Fonds Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz, I. HA Rep. 97 - appellate court

I Foreword <br /><br />1. History of the Authorities <br /><br />As a court that meets periodically at the Princely Court, the Court of Appeal has been tangible since the second half of the 15th century. The first mention dates back to the year 1468, when it consisted of representatives of the prince and the estates, in which the later division into a lord's and a scholar's bank, which was to remain in existence until 1748, can already be seen. In the first half of the 16th century it was extended to the highest court of the electorate. <br />We are hardly informed about the court constitution in the early days of the Court of Appeal. In 1516 the first efforts were made to establish an order for the Court of Appeal. However, they did not lead to any concrete result. After all, it is recognizable that Roman law is received in Brandenburg and becomes the basis of land law. In 1540 the efforts for a court order for the chamber court culminated in the Reformation of Churfürstlicher gnaden zu Brandenburg Cammergericht zu Cöln an der Sprew. One of the achievements of this order is the establishment of the Court of Appeal as an institution in the Schloss zu Cölln an der Spree that meets all the time. In addition, the principle of the written nature of negotiations is now introduced. Written submissions shall be submitted to and processed by the Court of Appeal in writing. The trial parties no longer have to travel from the province to the residence city to reach a decision. Supplication to the sovereigns is established as a legal remedy, which, however, is only dealt with temporarily by the Court of Appeal and temporarily also by other authorities. <br />When the Reformation was introduced in the Kurmark in 1539, jurisdiction in spiritual matters passed to the Elector, who transferred it to the Cölln Consistory. This consistory was part of the Court of Appeal until it became independent in 1573. In the late 16th and almost the entire 17th century, however, the development of the Court of Appeal stagnated. While the territories dominated by the Brandenburg Hohenzollern grew, the area of the Court of Appeal did not expand. On the contrary: Since under the rule of Margrave Johann in the Neumark after 1553 a separate higher court, the Neumark government, had arisen, the Neumark fell out of the sprinkle of the chamber court. Efforts were also made in the sand to give the Court of Appeal a contemporary order after the end of the Thirty Years' War and to remedy existing grievances. <br />Caused by the reconstruction of the castle, which began in 1698, a new accommodation for the Court of Appeal had to be sought. Together with the Konsistorium, it moved into the former cathedral provost's house on Brüderstraße, which was now known as the Kollegienhaus. This was in line with the general trend of the time to separate the Court and the Administration more institutionally and spatially. <br />The Grand Chancellor of Cocceji reserved the right, in the course of his comprehensive reform efforts with the judicial system, to reorganize the Supreme Court as well, He was mainly concerned with the centralization of the higher courts of Mark under his leadership. Already in 1735 the Court of Appeal was together with the Court of Appeal, the Ravensburger Tribunal, the Building Authority and the Lehn Chancellery in the newly erected Kollegienhaus in Lindenstraße on Friedrichswerder. In 1738 it was decided to divide the court into three senates: The first Senate largely continued the old Court of Appeal. He was assigned a second senate, an auxiliary senate, to support him in his business. In the Third Senate the previously independent Court of War, Court and Criminal Court merged, but with the loss of military jurisdiction. <br />The War, Court and Criminal Court was established in 1718 by the merger of the Hausvogtei, of the Berlin governorate and the General Auditoriat as the lower and highest military court of the residence city. He had to deal with a mixture of civil and criminal cases. It was responsible for smaller civil matters of the court servants and for the land registers of the free houses - a competence that the Hausvogtei had traditionally exercised. In addition, the Court of War, the Court and the Criminal Court acted as criminal courts for the specimens. In addition, the Hausvogt, who continued to exist as a public official within the Court of Appeal, was responsible for supervising the Hausvogtei as a remand prison. <br />However, this first reform was by no means Cocceji's last word. Further reorganizations followed in 1746 and 1748, whereby efforts were mainly made to bring the Senates of the Court of Appeal together on the one hand, and between the Court of Appeal and the lower courts of the Kurmark. In the course of this, the division into a men's and a scholar's