Status: 11/18/2021 10:35 a.m.
Scientists have investigated the history of the federal prosecutor’s office. The result: leading employees were once part of the NSDAP until the 1970s.
After 1945 – as is well known – the German judiciary in post-war Germany was heavily riddled with former Nazi lawyers. But the real extent is only now gradually coming to light. The Nazi burden was particularly strong at the Federal Prosecutor’s Office in Karlsruhe, according to the result of an extensive study commissioned by the Federal Prosecutor General Peter Frank in 2018.
It illuminates the period from 1950 to 1974 in the agency. In the 1950s there were a particularly large number of employees in the higher service who had belonged to the NSDAP. At that time, their share was around 75 percent. In 1966, ten out of eleven of the federal prosecutors responsible for prosecution were NSDAP members. This corresponds to a rate of 91 percent.
No break with the Nazi past
“Mere memberships alone say little about actual behavior during National Socialism,” said the legal scholar Christoph Safferling and the historian Friedrich Kießling about their research results, which have now been published as a book (“State Security in the Cold War – The Federal Prosecutor’s Office between Nazi Burden, Spiegel Affair and RAF “).
However, according to the two researchers, there was never a conscious break with the Nazi past. In the post-war years, they also did not look for unencumbered personnel. The criteria were different. First and foremost was the professional, legal experience.
Questionable death sentences
One person who played a particularly inglorious role in the history of the Federal Prosecutor’s Office was that of Wolfgang Fränkel. Appointed Attorney General in 1962, he had to vacate his post after only a few months. Fränkel, who joined the NSDAP in 1933, was able to prove that he had worked on dozens of questionable death sentences with the Reich Attorney General, the highest prosecution of the Third Reich, during the Nazi era.
In a number of cases, these were imposed for the most trivial reasons, for example when it was simply a matter of break-ins or theft. Fränkel’s activities during the Nazi era did not have any criminal or disciplinary consequences. This also applied to all other lawyers in the Federal Prosecutor’s Office who had participated in the Nazi injustice. When the scandal surrounding Fränkel was exposed, it was put into temporary retirement.
Consistent persecution of communists
In the 1950s and early 1960s, those responsible at the Federal Prosecutor’s Office focused primarily on the legal prosecution of communists – “an almost seamless continuation of what they had already practiced under National Socialism,” so another important result of the study.
The Cold War and the East-West conflict dominated political events at this time. For the Karlsruhe authority, state protection primarily meant “protection against communist overthrow and infiltration through a threatening East”.
The Federal Prosecutor’s Office carried out thousands of investigations and obtained a three-digit number of criminal convictions from the Federal Court of Justice. In contrast, the persecution of National Socialist perpetrators was rather low.
Disaster and caesura
The “Spiegel” affair in 1962 showed how much the agency had alienated itself from the increasingly liberal society in West Germany – from the point of view of the two researchers a key moment, a turning point in the agency’s history. “Der Spiegel” reported extremely critically on the armaments policy of the then Federal Defense Minister Franz Josef Strauss.
Previously, the paper had been leaked secret information. Those responsible for “Spiegel” were accused of treason. At the instigation of the Federal Prosecutor’s Office, publisher Rudolf Augstein came into custody: a huge scandal, an unprecedented attack on the freedom of the press, according to the legal scholar Christoph Safferling: “In this affair, the Federal Prosecutor’s Office had to learn painfully that society was already further in demanding constitutional values such as freedom of the press. “