Ernst Jennrich
Ernst Jennrich was a German gardener who was executed in East Germany for the murder of a Volkspolizei officer in Magdeburg during the Uprising of 1953.
Jennrich was a former member of the ruling Socialist Unity Party who joined the protests in Magdeburg and was accused of fatally shooting officer Georg Gaidzik during a confrontation on 17 June 1953. Jennrich was found guilty of Gaidzik's murder despite the weak evidence against him and sentenced to life imprisonment. Jennrich's sentence was increased to the death penalty days later under the influence of Justice Minister Hilde Benjamin and he was executed by guillotine in Dresden.
On 20 August 1991, the original court verdict was overturned and Jennrich was posthumously rehabilitated by a decision of the district court in Magdeburg.
Early life
Ernst Jennrich was born on 15 November 1911 in, a village in the Province of Saxony a short distance to the north of Magdeburg, into a working class family. He was the eighth of his parents' nine recorded children. After his eight years of compulsory schooling he embarked on an apprenticeship as a baker, but then switched to gardening which he completed. Jennrich was a member of the Young Socialists, the youth wing of the Social Democratic Party between 1928 and 1930. He was then a full member of the SPD until the Nazi rise to power in 1933.Nazi period
Jennrich was called up to undertake "emergency work", with one of the more high-profile projects on which he worked as a labourer was the construction of the Mittelland Canal. In 1935, he served a four-week prison sentence for criticising of the government. In 1940, he was again conscripted by the Reich Labour Service to work at the nearby Junkers aircraft factory. In 1942, Jennrich was conscripted into the Wehrmacht and sent to serve on the Russian front, where he was badly injured by shrapnel. He was discharged from the army in 1944 and returned to work at Junkers till 1944, when he was again drafted into the Wehrmacht. In April 1945, as World War II drew to a close, he managed to desert and was almost immediately captured by the Ninth United States Army moving in on Magdeburg, spending six weeks as a prisoner of war. By the time of his release, the American forces in Magdeburg were giving way to Soviet military administration under the terms of the Yalta Conference between the leaders of the United States and the Soviet Union.Soviet occupation zone
Following the German surrender and his release from captivity, Jennrich re-joined the SPD, though there is no indication that he ever became a party activist. He had married in 1938 and, with a wife and four growing children to support, he launched himself as an independent trader in fruit and vegetables in July 1945. In April 1946, the SPD was merged with the Communist Party of Germany under pressure from the Soviet Military Administration. Jennrich became a member of the resulting Socialist Unity Party of Germany, though much like with his SPD membership, he was not a party activist. Nevertheless, in 1947 he brought himself to the attention of the SED by resigning his party membership all together. Some time later, he called upon to explain why he resigned from the SED. In a courageous move, he explained it as his reaction to having been told, when attending a meeting with party officials, that he had acquired his fruit and vegetables business only through the the party".Jennrich was forced to abandon his business in 1949 when it became unprofitable, undertaking a succession of short term jobs. In October 1949, the Soviet occupation zone was relaunched and rebranded as the German Democratic Republic and, following Western rejection of the Stalin Note in May 1952, subjected to an intensified programme of wide-ranging and far-reaching Sovietization.
Uprising of 1953
On 1 June 1953, he accepted a position as a gardener with a Agricultural Production Cooperative based in Magdeburg. Around this time, tensions were mounting between workers and the SED over the Sovietization process. The crystallising issue was recent increases in highly unpopular "work quotas", which became a particular issue for workers in large production units. On 16 June 1953, construction workers in East Berlin started a strike and a march on the headquarters of the East German Trades Union Federation. Strikes and street demonstrators spread across East Berlin and then, within a day, to other major East German cities, including Magdeburg.At around 08:00 on 17 June 1953, Jennrich grabbed his bicycle and left his place of work, heading for the administrative office of the LPG for which he worked, in order to collect a documentary permit for timber clearance. While cycling across the city, about 200 workers had gathered along the Kastanienstraße, calling on passing citizens to join them for a general strike and street demonstration. They stopped trams and buses in order to encourage fellow workers to interrupt their commute and join the demonstration. By 09:30, the 200 demonstrators had grown to 2,000 and the numbers kept on growing. By the mid-morning, Magdeburg was on strike and the strikers were on the march across the city. Jennrich was initially bemused, unaware of why there were so many people out on the streets. He would later tell a court, "I simply had no idea how a strike was meant to look, since I'd never been involved in a strike". According to at least one source, as he returned from the LPG office with his timber clearance permit, Jennrich had to dismount from his bicycle because it was no longer safe, nor even possible, to cycle through the crowds. Elsewhere it is reported that as he began to understand "how a strike was meant to look", he presumably joined the flow in demonstrating against price rises for consumers and the imposition of increased work quotas on workers. Along the way he diverted to the furniture factory where his wife was employed, and asked the people he met there if they did not want to strike with the others. This casual question was evidently overheard by an SED party loyalist, and would later be interpreted by a court as, the very serious crime of "inciting war or boycott".
