Central legal protection office

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The Central Legal Protection Agency (abbreviation: ZRS ) was a federal German authority that existed from 1950 to 1970. The official task of the ZRS was to organize legal protection for Germans who had been charged or convicted of Nazi or war crimes by non-German courts. The ZRS, headed by Hans Gawlik , was subordinate to the Federal Ministry of Justice from its establishment , then from 1953 until it was dissolved to the Foreign Office .

history

Shortly after the end of the Second World War, there were various parastatal agencies in the three occupation zones of the Western Allies that looked after the fate of German prisoners of war abroad: in particular the interim organizations of the German Red Cross with its DRK tracing service , the German Caritas Association and the Evangelical Relief Organization were active here from 1945.

On December 1, 1949, the Bundestag, which had been constituted just under three months beforehand, decided to establish a central legal protection office to “ ensure legal protection for those Germans who were detained abroad as a result of the war”. The Bundestag debate on the establishment of the Central Legal Protection Agency was opened by the CDU member Eugen Gerstenmaier , who as head of the Evangelical Relief Organization was familiar with the situation. In his speech, Gerstenmaier consistently mixed the question of prisoners of war with the question of the accused or convicted war criminals and gave the following combined numbers of Germans in custody in the following countries for both categories: Soviet Union (300,000 to half a million), Poland (15,000), Yugoslavia (1,400), France (1,200), Holland (200), Belgium (100), Norway (60), Denmark (55), Luxembourg (50), Italy (20) and Greece (8). In addition to providing support for those wanted or convicted abroad, the legal aid office also looked after the convicted war and Nazi criminals who were held in the Allied prisons in Landsberg , Werl , Wittlich and Spandau .

The ZRS was assigned to the Federal Ministry of Justice. It started work in March 1950. Its long-term head was the lawyer Dr. Hans Gawlik , who was involved in the prosecution of Nazi and war criminals by the Allies as the defender of several defendants in the Nuremberg trials . Before 1945, Gawlik was a member of the NSDAP and a public prosecutor at the Wroclaw Special Court . After the establishment of the Foreign Office, the ZRS was subordinated to it on February 1, 1953. After the last “regular” prisoners of war were released by the Soviet Union in 1955, the focus of the ZRS was entirely on legal counsel for Germans who were charged with Nazi and war crimes abroad.

As a result of the clearance certificates issued by the ZRS to convicted SS and Wehrmacht members almost without exception, numerous convicted war criminals received, in some cases considerable, compensation after their release. So z. B. SS-Untersturmführer Karl Wiedemann, the leader of the guards of the Neuengamme concentration camp , 4,800 DM from the magistrate of the city of Bremerhaven.

In the 1958 budget year , the “Central Legal Protection Agency for Germans Accused Abroad” received a budget of DM 1.2 million  for 24  posts . The ZRS officially looked after 38 “internees”.

In addition to organizing legal counsel, the authority collected trial documents from abroad in order to warn Germans convicted in absentia against visiting countries where they are on the wanted list. In order to obtain the addresses of Nazi perpetrators convicted abroad for the purpose of warning, the ZRS worked with the Red Cross and also with the silent help . From 1964 onwards, the ZRS used the tracing service of the German Red Cross to search for a total of 800 Germans and Austrians who had been convicted of war crimes in absentia by French courts. The matter came to light in 1968 when the list of wanted Austrians, which the DRK had given to the Vienna Red Cross , appeared in a newsletter of the comradeship of the Linz 45th Infantry Division , where friends of Simon Wiesenthal noticed them. This warning list contained, among other things, the name of Alois Brunner . Gawlik retired in 1968.

In 1970, the ZRS was dissolved as an independent organizational unit and its tasks were taken over by Section V 4 of the Foreign Office.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The role of ZRS (with Dr. Hans Gawlik , in the medium)
  2. ^ German Bundestag (ed.): Negotiations of the German Bundestag / Annexes to the shorthand reports . Bundestag printed matter No. 165, stenographic reports Volume 1, 19th session, p. 543 ff.
  3. ↑ Norbert Frei: Politics of the Past . Munich 1996, pp. 181-182.
  4. ↑ Norbert Frei: Politics of the Past . Munich 1996, p. 21 f.
  5. ↑ "Compensation for convicted war criminals", in the medium
  6. ↑ Legal protection . In: Der Spiegel . No. 2 , 1958, p. 15 ( online ).
  7. ↑ a b Has been notified . In: Der Spiegel . No. 16 , 1968, pp. 51-53 ( online ).
  8. ↑ Oliver Schröm and Andrea Röpke: Silent help for brown comrades: the secret network of old and neo-Nazis , 2nd edition. Ch. Links Verlag, Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-86153-266-2 , pp. 51-52.
  9. ↑ Ulrich Keitel: The Foreign Office in Twilight or How Much Surface Does the Foreign Office offer? ( Memento of June 29, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) . Commentary in the Hessischer Rundfunk on August 17, 1968.