Bequest Hermann Weinkauff

The Fritz Bauer Institute acquired the bequest of Hermann Weinkauff from his granddaughter in June 2023. Hermann Weinkauff (1894-1981) was born in Trippstadt in Rhenish Palatinate on February 10, 1984. Until his Abitur in 1912, he attended the classical language high school in Speyer. He then studied law in Munich, Heidelberg and Würzburg. In Munich, he became a member of the fraternity Corps Hubertia Munich. Weinkauff participated in the First World War as a Bavarian field artillery volunteer at the Western Front and since 1917 as a reserve lieutenant. In 1920, he passed his first juridical state examination and completed his legal preparatory service in Speyer and Munich. In 1922, he passed the second state examination and became a probationary judge at the Bavarian Justice Department. He then was appointed III. state prosecutor. Weinkauff initially stayed at the Bavarian Justice Department but then switched to the Landgericht Munich I and the Amtsanwaltschaft Munich. Between 1925 and 1928, he was delegated as a so-called "Hilfsarbeiter" to the Reichsanwaltschaft in Leipzig and lastly became state prosecutor "außer dem Stande" at the Landgericht Munich I. In 1928 and 1929, Weinkauff was sent to Paris to study French law. In 1930, he returned to the Bavarian judicial service and worked as a supervising Oberamtsrichter at the Amtsgericht Berchtesgaden. He then was appointed Landgerichtsrat at the Bavarian Justice Department in 1932 and once again delegated as a "Hilfsarbeiter" to the Reichsanwaltschaft in Leipzig. From 1935 to 1937, Weinkauff held the office of the assistant judge at the Reichsgericht, first at the third criminal division headed by Erwin Bumke and as of 1936 at the first criminal division. Finally, he became Reich's court official (Reichsgerichtsrat) and substitutional president of the first Civil Senate. During his occupation at the Reichsgericht, Weinkauff participated in at least one appeal proceedings concerning a case of so-called "racial defilement". Since 1934, Weinkauff has been a member of the Bund Nationalsozialistischer Deutscher Juristen (Rechtswahrerbund) and the Nationalsozialistische Volkswohlfahrt. In 1945, at the end of the Second World War, Weinkauff was arrested and imprisoned at the US-American internment camp no. 15 in Schrobenhausen, Bavaria. After his discharge in 1946, he was appointed president of the Landgericht Bamberg. As a second job, he taught at the Philosophisch-Theologische Hochschule Bamberg. In 1949, he traveled to the US for a study trip. Then, he was appointed president of the Oberlandesgericht Bamberg and a member of the Bavarian Constitutional Court. Just one year later, on October 1, 1950, Federal President Theodor Heuss appointed him the first president of the newly founded Federal Court of Justice in Karlsruhe. In 1951, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Ruprecht-Karls-University Heidelberg. Weinkauff retired early on March 1, 1960. The same year, he was decorated with the Grand Federal Cross of the Order of Merit and in May 1961 honored with the Bavarian Order of Merit. He passed away in Heidelberg on July 9, 1981, at age 87. While Hermann Weinkauff was the president of the Federal Court of Justice, in 1953, the court conducted the investigation and proceedings against the so-called Naumann circle. Werner Naumann, the former state secretary at the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, had tried to infiltrate the Freie Demokratische Partei (FDP) together with like-minded individuals. They aimed to cause a right-leaning overthrow in the Federal Republic. The Federal Court of Justice closed the proceedings against Naumann and others in the summer of 1953. In 1954, Hermann Weinkauff opposed a Federal Constitutional Court's decision to reject the constitutional complaint of several former Gestapo officers. They had claimed their reinstatement in their civil servant status based on the "Gesetz zur Regelung der Rechtsverhältnisse der unter Artikel 131 des Grundgesetzes fallenden Personen". The Federal Constitutional Court ruled that the civil servant status during National Socialism was of different character due to the absolute deprivation of rights, the cooptation, and the oath to Adolf Hitler. Since the civil servant status was no traditional civil servant status it could not subsist. Weinkauff, however, dismissed the Gestapo officer's wrongdoings during the Nazi era as "mere embellishment". On May 20, 1954, the Federal Court of Justice gave a verdict in this view, simply disacknowledging the binding decision already made by the Federal Constitutional Court in December 1953. This event is unprecedented in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany. In 1957, during Weinkauff's presidency, a memorial plaque was installed at the Federal Court of Justice's building in Karlsruhe remembering 34 Reich judges and attorneys who had died in Soviet detention camps in 1945 and 1946. Most of the judges and attorneys had applicated unjust Nazi laws and had construed existing laws following the National Socialist ideology even before 1933. Weinkauff nevertheless declared the deceased jurists "innocent victims" and "martyrs of justice" at the unveiling of the plaque. After his retirement in 1960, Weinkauff applied himself commissioned by the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich to a treatise on the German justice in the Nazi era. The work was published in 1968. In it, Weinkauff attests himself and his colleagues a defenselessness against the Nazi injustice. Most of the jurists had felt obliged to the principle "law is law" after 1933 and therefore had not seen themselves in a position to act against the Nazi jurisdiction. The bequest Hermann Weinkauff covers after description, demetallization, and filing 14 archival units with a total extent of 0.6 running meters. Since it did not have an inner structure upon the acquisition in June 2023 the processor Johannes Beermann-Schön completely reorganized the holding during indexing in July 2023. It follows the "rules for the description of personal papers and autographs" (RNA, Regeln zur Erschließung von Nachlässen und Autographen). The archives group is now structured in three sections: "correspondence" ("Korrespondenzen"), "personal documents" ("Lebensdokumente"), and "collections" ("Sammlungen"). The section "correspondence" ("Korrespondenzen") covers private as well as work-related letters. Among other things, it documents Weinkauff's efforts to prove his "Aryan" descent in the 1930s and his assessment of the investigation against the Naumann circle that he worded in a short correspondence with the Federal Minister of Justice Thomas Dehler. The section "personal documents" ("Lebensdokumente") contains identification cards and certificates from different life phases of Weinkauff and records regarding his denazification and his professional career. This section also includes a comprehensive photo collection with mostly unidentified photos showing events and people of Weinkauff's social environment at the Reichsgericht in Leipzig and the Federal Court of Justice in Karlsruhe. The section "collections" consists of a small collection of newspaper clippings and several realia including Weinkauff's Grand Federal Cross of the Order of Merit and his Bavarian Order of Merit.