Later that morning, Jennrich met up with his eldest son and they returned to the streets, where there were shouts in the crowd that there was about to be a shooting incident at the Magdeburg police headquarters in Sudenburg. Jennrich made his way to the main police office with his son and others, where the gathering crowd was concentrated outside the Sudenburg detention centre, which was part of the same "justice complex" as the main police office. The sequence of the events that ensued is not consistently reported. Following Jennrich's posthumous rehabilitation by a Magdeburg court, it is his own version of events that becomes more persuasive, and which features in most of the more accessible sources. By the time Jennrich and his son arrived, probably at around mid-day, the guards outside the detention centre had already been disarmed by the crowd. An adolescent stranger next to him was brandishing a carbine rifle which Jennrich seized from him. An alternative version indicates that the reason he was holding the carbine was that it was Jennrich himself who had disarmed a guard outside the detention centre. Either way, Jennrich then fired two shots, first at the prison wall and then into the air. He did this in order the empty the weapon and thereby render it harmless. He discharged the gun harmlessly at the insistence of fellow protesters, and when he had done so he smashed it. During the course of the disturbance protesters had already broken through the outer gate of the "justice complex". Inside the complex, two policemen of the Volkspolizei and one official of the detested Ministry for State Security were fatally shot. It was later established to the satisfaction of a court that these killings were committed between 10:00 and 12:00, and so before Jennrich had arrived on the scene. That version that, if accepted and applied, would clear Jennrich of any involvement in the killings, and it is the version implicitly accepted by the court that posthumously rehabilitated him in 1991. But in the trial that established his guilt in September 1953, the inconvenient fact that Jennrich was probably elsewhere when the killings took place was overlooked or ignored by the judges.
Arrest
By the time Soviet troops arrived on the scene and a state of emergency had been declared at around 14:00, most of the crowd at Sudenburg had dispersed though Jennrich, for some reason, was still hanging around. Jennrich was arrested in the night on 19/20 June, and taken away for questioning by a small team of Soviet interrogators. Once they had finished with him, he was handed over to the East German authorities who prepared the charges.The charges against Jennrich, which indicate that surveillance reports in respect of the accused had been received and evaluated over a significant period of time, are as follows:
- "...inciting boycott and murder against democratic institutions and organisations and, since 8 May 1945, endangering the peace of the German people through spreading propaganda in support of fascism: consistent with this, acting from insidious and base motives, making possible a further crime, being the intentional killing of a human being".
Trial
On 25 August 1953, Jennrich faced trial for the first time. It had been determined that he should be charged with the killing ofVolkspolizei Sergeant who had been fatally injured by a gunshot during the fighting at the Sudenburg detention centre, it was alleged, between 10:00 and 12:00. Witnesses had been prepared appropriately, including another police officer who gave a clear account of the sequence of events. After the main gate to the Sudenburg justice complex had been broken down, demonstrators began to enter through it. One of them fired into the complex: the witness fired back, hitting the gunman in his leg. A second demonstrator had fired into the complex: again the witness had fired back, also hitting the second gunman in the leg. Then the witness saw that a window in the outer wall of the building beside the main gate was being smashed and someone was pointing a carbine from outside the justice complex through a hole in broken glass, towards Gaidzik. That was the source of fatal shot. The missing link in the evidence against Jennrich was that this witness never identified the individual with a carbine who had fired it. The only obvious link to Jennrich was that he had simply arrived and fired a carbine an hour or so later.Permitted to address the judge in his own defence, Jennrich delivered an unexpectedly effective speech:
- "...I can only say this: that I never wished to become a murderer. And I never committed any murder, because I know for sure that I did not shoot through the window on the right at any member of the Volkspolizei service. Furthermore I never had any wish to become the tool of these people, the tool of western provocateurs, nor of people who try to exploit the workers. I am not a person wishing to be exploited."
Death penalty
Two days later, the public prosecutor lodged his appeal of Jennrich's sentence: "The protection of our peace loving state requires the death penalty for the crime committed by the accused". Under instructions from the Supreme Court of East Germany, the judges who had already heard the case on 25 August 1953 and delivered their agreed judgement conducted a further hearing on 6 October 1953 at the end of which they sentenced Jennrich to death. The entire process lasted only fifteen minutes. A further consideration of the evidence was deemed unnecessary. "...the protection of our social order requires that the highest penalty - being the elimination of the accused from our society, the death penalty - be invoked". The judges evidently felt they had no choice. Minister of Justice Hilde Benjamin had already shared her view: "We are of the view that for Jennrich the death penalty is appropriate". Nevertheless, one of the judges involved evidently had a moment of conscience at the obvious inconsistency between the evidence presented and the imposition of the death penalty. There is a gap on the document in one of the spaces intended for a judicial signature.In November 1953, from the isolation cell in which he was being held, Jennrich wrote a detailed seven page plea for clemency to Wilhelm Pieck, the President of East Germany, in which he insisted on his innocence and declared himself ready to accept even the most difficult of working conditions "in order that I can later be accepted as a complete person within the social order of the German Democratic Republic", but this was rejected by Pieck.
Jennrich was transferred to the in Dresden, constructed during the Nazi period and still in regular use.
Execution
On the morning of 20 March 1954, at approximately 04:00, Jennrich was executed on the guillotine, with little being known of his final hours. The death certificate necessary in order that the physical remains might be lawfully disposed of showed the causes of his death to have been "pneumonia" and "acute low blood pressure". Many years later, it emerged that he had written a farewell letter for his wife and sons, in which he continued to protest his innocence. Belatedly, the letter has found its way into the possession of one of his younger sons called, like his father, Ernst Jennrich.His ashes were placed in an urn and then interred at the Crematorium near the execution facility, where they remained till after reunification of Germany in 1990.