bank was abolished in 1748, which had been affirmed in the order of 1738 for the first two senates, and the Court of Appeal became the first instance for consistorial proceedings. It thus regained responsibilities which it had already possessed until 1573. <br />In addition, the Higher Appeal Court was integrated into the Appellate Court. It had been founded after 1698 when the non-Mark territories of the Hohenzollern situated in the Reich were liberated from the Imperial Chamber Court. The subjects of the territories concerned were now no longer free to turn to a Reichsgericht (Imperial Court) in controversial legal questions. For these territories, the High Court of Appeal has now been established as the final instance. In this way, the Elector was able to round off his aspirations to sovereignty in legal terms. The Ravensberg Tribunal and the Secret Judicial Council, which was responsible for criminal cases, were also incorporated into the Court of Appeal, in which members of the Royal House, high dignitaries and high Prussian diplomats participated as trial parties. Thus, the Court of Appeal regained jurisdiction for certain matters outside the Kurmark, without its scope having been generally extended. <br />With the reform of the year 1748, the Pupillenkolleg was also brought into being as part of the Court of Appeal. The interior with the - from today's point of view - peculiar name (lat. pupilla = orphan), entered the scene as the supervisory authority for the warders directly subordinated to the Court of Appeal and for the guardians led by the Kurmärk lower courts. Procedural activities were not the responsibility of the body. Rather, it was hoped that the establishment of the College would reduce the number of guardianship cases heard in court. <br />However difficult this reorganization may have been to implement, it remained groundbreaking for the future development of the Court of Appeal. The distribution of business in 1782 was also ultimately based on the earlier provisions. The Court of Appeal was now divided into an Instruction Senate and an Appeal Senate. The Instruction Senate was the Kurmark Supreme Court and was divided into a criminal and a civil deputation. He was also in charge of the supervision of the Kurmärk lower courts. The Upper Appeal Senate, on the other hand, was in second instance responsible for the higher courts of the various parts of the Mark Brandenburg. However, the Hausvogtei was separated from the Kammergericht again. <br />The distinction between instruction and upper appeal senate was also maintained in the 19th century. This is proven by a look at the Chamber Court Rules of 1845. The jurisdiction of the Instruction Senate included, among other things voluntary jurisdiction and supervision of the lower courts of the Kurmark and the county of Stolberg-Wernigerode. It also served as a feudal curia and - once again - as a bailiff's court. The Civil and Criminal Senates remained in place. The Pupillenkolleg continued to be a separate body within the Court of Appeal. <br />Central state jurisdiction fell to the Appellate Court as a result of the persecution of demagogues following the Frankfurt Guard Storm. The investigations were conducted by the Federal Central Authority in Frankfurt/Main. In Prussia, the Criminal Senate of the Supreme Court was given the jurisdiction of a state court, which was allowed to hear high treason cases for the entire national territory. In order to ensure cooperation between the State Court and the Federal Central Authority, a ministerial commission was set up, which also decided on the indictment and was thus the mistress of the proceedings. <br />The persecution of demagogues marked the beginning of a new era for the Court of Appeal. It was now confronted with mass trials in which several hundred people whose cases were intertwined had to be investigated simultaneously. As there was no public prosecutor's office until the middle of the century, the State Court coordinated both the preliminary proceedings and the adjudication. This was also reflected in the keeping of files: on the one hand, file series were kept according to fraternities in which the investigation results were compiled, on the other hand, procedural files were kept according to individuals. The aim was probably to follow the links between the students and to link the individual proceedings under the name of a leader or a person who was the starting point of the investigation. All other individual procedures were listed as special files for this 'lead procedure'. In addition, however, unrelated procedural files were also created. <br />In the second half of the century, the mass trials against the members of student fraternities continued in the mass trials against insurgent Poles and the participants in the revolutionary unrest in mid-century Berlin. What from the point of view of bourgeois-liberal historiography is