Justice victim: Fechenbach

Felix Fechenbach Felix Fechenbach (* 28 January 1894 in Mergentheim, murdered 7, August 1933 in Scherfede) journalist, politician (SPD, USPD), writer and poet.

- Yg. 1924, No. 37 -

The Bavarian people's courtsOne of the worst phenomena of our day has found a well-deserved fall. Well-deserved: because their laws were right to have something to do rarely. They were dangerous institutions.

Now they are gone; and left over from their work only the shameful memory and a remnant of victims sitting behind prison walls. Among them the traitor Fechenbach.

His crime is: that he is the secret secretary Eisner has been. The citizen has a good memory, if he wants. His resentment against everything that is strange or incomprehensible to him survives the end of the world. Because he has character. The character of a dog. There is a treacherous beast in him; sometimes she slumbers; but if ever there is an opportunity to break the hated man's teeth, she is immediately awake.

Fechenbach was too careless. But one must not reproach him for this: no one could, in his place, have surmised that bourgeois "people's judges" could go so far in their blind hatred, in passing on a text such as that of Ritter telegramTo see treason. The Knight telegram from July 1914 burdened only the pope, at most still the Austrian government, in no case however the German (also not the imperial, which protect the "people's court" in the case Fechenbach apparently felt called).

It took a rope; because they wanted to make a snare for the hated man. And what had proved in other countries in the first attempt as a stubborn thread that could not carry a mouse, was in Bavaria as a solid rope on which you could hang the "traitor" Fechenbach as high as it was a lust.

Despite the fact that it was a "press offense" that had been barred for three years, despite the fact that 1920 had already received a final judgment (acquittal) in the same case, charges had been filed. Although neither the proof had to be furnished that the offense of treason was fulfilled, that further damage had been done to the German Reich by the publication of the telegram - there are still many "Nevertheless" - Fechenbach was sentenced to ten years in prison.

These Munich righteous are indeed rebels. They have rediscovered the ennui of the "punishment" that is there: revenge. In their wickedness and vengeance they are naive as the animal or the primitive man.

But what do we do that are not primitive but complicated and sensitive enough to shake us to the core of seeing justice used as a tool of revenge? If we see that not only minor offenses are severely punished, but that innocent people are "rightfully" murdered?

Do we not have to get up, unite, take to the storm, to tear down the tower, in which the guiltless is exposed without protection to the arbitrariness of legal civil criminal law?

Again and again one remembers, if the case Fechenbach is mentioned, at the French Captain Dreyfus and his defender, his liberator [Émile] Zola, The great Frenchman did not rest until he had managed to awaken the conscience of his people, to restore freedom to the innocent condemned. Should the soul of the German people be so dull and dull that it would be impossible to unleash in it an enthusiasm for the law, an enthusiasm for the restoration of justice, a great passion for the liberation of an unjustly incarcerated?

1924, 37 Max Barth

The "Ritter telegram" is a telegram from the Bavarian ambassador to the Vatican Baron Ritter of the 16. July 1914, according to which the Pope has approved a "sharp action" Austria against Serbia. Fechenbach is due to passing on his text to a Swiss journalist (in April 1919) on 20. October 1922 has been convicted as a traitor to 10 years in prison. On the 19. December 1924 he has been pardoned.

On the 7. August 1933 became Fechenbach on the way from Detmold to the Dachau concentration camp in the Kleinenberger forest between Paderborn and Warburg murdered. The leader of the transport command, SA-Obertruppführer Friedrich Grüttemeyer got out of the car with Fechenbach and tried unsuccessfully to get names of informants. When Grüttemeyer went aside, SS man Paul Wiese and SA member Walter Focke fired several pistol shots at Fechenbach, who was mortally wounded and taken unconscious to a Scherfeld hospital, where he died the same day without consciousness to have regained. The widow was sent by telegram to the 8. August was informed that her husband had been wounded during an escape attempt and later died. Reinhard heydrich claimed in a letter from 9. August in his capacity as "the political police commander of Bavaria", Fechenbach was "shot dead by the officials of the Lippe state government during an escape attempt".[14] The order to transport had the order of the National Socialists for Head of government appointed in Lippe Hans-Joachim Rieckegiven[15] who personally followed Fechenbach. Four SA and SS men from Detmold were suspected of the crime: Friedrich Grüttemeyer, 1969 convicted subsidy   Murder to a Penitentiary of four years[16], Paul Wiese, 1948 convicted for "deliberate manslaughter"To a prison sentence of five years[17]Karl Segler, who could not prove his involvement, and Josef Focke, who was never caught[18], The role of Rieckes could never be fully explained. He could not prove the order to murder, a criminal case against him was set to 1970.[19] The fact was that Riecke had hired the murderer Paul Wiese as his personal driver a few months later.[20][15]

The grave of Fechenbach is located in the Jewish cemetery in Rimbeck.

Source: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_Fechenbach