in the Reich Ministry of Justice, a "non-party member", which made his sponsor Hans Frank not hesitate to promote him to two of the highest judicial positions in the Nazi state.

literature

• Lothar Gruchmann: Justice in the Third Reich 1933–1940. Adaptation and submission in the Gürtner era , Munich 1988, ISBN 3-486-53831-4
• Friedrich Karl Kaul , History of the Reichsgericht, Volume IV (1933–1945), East Berlin 1971, p. 263
• Walter Wagner : The People's Court in the National Socialist State. , German publisher. Stuttgart 1974, ISBN 3-486-54491-8
• Günther Wieland : That was the People's Court. Investigations, facts, documents. Staatsverlag der DDR, Berlin 1989, ISBN 3-329-00483-5 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Bruner's time as a judge in Munich, Berlin and Leipzig was unspectacular for the German historiography of National Socialism. His name does not appear at all in the thousand pages of the first standard work on the People's Court by Walter Wagner. For the normality of the persecution of dissenters and opposition members in the judiciary of the Weimar Republic and during the establishment of the National Socialist terror regime, there was still no room in the previous representations: before the terror that followed, the injustice justice from 1933 to 1939 evidently looked small. The beginnings of the People's Court up to 1934 to 1936 by Wagner and Gruchmann are also rated as “mild”.
2. ^ Ordinance of the Reich government on the formation of special courts of March 21, 1933.
3. ↑ Law amending the provisions of criminal law and criminal procedure of April 24, 1934.
4. ↑ Gruchmann, Justice in the Third Reich , p. 961 ff.
5. ↑ Gruchmann, Justice in the Third Reich , p. 965.
6. ↑ Facsimile at Wieland, Das war der Volksgerichtshof , p. 27.
7. ↑ Wieland, That was the People's Court , p. 29.
8. ^ Wagner, The People's Court in the National Socialist State. , P. 79.
9. ↑ Quoted by Hansjoachim W. Koch, Volksgerichtshof. Political Justice in the Third Reich , Munich Universitas 1988, ISBN 3-8004-1152-0 , p. 106f.
10. ^ Reich Ministry of Justice, April 29, 1936 Helmut Heiber, Regesten Volume 2 p. 227 .