Richard Schuh

Richard Schuh (2 October 1920 – 18 February 1949) was a German convicted murderer and the last criminal to be executed by the West German judiciary (excluding West Berlin).

Biography[]

Schuh was a trained mechanic who had served in the Luftwaffe during World War II and was later an American prisoner of war. After his release, he eked out a living by doing odd jobs. Since he was only able to make a living with difficulty in this way, he murdered a truck driver near Herrenberg on 28 January 1948, in order to get hold of the new tires on his vehicle and sell them on the black market.

Schuh's crime was quickly solved. He was arrested and sentenced to death by the Tübingen Regional Court in May 1948. Schuh's appeal, as well as pleas for clemency from close relatives and even from the director of the prison where Schuh was incarcerated, were ineffective: a commutation of the sentence to life imprisonment was in the hands of the President of Württemberg-Hohenzollern, Gebhard Müller, a proponent of the death penalty.

The execution was carried out with a guillotine on 18 February 1949, at six o'clock in the morning, in the courtyard of the prison at 18 Doblerstraße in Tübingen. During the execution, the small town hall bell was rung. Schuh himself had only learned of the scheduled date the night before. Schuh's body was handed over to the anatomical institute of the University of Tübingen. The guillotine is on display in the Ludwigsburg Prison Museum.^[1]

Legacy[]

During the Nazi era, some 16,000 people had been executed. In the years between the end of the war and the entry into force of the Basic Law on 24 May 1949, German courts in the three western occupation zones imposed a total of 34 death sentences; 15 of these were carried out. Schuh's beheading was the last civilian execution on West German territory.^[2]

In West Berlin, where the Basic Law applied only to a limited extent, the death penalty for civilian crimes was not abolished until 1951; the last person to be executed there was the robber-murderer Berthold Wehmeyer on 11 May 1949. In abolishing the death penalty, the Parliamentary Council drew a lesson from the Nazi era.^[2]

On 7 June 1951, American soldiers hanged seven German war criminals sentenced to death at Landsberg War Crimes Prison.

See also[]

• Capital punishment in Germany
• List of most recent executions by jurisdiction

References[]

Bibliography[]

• Hans-Joachim Lang (1999). Richard Schuh, Ihr Leben ist verwirkt!. Die Zeit.

Sources[]

• Raimund Weible (2009-02-18). "Zum letzten Mal fällt das Fallbeil". Schwäbisches Tagblatt. Retrieved 2019-05-08.
• Berthold Seewald (2018-02-16). "Todesstrafe in Deutschland: Um sechs Uhr starb der Raubmörder unter dem Fallbeil". welt.de. Retrieved 2019-05-08.
• Katja Iken (2018-02-18). "Todesstrafe in Deutschland: "Gehen Sie mutig und gefasst Ihren letzten schweren Gang"". einestages auf Spiegel Online. Retrieved 2019-05-08.