Wolfgang Frankel

This article deals with the lawyer Wolfgang Fränkel. For the doctor, see Wolfgang Bernhard Fränkel .

Wolfgang Immerwahr Fränkel (born January 4, 1905 in Gablonz , Bohemia , † November 29, 2010 in Bad Liebenzell ) was a German lawyer . He was Attorney General at the Federal Court of Justice from March to July 1962 , but was put into temporary retirement because of his Nazi past .

Studied and worked for the Reich Attorney General

After studying in Berlin , Göttingen and Kiel in 1928 and 1932, the son of a Protestant pastor passed the two state examinations in law with excellent results (both “good”). On March 3, 1933, he was appointed court assessor by the Prussian Minister of Justice and assigned to the public prosecutor's office at the Kiel Regional Court . At the local public prosecutor's office , who had become a member of the NSDAP on May 1, 1933 , he was responsible for the press and political criminal matters as a so-called "unskilled worker" and, as he was certified in a certificate from 1935, proved himself with very unusual achievements. Politically, he was confirmed in a certificate from the Gauleitung Kiel from 1936 that he was unreservedly reliable. In a testimonial from the Gauleitung Kurhessen from September 1936, he was described as a "staunch supporter" who was politically reliable without any restrictions.

He was after in September 1934, Kassel was appointed Staatsanwaltschaftsrat, in November 1936 as staff to Empire advocacy of Leipzig appointed, where he remained until his call to the armed forces worked 1,943th In the meantime he had been promoted to district court director in Leipzig in 1939 while still working for the Reich Attorney General. In the realm advocacy Frankel was a "research assistant" responsible for the processing of nullity complaints , one only the senior prosecutor are entitled to appeal , be reviewed in the really final judgments of local and regional courts, including special courts. Fränkel is said to have voted in favor of the death penalty in around 50 cases . The later President of the Stuttgart Higher Regional Court Richard Schmid described Fränkel in retrospect as a "fanatic of the death penalty".

Career in post-war justice

After the war and release from American captivity in July 1946, Fränkel worked as a local judge at the district court in Rendsburg from February 1947 (according to another source possibly as early as 1946) . At the end of March 1951 he was seconded to the Federal Public Prosecutor's Office.

His appointment as federal prosecutor at the suggestion of Federal Justice Minister Thomas Dehler ( FDP ) in June 1951 was delayed. The Legal Committee of the Federal Council did not consider Fränkel to meet the requirements of the office of a federal prosecutor, but not because of a lack of legal qualifications.

The appointment proposal of the Minister of Justice led to a discussion in the Federal Council, which had to approve under Section 149 of the GVG , as to whether former members of the Reichsgericht or - as in the Fränkels case - employees of the Reich Attorney General were acceptable as federal prosecutors. This question arose precisely in the area of ​​the staffing of the Federal Prosecutor's Office, as it had to guarantee the protection of the constitution in a special way because of its responsibility to prosecute state security offenses. Therefore, the staff of the Federal Prosecutor should at least have a feeling for the injustice of the Hitler dictatorship. Despite this discussion, on July 26 and 27, 1951, the Federal Council approved Frankel's appointment as federal prosecutor with three abstentions. Fränkel worked in the auditing department and was a member of the large criminal law commission .

Appointment as federal prosecutor

The excellent evaluation in official assessments and his position as the longest serving federal prosecutor made him a candidate for the office of general public prosecutor in March 1962. In addition, his predecessor Max Güde , who had given up his office on October 26, 1961, spoke out in favor of him. In addition, Fränkel had answered the question of Justice Minister Wolfgang Stammberger (FDP) in the negative, whether the East (i.e. the GDR ) could possibly bring something against him. Wolfgang Fränkel was introduced as the third head of the Federal Prosecutor's Office on March 30, 1962, thus ending the long vacancy after Güdes left. The problem of Fränkel's activity in the Reich Attorney's Office in the National Socialist German Reich played no role in this promotion. He was appointed to the office of Federal Public Prosecutor on March 23, 1962 by Federal President Heinrich Lübke - with the unanimous consent of the Federal Council and the Federal Government ( Adenauer IV cabinet ).

Allegations of activity in the Nazi judiciary

A few days later, the GDR media began to discuss and criticize Frankel's past. His upcoming appointment is "a typical example of the re-use of Nazis in the West German judicial apparatus". The allegations increased in April. For the first time, details of Fränkel's activities were disseminated to the Reich Attorney General. He was accused of using the appeal of annulment as a means of tightening the judgments. The West German public dismissed these as yet insignificant accusations as propaganda of the GDR, since the GDR had tried in earlier cases to discredit high-ranking personalities from politics, the judiciary and the armed forces through untrue accusations and forged documents.

