February 18, 1949

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Martin Antonenko

A Fixture
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Jul 11, 2008
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The Last Execution By The West German Judiciary...


On February 18, 1949, at six in the morning in the courtyard of the prison at Doblerstrasse 18 at Tübingen...





... the last time a person was executed by the West German judiciary!

It is about the 28-year-old robbery murderer Richard Schuh...



... who dies under the Guillotine.

Schuh had stabbed a truck driver near Herrenberg on January 28, 1948 in order to get the new tires on his vehicle and sell them on the black market. In May 1948, the Tübingen district court sentenced him to death.

A conversion of the sentence to life imprisonment was in the hands of the President of the then state of Württemberg-Hohenzollern, Gebhard Müller...



...a strict supporter of the death penalty.

The guillotine under which Schuh died is now shown at a museum...:



On May 8, 1949, the West German Basic Law came into force; Article 102 of it states succinctly: "The death penalty is abolished."



As a result, the parliaments of all West German federal states - where they still exist - remove the death penalty from their state constitutions.

Only the state parliament of the Free State of Bavaria - although it has been announced umpteen times - has not been able to bring itself to do so to this day!

However, since Article 31 of the Basic Law stipulates that federal law may break state law, the death penalty can no longer be pronounced and carried out there either...

Although Schuh's execution in 1949 was the last killing of a human being by the West German judiciary, it was by no means the last execution on German soil:

In Landsberg prison, the Americans continue to execute convicted Nazi war criminals (until 1951)...



...for whom even their own - officially so-called - "war criminals' cemetery" is laid out next to the place of execution...:




The Soviets kill an unknown number of people in their zone of occupation (and later in the GDR) until shortly before their departure from Germany in the 1990s; first war criminals and political opponents, then mostly members of their own armed forces.

This is usually done by trained NKVD (later KGB) members, who kill by shooting in the neck...:



The GDR judiciary also continues to kill - a total of 166 people were executed there!

Until 1968 in Leipzig, the central place of execution in the building of the former royal district court at Arndtstraße 48...





...used the "Fallschwertmaschine" ("drop sword machine) " for this, which, like the guillotine, was officially called in the GDR...:



The execution room was known far beyond Leipzig as the so-called "Children's Room"...

After that, like the "brothers" from the Soviet Union, they started shooting in the neck. The condemned man had to step through an open door behind which his executioner was waiting. He then quickly stepped behind his victim and shot him in the neck!

The last person to be executed was Werner Teske, on June 26, 1981, a Hautmann of the "Hauptverwaltung Auflärung" ("Main Office for Enlightenment") the spy service of the Ministry for State Security...:



Teske had recently worked as a double agent for the West and tried to defect to the West. He was sentenced to death by a military court for "committed, completed and prepared espionage in a particularly serious case in combination with desertion in a serious case".



... and at Leipzig in the "Children's Room" by the executioner Werner Lorenz...



...killed by an "unexpected close-range shot", as the execution protocol says.
 
Another day of interesting info ....a executioner hiding behind a door seems a bit awkward!

......l.still suppose the "job" was completed !

Nap
 
It's interesting that, in the book "1984" by Eric Blair (aka George Orwell), executions were carried out by "unexpected close range shot" as the condemned person walked down a long corridor towards sunlight. Anyone who hasn't read "1984" needs to do so - it is amazingly prophetic.

Phil
 

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