Central Investigation Board
The central investigation authority was an institution of the German Confederation for the supranational persecution of the opposition based in Frankfurt . It was founded in the mid-1830s and worked until the revolution of 1848 .
Development and importance
At the beginning of the 1830s, in the wake of the July Revolution , the liberal and nationally oriented opposition movement was also revived in the German Confederation. The Hambach Festival (1832) and the Frankfurt Wachensturm (1833) in particular were the occasion for the governments of the member states of the German Confederation and the Federal Assembly to intensify the political repression, which gradually subsided after the height of the persecution of demagogues in the first half of the 1820s would have. The Austrian State Chancellor Metternich set the course with his statement: " We will strike in Germany ." As a result, the joint action against the opposition of the two great powers Prussia and Austria was coordinated. Even from the constitutional states of southwest Germany there were calls for better cooperation between the police authorities across national borders. Outside the federal organs, a south-west German " security association " was formed in 1832 from representatives from Baden , Hessen-Darmstadt and Württemberg . Shortly afterwards, the Bundestag also became active and on July 5, 1832, passed the so-called measure law. This introduced stricter censorship measures against the press, banning all political associations and parties and all corresponding symbols. In addition, there were provisions that were directed against the members of the state parliaments. These resolutions were tightened by the deliberations of the Vienna Ministerial Conferences from January to July 1834. Their result was the “Vienna Secret Sixty Articles”, which were so explosive that the Federal Assembly only had them published in part.
In order to implement the resolutions of the Federal Assembly and the Ministerial Conference, the political police were expanded in the individual states and the central investigation authority was set up in Frankfurt. This had the task of "uncovering the more detailed circumstances, the scope in the context of the plot against the existence of the federal government and against the public order in Germany ". The facility was not a court, but a state police prosecution agency that primarily collected information about opposition members and passed them on to the individual states for arrest and trial. Conversely, she received information from the courts in the states and thus gained an overall picture of the political situation. In the "black book" of the authorities, a total of 2140 court cases that were conducted between 1830 and 1842 were documented. This provided a central directory of the relevant opposition figures. No political regional court proceedings in the individual states could be terminated before they had reported the results of their investigations to Frankfurt. Detainees on remand were not allowed to be released until the Central Investigation Bureau itself closed its investigation.
literature
- Wolfram Siemann : From confederation to nation state. Germany 1806-1871 . Munich, 1995. pp. 349-353
- Jürgen Angelow : The German Confederation . Darmstadt, 2003, pp. 49-51