It was a personal castling, in which one move forces the next. Because the previous Federal Prosecutor General Peter Frank has moved to the Federal Constitutional Court as a judge and is taking over from Peter Müller, the head of the Federal Prosecutor’s Office must be replaced. Which isn’t easy because the investigative agency is dealing with a growing and extremely complex field of work, including the prosecution of right-wing terrorism and the investigation of war crimes. Federal Justice Minister Marco Buschmann (FDP) has now presented a proposal that still needs to be approved by the Federal Council. Jens Rommel, previously a criminal judge at the Federal Court of Justice (BGH), will head the authority in the future.
The 51-year-old became known in his previous role as head of the Central Office for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes. From 2015 to 2020 he was at the head of the Ludwigsburg authority. At a time when law enforcement was increasingly targeting concentration camp guards. In 2016, the Federal Court of Justice ruled in the case of concentration camp accountant Oskar Gröning that the small cogs in the wheels of the Nazi extermination machine would also be held criminally responsible, without proof of individually attributable murders. This line had already emerged in the Demjanjuk trial in 2011 and led to further investigations into Auschwitz, Majdanek and Stutthof. The last living old men who once guarded the organized mass murder were brought to justice.
“Neither related nor related by marriage” to the field marshal from the Nazi era
During this time, Jens Rommel often had to answer the question: What do you want with the old men today? Murder is not time-barred, he could have replied soberly from a legal point of view, but he had a wiser answer ready: the German state at the time organized these crimes, and this gave rise to a special obligation for the constitutional state. “Our look at the small cogs makes it clear that these crimes don’t just happen, but are committed by individual people,” he told the newspaper a few years ago taz.
He was also asked about his last name at the time – and no, he is “neither related nor related by marriage” to the field marshal from the Nazi era, as he patiently clarified. Jens Rommel comes from Ellwangen in Baden-Württemberg, from a family with no lawyers at all. His father studied mechanical engineering and his mother was a foreign language correspondent. A student internship with a lawyer impressed him so much that after graduating from high school he decided against Romance studies and studied law in Augsburg and later Würzburg. Of course, this was complemented by specialist foreign language training, which took him to Lyon for a semester.
The Federal Prosecutor’s Office is expanding – terror and war crimes bring employment
In 2003, Rommel began working as a judge in the Baden-Württemberg judiciary, followed by secondments that were important in his career, for example to the Baden-Württemberg Ministry of Justice and as a consultant in the Brussels state representation. One station in particular stands out here: from 2007 to 2010 he was a research assistant at the Federal Prosecutor’s Office, then headed by Monika Harms.
What awaits him now that he himself becomes Federal Prosecutor General can be guessed at by looking at the reports of the past few weeks. The Federal Prosecutor’s Office has brought charges against a Reichsbürger group that is said to have planned a coup. It enforced arrest warrants against three suspected Hamas terrorists. And she indicted two suspected members of the terrorist group Hezbollah.
The expanding investigative agency with around 300 employees works at the intersection of national and international crises. Prosecutors have secured a verdict for crimes against humanity against a henchman of the Syrian Assad regime; in Ukraine they are helping to investigate crimes under international law. Jens Rommel, who once solved long-ago crimes, will now have to deal with major criminals who are very present.