City mayor in times of occupation and judges of the Special Court in Toruń (i.e. about historical and legal paradoxes)

Abstract

During occupation the post of the mayor of city of Toruń was awarded for organizing the burning of the synagogue and the house of its caretaker in Furth, on “Kristallnacht” (Nov. 9–10, 1938). The judges of the special court in Toruń who sentenced Poles to death were more cruel than officials of the Ministry of Justice in Berlin. The judges of this court sentenced to death a Polish woman, to whom a German soldier had given a woman’s jacket. The Polish woman did not know that this jacket had previously been stolen from among the items intended for shipment to the Eastern Front. Nevertheless, the judges of the Sondergericht found her guilty of an intentional crime. In the Ministry of Justice in Berlin, the sentence of death was changed to 10 years of a prison camp, which a Polish woman had no chance to survive. The judges of the Third Reich were not criminally responsible in West Germany. They explained that they used the law in force at that time when issuing death sentences.