Leonhard Drach

Leonhard Drach (9 March 1903 – 12 January 1996) was a German jurist and convicted war criminal.

His criminal conviction arose from his work as a government prosecutor in occupied Luxembourg during the early 1940s. He was pardoned in 1954 and made his way back into the legal service as a regional prosecutor in Frankenthal, Germany. However, in 1965 his Nazi past was raised in the press by a disgruntled party whom Drach had recently prosecuted, and a wider media storm ensued. Matters were raised which generated some painfully intense public soul searching, and Drach's application, at the age of 63, to take early retirement was accepted in 1966.

Life Early years Leonhard Josef Hubert Drach was born and grew up in Aachen. He studied jurisprudence at Cologne and Bonn, qualifying in 1928 and taking a post as a Court Assessor in Aachen. Late in 1931 he moved on, becoming an assistant in the Prosecutor's Office at Trier, where in April 1933 he became a senior administrative assistant specialising in press and political crimes. On 14 September 1942 Drach received a note from Hartmann congratulating him for his part in the proceedings. The court had been persuaded. The men were executed (shot) at the Hinzert concentration camp, a short distance to the east.

In September 1944 US troops forced the Germans out of Luxembourg. The German administrative authorities took their files with them, to Trier, where the court clerk was instructed to light a bonfire in the courtyard outside the main court house. The files recording the legal history of Luxembourg under German occupation were thrown onto the flames from the window of his office by Chief Prosecutor Leonhard Drach. In 1960 he was promoted to the position of Chief District Prosecutor ("Oberstaatsanwalt") at Frankenthal. It should be stressed that Nowack always maintained that he had done nothing wrong in acquiring shares at a discount to which, as an "employee" of the company, he was entitled. The state prosecutor in the case was the Frankenthal Chief District Prosecutor, Leonhard Drach.

At Mainz there was more support for Drach in the regional parliament where, in an outburst characterised in Die Zeit as "painful" (peinlich), the ambitious new chairman of the large centre-right CDU (party) group blustered, "if we cannot manage to integrate the "Third Reich" generation into our democracy, there will never be a vibrant democracy" ("Wenn es nicht gelingt, die Generation, die einst das Dritte Reich getragen hat, in die Demokratie einzugliedern, wird es nie eine lebendige Demokratie geben"). As a very old man, when interviewed, Leonhard Drach maintained that he had only acted in accordance with the law ("Ich habe nur nach Recht und Gesetz gehandelt").