Anne-Eva Brauneck

Anne-Eva Brauneck (born 9 December 1910 in Hamburg; died 6 March 2007 in Lich) became the first or second female (West) German professor of law in 1965. Brauneck studied law at the end of the Weimar Republic at the University of Heidelberg. She turned to studies on the family backgrounds of juvenile offenders. Her work was suspect to the National Socialists because it did not conform to the government mantras involving the "hereditary nature" of criminal proclivity.

Life Provenance and early years Anne-Eva Brauneck was born in Hamburg, the second of her parents' two daughters. The girls' father, who was very much older than their mother, was a secondary school head. Although she became, on paper, a fully qualified lawyer in 1937, women were still denied admission to the legal profession and higher judiciary during the period: there are indications that women's career options in the sector had actually been reduced under the Hitler government. Brauneck took, instead, a mid-level post with the police service, passing a further exam qualifying her as a "Kriminalassistent" in 1939, and allowing her a modest promotion to a higher-level grade. This amounted to a set of rules, which to her astonishment Reichsführer Himmler, whose wide accumulation of responsibilities included the police service, signed off without requiring any amendments. The decree, published by the Interior Ministry in July 1944, was later commended by no less a figure than her old doctoral supervisor, Gustav Radbruch, who thought it "humane". In 1942 she had been transferred to an all-women department that was mandated to focus on youth crime. Many of her colleagues had backgrounds in social work. Brauneck herself attributed the respect and relative professional freedom that she felt she enjoyed in the police service by this time to nothing more remarkable than her gender: "All the male criminal officials belonged to the SS: we could not do that, because as women we lacked certain essential characteristics, and so we did indeed have to greet every uniformed colleague we came across appropriately, but we were then left to follow old-fashioned human behavioural principles undisturbed [unlike our male colleagues]. Our superiors ... who secretly were no longer true believers in National Socialism, seemed often to find it entirely correct that, as women, we had certain 'innate weaknesses'".

Post-war years After the Soviets captured Berlin in the early summer of 1945 members of the police department all found themselves dismissed without notice. She subsequently discovered that any accrued employment rights from her eight year of police service that she might have anticipated would in any case have been without effect, since under the Hitler government women police staff - unlike their male counterparts - only received "lifetime" contracts and the accompanying entitlements after reaching the age of 35. She was 34 when the war ended. She did not, in any event, re-apply for a job with the police service, since the only criminal investigation jobs open to women, even at this stage, were relatively low down in the organisational hierarchy, and poorly paid. Instead she worked "as a freelancer", at the same time devoting herself to studying aspects of Psychology. The report was commissioned by the UNESCO and the 3-person team operated under the theoretical supervision of an international board of trustees.

Habilitation The conventional path to a life-long career in university-level education in West Germany was through a "Habilitation" (post-doctoral) degree, and during her five years working as an assistant for Sieverts awareness of this gap in her qualifications became increasingly pressing. She faced resistance to the idea both (she became convinced) on account of her gender and because Criminology, her speciality, had not yet been rehabilitated as an independent subject in its own right among the Hamburg academic community. It had been effectively downgraded in Germany during the 1940s, atrophied both by the simplistic inflexibility of National Socialist pseudo-science and by the enforced emigration, during the 1930s, of many of Germany's leading criminologists, most of whom seem to have ended up in the United States of America. By the later 1950s - partly as a result of the efforts of Rudolf Sieverts and his team - Criminology had regained a measure of academic respectability. Anne-Eva Brauneck completed her Habilitation dissertation in 1959 and finally received her Habilitation degree in 1961. It dealt with "Criminal Law and Criminal Law Support" ("Strafrecht und strafrechtliche Hilfswissenschaften") and was based on a catamnesistic investigation of around 300 convicted young offenders, and she had secured from Sieverts - who was by this time a senior member of the university - an assurance that in return for this work she should expect to receive a "venia legendi" ("permission to teach at the university").

Professor in Gießen After securing her habilitation there is a sense in which Anne-Eva Brauneck had outgrown her various roles at Hamburg, and though her gender may still have counted against her, in 1965 she was able to accept the newly created teaching chair in "Criminal Law and Criminology" ("Strafrecht und Kriminologie" - subsequently re-focused as the teaching chair in "Criminology and Criminal Policy" - "Kriminologie und Kriminalpolitik") at the University of Giessen.

Celebration Anne-Eva Brauneck retired in 1975. Her successor at Gießen, Arthur Kreuzer, produced an affectionate tribute to her when she died aged 96 at her home in Lich (just outside Gießen), more than thirty years later. He was fulsome in his praise of her contribution to various professional (and other) associations, including the Deutscher Juristinnenbund (German Association of [female] jurists), the Deutsche Vereinigung für Jugendgerichte und Jugendgerichtshilfen (German Association for Youth Courts and Youth Justice Support), the 16-member "Alternative Professors" working group on comprehensive Criminal Law Reform and the Humanist Union. Kreuzer also commended, in particular, Brauneck's contributions over the years to the Monatsschrift für Kriminologie und Strafrechtsreform, a specialist journal devoted to criminology and criminal law reform.

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