Günther Vollmer

Günther Vollmer (20 April 1902 – 20 April 1945) was a member of the Nazi Party and a German jurist and doctor of law (Dr. iur.). He was the attorney for Erich Koch, one of the leaders of the Nazi Party in East Prussia. During the Third Reich, he worked for the Reich Ministry of Justice in several different positions as an attorney and legal advisor. He was also Gauführer of the professional organization of Nazi jurists.

Biography Vollmer wrote his doctoral dissertation in 1926 on "The Development and Contemporary Meaning of Hostageship: a Study in International Law" at the University of Cologne. He first joined the Nazi Party in 1922 and again in March 1932, after it was reorganized. Vollmer was an attorney in Königsberg, where he was named senior state attorney by the Königsberg Landgericht in June 1933. While there, he worked under Roland Freisler on a position paper on criminal law called "National Socialist Guidelines for a new German Criminal Code" (Nationalsozialistische Leitsätze für ein neues deutsches Strafrecht). Released by the Prussian Ministry of Justice in 1933, the document interpreted the law more narrowly, curtailing previous rights.

Because of his trustworthiness and loyalty to the Nazi Party,

Summarizing the kind of behavior that justified the death penalty according to 1943-1944 jurisprudence, Dr. Vollmer wrote, "No longer tolerable and fundamentally worthy of death are [...] remarks of the following kind: The war is lost; Germany or the Führer picked a fight and senselessly or frivolously started the war and must lose it; the NSDAP should or will relinquish power and, like the Italian model, make way for the understanding of peace; a military dictatorship must be established and will be able to forge peace, one must work slowly in order to bring about the conclusion; an intrusion of bolshevism would not be as bad as the propaganda paints it, and will only harm the leading National Socialists; the English or the Americans will stop bolshevism at the German border; urging by word of mouth or letters to the front to throw down their guns or turn back; the Führer is sick, incompetent, a butcher, etc."

On November 18, 1944, Vollmer gave a lecture in Göttingen to the National Socialist Lawyers' Association with Rudolf Smend (January 15, 1882 – July 5, 1975), a jurist and law professor. Their topic was wartime criminal law and its maintenance. A letter sent to Vollmer by another Ministerial Director was used in the Nuremberg Trials to show that judges were not just guided by the executive branch, but were also spied on by Adolf Hitler's government. He was killed on 20 April 1945, his birthday (incidentally also Hitler's), shortly before the end of the Second World War, in Frankenberg, Saxony.

Publications Entwicklung und heutige Bedeutung der Geiselschaft: eine völkerrechtliche Studie (1926); Ohlau in Schlesien (1928) Reichs-Rechtsanwaltsordnung: in der Fassung des Gesetzes vom 21. Februar 1936 Berlin (1936) Reichsnotarordnung vom 13. Februar 1937 : mit einschlaegigen Nebengesetzen u. Verwaltungsbestimmungen Berlin (1937)

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