Wilhelm Gallas

Wilhelm Gallas (born July 22, 1903 in St. Petersburg , † November 5, 1989 in Heidelberg ) was a German lawyer , criminal law theorist and university professor. Wilhelm Gallas is considered to be one of the most powerful and formative German criminal law dogmatists. During the reign of National Socialism he was a representative of the National Socialist criminal law theory, which is evident from his functions as a university lecturer and editor and editor of the journal for the entire criminal law science (ZStW). However, the essays he wrote during this period are relatively moderate and not decidedly racist. Many of his dogmatic concepts and perspectives, in particular the personal doctrine of injustice he developed and his conceptions of intent , injustice and guilt , have had a decisive influence on German post-war criminal law and are largely recognized to this day or find numerous followers in the criminal law doctrinal discussion.

Life

Wilhelm Gallas was born on July 22, 1903 in St. Petersburg, Russia. Here he spent his childhood and attended the German Katharinen School until the outbreak of the First World War. In the course of the war he and his family moved to Darmstadt, and later to Berlin.

After studying the law at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin Gallas in 1931 received his doctorate with his teacher Kohlrausch Eduard with a thesis on criminal policy and criminal law system with special reference to Soviet law . Just one year later, Gallas completed his habilitation, also with Kohlrausch, with the essay The essence of criminal omission and its position in the system of criminal doctrine .

Gallas used his knowledge of the Russian language for his first major publication - the first (and to date only) German translation and commentary on the Criminal Code of the USSR from 1926. Gallas' interest in questions of comparative criminal law was later reflected in his membership in the advisory board and board of trustees of the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law in Freiburg im Breisgau.

After assuming a substitute professorship at the University of Bonn , Gallas was appointed professor of criminal law in Giessen in 1934 , and a year later in Königsberg. In 1940 he followed a call to the University of Tübingen. Although he accepted a call to Leipzig in 1942, he was unable to follow him because he was drafted into the Wehrmacht. From 1935 Gallas was co-editor of the magazine for the entire criminal law science (ZStW), from 1934 to 1942 also its editor.

After the end of the National Socialist dictatorship in Germany, Gallas was able to continue his academic career without a break. After the end of the war, he did not take up teaching in Leipzig; instead he worked at the University Library of Tübingen until 1947, took on a teaching position at the University of Hamburg in the same year and was reappointed in 1948 to his previous chair for criminal law, procedural law and legal philosophy in Tübingen . He turned down offers to the Universities of Cologne (1948) and Göttingen (1952). From 1954 until his retirement in 1971 he taught as a full professor for criminal law , procedural law and legal philosophy at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg , of which he was also rector in the academic year 1964/1965 . Wilfried Küper was appointed his successor at the chair for criminal law, criminal procedure law and legal philosophy .

From 1954 to 1959, Gallas was a member of the Grand Criminal Law Commission and had a significant influence on the liberal reform of criminal law. From 1959 until his death in 1989, Gallas was a member of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences .

The most important works published by Wilhelm Gallas in the post-war period include: On the current state of the doctrine of crime (1955); Contributions to crime studies (1968); On the structure of the criminal law concept of injustice (1979)

Note on the sources

When viewing the sparse biographical material on Wilhelm Gallas, it is noticeable that it is largely silent about Galla's academic and legal political work during the time of the National Socialist dictatorship. For example, the Festschrift for Galla's 70th birthday contains neither biographical information on the jubilee nor a list of publications. More detailed appraisals of the few publications by Gallas in the period from 1933 to 1945 are, however, contained in Gerhard Werle's habilitation thesis, published in 1989, on Justiz-Strafrecht und Police Crime Fighting in the Third Reich ; there also evidence.

Selected aspects of the work in the post-war period

In legal circles, Gallas is undisputed, as evidenced by the obituaries of his equally important students and colleagues, as one of the most influential German criminal law dogmatists of the post-war period, who also helped German criminal law gain a high international reputation.

The focus of the work of Gallas are of the dogmatic issues of general teaching criminal law and the criminal policy , where he developed the concept of an oriented on debt thoughts and equally of crime prevention serving punishment represents. Eminent teachers of criminal law such as Jescheck and Lackner unanimously appreciate that Gallas is always concerned with disclosing the fundamental decisions of criminal policy and legal philosophy that determine criminal law, and thereby gaining clarity about the nature of guilt, crime and punishment. According to Jescheck, the basis of Gallas' conception of crime and punishment is based on Ludwig Feuerbach's "legal-political conception determined by the idea of ​​individual freedom", the conviction of the freedom and personal responsibility of the offender for exceeding the "obligations the barriers drawn to justice ”, the double justification of the criminal injustice in the violation of legal rights and the violation of duty as well as the justification and strict assessment and limitation of the punishment according to the guilt of the offender. Gallas sees the essence of punishment in retaliation for injustices for the purpose of crime prevention. Lackner counts among Gallas' lasting achievements that he ultimately succeeded in building a bridge between the finalistic doctrine of injustice and the special purpose doctrine and thus paved the way for a structurally uniform personal doctrine of injustice.

Gallas developed a concept of the dual position of intent . On the one hand, as the bearer of the final action control, this should be a feature of the injustice and on the other hand, as a bearer of the disinterestedness, a feature of the guilty offense. This position is reflected in the distinction and definition made by Gallas of the three types of intent that are still in use today, as well as in the delimitation of conditional intent from deliberate negligence.

“The perpetrator takes the possibility that the punishable result will occur really seriously. He doesn't push them aside by trust or hope, but rather endures the idea, so to speak, that success can occur. And because he endures this and acts nonetheless, he shows that the preservation of the legal interest is not important to him. ”[…] On the other hand, the perpetrator acts deliberately negligently if he“ trusts, contrary to duty and accusingly, that the realization of the legal offense will not occur. "

Gallas' view of intent and guilt also corresponds to his doctrine of the error of prohibition , in which he assumes a three-way division based on the convictions of the perpetrator. The erroneous assumption that the factual prerequisites for a reason for justification are met leads to the elimination of intent at Gallas, a solution that is still represented today as an analogous legal consequence of the error in the legal status , but has not become law. Gallas also wants to treat all other cases of error in the prohibition on the legal side analogous to the error in the legal status and generally only see the offender being punished for negligence.

Gallas' contributions to participation theory were also of lasting importance . Starting from a strict rejection of the figure of the unified perpetrator and a determination of the form of participation on the basis of the appearance of the crime, Gallas introduces the concept of perpetration as a criterion for the delimitation of perpetration and participation . Here, Gallas focuses on the real significance of the considered contribution in the context of the overall event and on the degree of the realization of the planning will of the offender in the act according to the facts.

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1. ↑ Hans-Heinrich Jescheck, Karl Lackner, Manfred Maiwald a. a .: In memoriam Wilhelm Gallas . Heidelberg 1990
2. ↑ Jescheck, Lackner, Maiwald et al., P. 7 ff.
3. ↑ Jescheck, Lackner, Maiwald et al., P. 53 ff.
4. ^ Wilhelm Gallas: Minutes of the meetings of the Great Criminal Law Commission , 1959, Volume 12, p. 490

• Manfred Maiwald: Obituary for Wilhelm Gallas , jurist newspaper, year 1990, 83 (also contained in the above memorial)
• Wilhelm Gallas: On the current state of the doctrine of crime , ZStW 67 (1955)
• Wilhelm Gallas: Contributions to the Doctrine of Crimes , Heidelberg, 1968 (collection of essays and lectures since 1945)

Web links

• Works by and about Wilhelm Gallas  in the German Digital Library
• Wilhelm Gallas in the professorial catalog of the University of Leipzig