The Federal Ministry of Justice then asked Fränkel to report in detail on his activities at the time in order to obtain suitable information to be able to counter the attacks. In his report, Fränkel denied any involvement in death sentences imposed on the basis of political or racist motives and claimed that he had only participated in legal proceedings. He recalled that he was involved in two cases in which a death sentence was imposed in the extraordinary objection proceedings. In no case had a court pronounced the death penalty by way of an appeal for annulment. Fränkel also said that with 500 to 600 criminal cases annually, he could not remember every single case with absolute certainty.

In June 1962, on the occasion of an article in Neues Deutschland, evidence was made public that suggested Fränkel's involvement in over 30 questionable death sentences during his time with the Reich Attorney General. These were substantiated by a 130-page brochure published in the GDR on June 23, 1962 at a press conference of the GDR's own Committee for German Unity chaired by Greta Kuckhoff , entitled “From the Reich Attorney General to the Attorney General - Wolfgang Fränkel, new Federal Attorney General ". Based on files from the Reich Attorney General, 34 cases were found in which Frankel was involved in the imposition of the death penalty. These allegations led to reactions: some criticized the campaign character of the allegations and refuted parts of them as clearly false, while others took up true allegations. Der Spiegel reported that Justice Minister Stammberger had presented the brochure to Fränkel and that the latter had admitted the authenticity of the evidence. Ernst Müller-Meiningen jr. wrote in the Süddeutsche Zeitung that Frankel's career was "a shame".

After looking through the brochure, Frankel offered to resign; he was on leave on July 2, 1962. Before taking any further steps, the results of an investigation by a working group consisting of members of the Bundestag Hans Wilhelmi ( CDU ), Gerhard Jahn ( SPD ) and Thomas Dehler ( FDP ) were awaited. On July 9, 1962, they came to the conclusion that Fränkel had not violated any official or official duties during his time with the Reich Attorney General. However, for general political and judicial policy reasons, this activity deprives Fränkel of the ability to hold the office of Federal Public Prosecutor. On July 24, 1962, Wolfgang Fränkel was put into temporary retirement at the request of the Federal Minister of Justice Stammberger in accordance with Section 36 I BBG . At the same time, disciplinary proceedings were initiated against him. Before his appointment as Federal Public Prosecutor, Fränkel negligently concealed relevant events from his work at the Oberreichsanwalt from the Minister of Justice and negligently provided false information about them after the GDR publication appeared.

details

The allegations against Fränkel were individually controversial. It corresponded to the tactics of the GDR to combine authentic documents with forged ones. The statement in the allegations that he was a lawyer and worked closely with Roland Freisler was superficially incorrect . In fact, he had only been an unskilled worker for the Reich Attorney General. Despite his membership in the NSDAP, Fränkel tried to refute the charge of having identified himself ideologically with National Socialism by submitting his diary entries. In his private sphere, he then kept a distance from the system of the “ Third Reich ”. His involvement in death sentences for minor offenses by way of an annulment complaint, however, corresponds to the facts. His written remarks in no way testified to restraint or even distance from the injustice regime.

Some examples (proof below):