usually presented as a repressive measure of a late-absolutist power state has, however, brought progress for the legal system. Thus, in the course of the Poland Trials of 1846, not only was the public oral hearing introduced, which had previously been unknown in Prussia, but also the course was set for a separation of the executive from the judiciary. A public prosecutor was appointed to coordinate police investigations and bring charges before the courts, while the judicial treatment of the cases was transferred to separate prosecution and verdict senates. <br />The state court was abolished in 1879. The Court of Appeal then continued to exist as the Higher Regional Court of the Province of Brandenburg until the end of the Second World War and has since functioned as the Higher Regional Court of the State of Berlin. <br /><br />2. History of the Collection <br /><br />The changeable history of the Court of Appeal, into which other courts were repeatedly incorporated and separated and which was temporarily used as a regional court for the Kurmark and the Kurmark, respectively. The province of Brandenburg, which is then to be referred to again as the Prussian State Court, has had a strong influence on the formation of the population. When the files - probably at the beginning of the 20th century - were handed over to the Secret State Archives, they were divided into two main groups according to jurisdiction: First of all, files were archived which were related to the activities of the Court of Appeal as the Prussian state court or as the supreme regional court for Prussia. They were assigned as Rep. 97 to the Central Authorities established in the I. Department. When in later years documents with Brandenburgian references were added, these were separated from it as Rep. 4A under the stocks of the province Brandenburg, which were listed in the X. in the main department. The provenance principle has therefore not yet been fully applied to stock formation. Pertinence was given considerable weight as a reference to a certain thing. Initially, the indexes of the contributions as well as an index volume created by Ernst Friedländer were available as finding aids. From the inventory overview of the Secret State Archives of 1939 it can be seen that at that time indexing on index cards had begun. <br />At least the files, which were set up in the I. HA Rep. 97, were to a large extent disordered with the delivery and were not ordered also in the course of the archivischen treatment. The inventory I. HA Rep. 97 was divided into a total of twelve classification groups designated by Roman numerals, which can be looked up in the inventory from 1934 (see Ernst Müller and Ernst Posner (Bearb.), Overview of the holdings of the Geheimes Staatsarchiv zu Berlin Dahlem, vol. 1: I. Hauptabteilung, Leipzig 1934, p. 138f.). The inventory X. HA Rep. 4a, on the other hand, was divided into ten systematic groups designated by Arabic numerals (see Reinhard Lüdicke (Bearb.), Overview of the holdings of the Geheimes Staatsarchiv zu Berlin Dahlem, Vol. 3: X.-XI. Hauptabteilung, Leipzig 1939, p. 24ff.). <br />The files of inventory X. HA Rep. 4a, which the Court of Appeal produced as the Higher Court of the Province of Brandenburg, remained in the Secret State Archives in Berlin during the Second World War, with the exception of the Sentenzbücher. Although they survived the war unscathed, a considerable part, however, was burned, as it says in the find book from the year 1951, "with the conquest of Berlin by the Russians". An overview of the destroyed files can be found in the card index boxes made before the war (now GStA PK, I. HA Rep. 97 No. 2168 and 2169). Until 1951, the preserved files were indexed by Berthold Schulze in a new find book based on the preparatory work of Dr. Herta Mittelberger and Reinhard Lüdicke. <br />The stock I. HA Rep. 97 and the sentence books of the X. HA Rep. 4a, on the other hand, were outsourced during the Second World War. A total of 379 packages of files were brought to Staßfurt. What they contained did not appear in the swap list. However, one box containing investigation files and two boxes for the treason trial against Heinrich Ludwig Tschech remained in the Secret State Archives. After the Second World War, the files were transferred to the German Central Archive II, Merseburg. <br />As the tax registers were not available, however, Siegrun Thiele compiled a new index in 1953. The pre-war systematics were maintained, so that the files were assigned to the eight groups Sentenzbücher, Collectanea des Geheimes Justizrats, Burschenschaftliche Verbindungen, Polen-Prozessen, Oberstaatsanwalt, Akten betr. the tax refusal of members of the National Assembly in 1848, political trials/high- and treason of the country as well as political trials/subterprofessionalism - the tax refusal of members of the National Assembly in 1848files have been assigned to