Wilhelm Kühnast

Wilhelm Kühnast (born January 21, 1899 in Wartenburg ; died December 17, 1970 in Berlin ) was a German lawyer.

Life

Kühnast's dissertation in Halle 1928

Wilhelm Kühnast was born as the son of the farmer with the same name and his wife in Wartenburg an der Elbe. He passed his Abitur after self-study, studied law in Berlin, received his doctorate with the dissertation of April 19, 1928 and became a lawyer.

During the Weimar Republic , Wilhelm Kühnast was a member of the SPD . During National Socialism he worked as a councilor at the Berlin-Moabit district court from 1936. He was busy prosecuting homosexuals until the collapse of the Hitler regime. Kühnast did not join the NSDAP - like many Nazi lawyers who were loyal to the line. He was drafted into the war several times, but was postponed because of a leg problem. Against his will, he took over the role of executioner in Moabit. In 1944 his only son, his wife and their mother died in the hail of bombs.

On May 20, 1945 the city court appointed him as attorney general. With the establishment of the four-power status in Berlin on October 15, 1945, he was appointed attorney general under the Soviet military administration. He was the first "general" after the Second World War and was also called that by employees.

In 1945 he dealt with his first sensational case: The NSDAP functionary and chief post director Karl Kieling had shot an anti-fascist in the last days of the war and was sentenced to death, after the sentence was overturned, to 8 years in prison. Kühnast applied for the judgment to be set aside. In February 1946, Wilhelm Kühnast gave a lecture in which he described the prosecution of so-called Nazi informers (i.e. persons who extradited people to the Gestapo during the Nazi era ) as legally problematic, but possible under the new Allied law. In April 1946 he applied for Helene Schwärzel to be extradited from the French occupation zone in Berlin to his area. The New Germany called him because of his activities relating to Nazi informers an "upright anti-fascists". In the summer of 1946, Kühnast applied for the then 52-year-old Nazi executioner Wilhelm Friedrich Röttger to be extradited from Hanover to Berlin to try him there.

In March 1947 the situation changed. Kühnast now appeared as a plaintiff himself. He charged two men with defamation. They had allegedly seen Kühnast take files from the People's Court to his home and let them disappear. Kühnast won the trial (one of the defendants was sentenced to eight months in prison in April 1947), but in April the New Germany criticized the attorney general for the first time: the trial was hasty and the question was whether Kühnast could still be the right attorney general for democratic Berlin. Because the newspaper was the mouthpiece of the interim administration (predecessor of the GDR), Kühnast's case came from above. On May 30th, the Allied Command in the Eastern Sector of Berlin placed him under house arrest.

The official reason for this was that there was a connection to the arrest of four employees in his department. In the East Berlin press, Kühnast was dismantled within the following months: he had resold confiscated property from prisoners. As the chief prosecutor against Nazi informers, he was an "inhibiting force". Presumably, however, the house arrest had solid political reasons. The Tagesspiegel reported on August 1, 1948 that Kühnast had sought criminal proceedings against the highest communist functionaries, namely against the later GDR, on the basis of tips from older police officers who, like himself, were close to the SPD (and thus viewed by the KPD as enemies) - Intelligence chief Erich Mielke and the later state council chairman of the GDR Walter Ulbricht - both because of a 1931 murder of the police officers Paul Lenk and Franz Anlauf in the middle of Berlin. Kühnast was officially removed from office in December.

Kühnast lived at Wattstrasse 12 in Oberschöneweide in the southeast of Berlin. While the Soviets maintained house arrest, the three Western powers lifted it. On August 3, 1948, Wilhelm Kühnast, accompanied by two criminal police officers, approached the American sector of Berlin while walking . Immediately at the border on Neukölln's Jupiterstraße, he threw himself to the ground and shouted “Help, robbers”. In the scuffle, his two companions were arrested for possession of weapons, and Kühnast was released. The western press celebrated him. After that it became quiet around Wilhelm Kühnast. He died in West Berlin in 1970.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Wilhelm Kühnast: The compulsory lease under the Reich Settlement Act of August 11, 1919 . Publisher Noske 1928
2. ↑ Andreas Pretzel: Nazi victims with reservation: homosexual men in Berlin after 1945 . Lit, Münster 2002, ISBN 3-8258-6390-5 .
3. ↑ The appeal is said to have been based on a misunderstanding: The Soviets were in Berlin looking for a lawyer for the post of Attorney General and asked for the “greatest public prosecutor”. Then they were called Kühnast, who was of great stature.
4. ↑ Kieling was finally executed on August 21, 1946. It was the last execution in the Spandau correctional facility. The Kieling case is interesting in terms of legal history, because immediately after the war, the case law was far from being consolidated and Kieling was exactly in between. The first death sentence was pronounced in June 1945 under the head of the public prosecutor at the Friedenau District Court, Ernst Melsheimer . Melsheimer later became the first attorney general in the GDR.
5. ↑ Berliner Zeitung , February 17, 1946, Volume 2 / Issue 40 / Page 2
6. ↑ Neues Deutschland, May 16, 1946, Volume 1 / Issue 20 / Page 4
7. ↑ Neues Deutschland, March 26, 1947, Volume 2 / Issue 72 / Page 4
8. ^ Friedrich Scholz: Berlin and its justice: The history of the chamber court district 1945 to 1980 . De Gruyter 1981
9. ↑ The stopped umbrella . In: Spiegel Online . tape June 25 , 1947 ( spiegel.de [accessed August 31, 2019]).
10. ^ Jochen Staadt : The Berlin police at zero hour. ZdF 28/2010