- Yg. 1928, No. 3 -

Jakubowski, a Russian prisoner of war, is at 26. March 1925 sentenced to death by a Mecklenburg jury and sentenced to 15. February 1926 been executed. In all likelihood he has become the victim of a judicial murder.

Jakubowski is said to have murdered his three-year-old illegitimate son Ewald Nogens. The child is since the 9. November 1924 disappeared. Jakubowski is said to have brought it out to the heath, killed and buried it. There is no proof; the alibi of the executed was already almost complete at the trial, only where he stayed for half an hour can not be proved by witnesses (not from him, but also from the court): so, the court has accepted, he has committed murder during this time. That a witness who heard cries puts this incident at the beginning of this half-hour (to which the "murderer" could not have been at the scene) apparently did not cause the court to worry. It says in the indictment (not in the grounds!): "However, the time given by the witness does not seem to have been quite correct, because the throttling is not already at 5.45 clock, but only after 6 has been done." "Be done "- this arbitrary assumption has apparently appropriated the court. The "complete proof of circumstantial evidence", in which a person has been made shorter by a head, is no proof at all, contains no trace of evidence. The only witness Jakubowski wants to see on his way to the murder place is an idiot; he was heard unopposed ("because he has no sufficient idea because of mental weakness of the nature and meaning of the oath"); a few weeks later he was brought to the madhouse as an incurable insane. At the time of the trial, despite his obvious idiocy, he was still fit to serve as a chief witness and, by his simple statement (he did not even know his age), sealed the fate of a human being.

The court, to make Jakubowski's guilt credible, called the man a bad father; the opposite is proved. He, who spoke only poorly German, refused, despite his request, a Russian interpreter; his statements on individual points of his statement: he was misunderstood, it has dismissed as a "lame excuse". Jakubowski asserted his innocence until the end; he has pointed to another trail: it seems that they did not care about the hint at all.

The Catholic chaplain wondered about the nature of the trial. Like his Protestant colleague, he was convinced that the execution would not have taken place if it had been a Mecklenburg citizen. The representative of the government, a ministerial councilor who was present at the trial, did not believe the circumstantial evidence, expected the pardon - and, after being rejected, covered his minister. The prison officials were partly convinced of Jakubowski's innocence, partly unconvinced by his guilt. The public defender appealed two days before the execution in a letter to the Ministry of State in Neustrelitz and expressed his firm conviction that Jakubowski was innocent.

All for free! The poor guy's head had to fall. The machine has won. Fiat Justitia! The dirty legal notion of a dirty bourgeois ideology must remain untouched: the death penalty must appear sacred and just as well, even if its application does not seem justified by the letter of the law. There is nothing in man: he is touchable and outlawed; untouchable and taboo is the apparatus alone.

1928, 3 Max Barth

The man who could have reprieved Jakubowski is the former Mecklenburg-Strelitzian Prime Minister Hustädt. A criminal complaint of the League for Human Rights against prosecutors and judges in the Jabubowski case, Attorney Müller and District Court President of Buchka, has been rejected. A retrial initiated at the request of Jakubowski's parents is still pending. The perjured main witness, August Nogens, was sentenced to death in June by 1929.