• The district court Mährisch-Schönberg had the 18-year-old Czech farm worker Vlk. for rape sentenced to 16 months in prison. It had taken into account that the defendant had no criminal record, was partially confessed and only 18 years old. In the grounds of the annulment complaint, with which Fränkel sought a tightening of the sentence, he wrote: “The district court obviously did not take into account the outrageous impudence that lies in the fact that a Czech has chastised a German girl. That is a legal error. "
• Stanislaw D., a Pole who was deported to the German Reich for forced labor , had told a compatriot that Hitler would never conquer all of Europe and that the English were not afraid of him. The Germans are weak. "Us" Poles were better off in Russia than they are now in Germany. The special court in Kiel imprisoned the accused for “anti-German sentiments” according to Section 1 (3) of the Polish Criminal Law Ordinance , according to which Poles and Jews were compulsorily punished with death, only in less serious cases if they manifest hostile German sentiments through hateful or inflammatory activity , in particular made anti-German statements, were sentenced to imprisonment. There is a less serious case, which is why no death penalty should be imposed. As a clerk for the responsible senior Reich attorney, Fränkel formulated an annulment complaint with the aim of the death penalty, because the state had to "counteract such attempts at decomposition with relentless severity".
• The Pole Josef F. had been sentenced by the special court in Kiel to six years of “aggravated prison camp”, that is to say a concentration camp with an almost certain fatal outcome for him as a Pole, for causing public nuisance ( exhibitionism ) . Frankel was not satisfied with this. The accused acted unrestrainedly. The acts are likely to cause unrest in the population and to impair the feeling of security from such attacks by foreigners (emphasis added) . The goal here was the death penalty.
• In the case of a thief of three pairs of shoes, a briefcase and other rather inferior objects who, in his opinion, was wrongly not sentenced to death, Fränkel formulated that it was a dangerous and worthless person for the national community (emphasis added) .
• In the case of a person convicted of “only” a prison term of seven years for the theft of a coat and subsequent preventive detention, Fränkel stated, with the aim of imposing the death penalty, “his mental and emotional inferiority - which the special court had assessed as mitigating the penalty - would otherwise have the perpetrator have to make efforts to compensate for its facilities that are dangerous to the community ”. This does not justify refraining from the death penalty. The Imperial Court ruled on the death penalty.

Criminal law processing

The known individual cases of Fränkel's involvement in proceedings in which the death penalty was imposed resulted in criminal charges by GDR citizens for murder or attempted murder at the Karlsruhe public prosecutor's office in investigations into two murders, complicity in murder and attempted murder in four Cases that were discontinued in September 1964 by a resolution of the Karlsruhe Higher Regional Court on the grounds that Fränkel could not be proven that he "even doubted the validity of the cited provisions during the war, let alone recognized their invalidity". Such an argument corresponded to the prevailing view of the offense of perversion of the law . The Federal Court of Justice also argued similarly in the famous Hans-Joachim Rehse case .

Disciplinary processing

In July 1965, a several-day hearing took place before the Federal Service Court (BGH), which finally recognized an acquittal . The press release stated, among other things: "Incidentally, it was documented in the negotiation that Fränkel was emphatically opposed to National Socialism."

literature

• Justice and National Socialism. Catalog for the exhibition of the Federal Minister of Justice 1989, pp. 373–381.
• Committee for German Unity and the Association of Democratic Jurists in Germany: From Reich Prosecutor to Federal Prosecutor's Office. Berlin (East) 1962 (on the authenticity of the documents, see above in the text)
• Friedrich Karl Kaul : History of the Reichsgericht. Volume IV: 1933-1945. East Berlin 1971, p. 317.
• Gerhard Fieberg: Wolfgang Fränkel. In: Ministry of Justice of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia (ed.): Between right and wrong - CVs of German lawyers. Düsseldorf 2004, p. 113 ff. (With further references from legal journals)

Web links

• Literature by and about Wolfgang Fränkel in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ The time change and the German judiciary. ( Memento from March 15, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
2. ↑ ^{a b} Federal Prosecutor General: Presentation is recommended. In: Der Spiegel. 28/1962.
3. ↑ Wolfgang Fränkel in the Munzinger archive ( beginning of article freely accessible)
4. ↑ ^{a b} Gerhard Fieberg, In: Between right and wrong. 2004, p. 113.
5. ↑ quoted from Ingo Müller : Terrible Jurists . The unresolved past of our judiciary. Kindler Verlag, 1987, p. 218.
6. ↑ ^{a b c d} Gerhard Fieberg, In: Between right and wrong. 2004, p. 115.
7. ↑ New Germany. June 24, 1962, pp. 1 and 2.
8. ↑ cit. after Manfred Kittel : After Nuremberg and Tokyo: "" Coping with the past "in Japan and West Germany 1945 to 1968". Munich 2004, p. 145.
9. ↑ ^{a b c d} Gerhard Fieberg, In: Between right and wrong. 2004, p. 116.
10. ↑ Klaus Bästlein: " Nazi blood judges as pillars of the Adenauer regime". The GDR campaigns against Nazi judges and public prosecutors, the reactions of the West German judiciary and their failed “self-cleaning” 1957–1968. In: Klaus Bästlein, Annette Rosskopf, Falco Werkentin: Contributions to the legal history of the GDR. (= Series of publications by the Berlin State Commissioner for the Records of the State Security Service of the former GDR. Volume 12). 4th edition. Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-934085-05-3 , pp. 53-93, here p. 62.