People's Court

People's Court (National Socialist People's Court, in German Volksgerichtshof, or VGH), the highest Nazi court for political crimes. These varied in severity, from listening to forbidden radio broadcasts to the attempted assassination of Hitler (see Schwarze Kapelle).

The roots of the People's Court, set up in April 1934, went back to 1922 when the then minister of justice, as the result of a political assassination, abrogated the time-honoured principle of nulla poena sine lege (no punishment without law) and the legal system of the Weimar Republic was highly politicized. It was allowed to exist because most Germans fervently believed that the First World War had been lost because of traitors in their midst and its creation was predicted by Hitler in Mein Kampf when he wrote that ‘one day a German national tribunal must condemn and execute several tens of thousands of the criminals who organized and are responsible for the November treason [the armistice which ended the First World War was signed in November 1918] and everything connected with it’.

Otto Thierack was president of the VGH until 1942. He was then succeeded by Roland Freisler and, finally, by Harold Haffner. Its jurisdiction extended beyond pre-war Germany to the population of Bohemia and Moravia, Poles in annexed territories, and Germans in Alsace-Lorraine and Eupen-Malmédy, and to non-Germans arrested under the Night and Fog Decree.

The VGH was part of Germany's normal legal system in that those appearing before it were arrested and prosecuted by the police in the normal way. But its courts ignored an elementary rule of justice, impartiality, as it employed judges, both professional and lay, who were committed to the Nazi cause. There was no right of appeal and no trial by jury. Not everyone was found guilty by its courts, but those who were released were simply rearrested by the Gestapo and sent to a concentration camp. The Wehrmacht had its own courts, the highest being the Reichskriegsgericht which tried members of the German Rote Kapelle. Officers implicated in the attempt to assassinate Hitler in July 1944 were expelled from the Wehrmacht so that they could be tried by the VGH.

Figures are unreliable, but an estimated 12,891 death sentences were passed by the VGH between 1934 and 1944, most of them during the latter stages of the war when increased resistance activity, and then Hitler's attempted assassination, greatly added to the numbers. See also Germany, 3.

Bibliography

Koch, H. W. , In the Name of the Volk: Political Justice in Hitler's Germany (London, 1989).