the district attorney's office. A further subdivision of the inventory was not carried out, which is why the registrational context of the files was not comprehensible. Despite their contemporary cumbersomeness, the titles were apparently written off from the files largely unexamined. After all, an index was created for the search for certain persons. <br />Already in 1954, when the stock was newly developed, part of substock X was located. HA Rep. 4a in the Brandenburg State Archives. They were testamentary and probate registries. In the course of the demarcation of the holdings between the German Central Archive, Dept. Merseburg, and the Brandenburg State Archives in 1963, the Sentenzbücher were transferred to Potsdam. The files on the political trials remained in Merseburg, which were documents of the Court of Appeal as the Prussian state court. These files were transferred to the Geheime Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz after the dissolution of the German Central Archive in 1994. The files of the Court of Appeal, which were transferred to the Brandenburg State Archives after the Second World War, can still be viewed there. <br />The systematic groups were included in the signatures when the two partial holdings in Berlin-Dahlem and Merseburg were catalogued after 1945. In addition, during the indexing in the German Central Archives, several files were sometimes recorded under one signature without this being apparent from the finding aid book. After the consolidation of the partial holdings in the Secret State Archives of Prussian Cultural Heritage, errors and mistakes repeatedly occurred when the files were excavated. For this reason, U. carried out a revision of the portfolio in 2009. At the same time, the holdings were re-signed and the indexing data were transferred to a database and revised. The stock was then reclassified. The present classification is no longer based on the large groups mentioned above, but on the organisation of the Court of Appeal in the 18th and 19th centuries. Since the mass of the tradition dates back to the 19th century, it made sense to fall back on the division between the instuction senate and the upper appellation senate established in 1782 and confirmed in 1848. The positions incorporated into the classification or located at various times at the Court of Appeal (Privy Judicial Council, Pupillenkolleg, Public Prosecutor's Office, etc.) were also taken into account accordingly. Particular importance was attached to making the historical connection between the individual procedures, in particular the mass procedures of the 19th century, clearer than in the older finding aids. <br /><br />3. stock analysis <br /><br />>The tradition of courts is usually divided into organizational and procedural files. As far as the Court of Appeal is concerned, the tradition clearly focuses on the procedural files of the 19th century. On the other hand, only a small part of the organizational records has been preserved, with two large blocks clearly visible, namely the personnel records and the supervision of the lower courts of the Kurmark and the province of Brandenburg. The personal files shall include the training files of legal trainees as well as the files of judges and accredited lawyers. The files on supervision mainly deal with the establishment and administration of the courts, recruitment cases, visits and disciplinary matters. <br />The procedural files are masses of uniform documents. For each case, for each procedure, a file is created under the name of the person affected, which documents the procedure execution. They are subdivided into civil and criminal proceedings. There are hardly any civil proceedings in progress. There are predominant matters which, from today's point of view, can be attributed to voluntary jurisdiction: They concern foundations, mortgages, fiefdoms, the land register administration of the open houses as well as the guardians supervised by the Pupillenkolleg. It should be emphasised that the stock-taking process appears to have placed great emphasis on special procedures which have been reflected in extensive series of files. Among the cases of the Pupillenkolleg, for example, the guardianship over the heirs of the Jewish banker Aron Meyer Kornicker stands out with about 50 files as well as the guardianship over the heirs of the cavalry master a.D. Ernst Karl Samuel von Bredows on Landin with over 90 files. Only the initial letter B is preserved in the inheritance cases. <br />In the criminal proceedings, apart from a moral offence, only political trials have survived that have been tried by the Criminal Senate as the state court. Everyday crime is therefore not reflected in the tradition. Extensive series of documents document the great political events of the 19th century. Century: the time of the fraternity feasts, the uprising to restore the Polish state in 1863, the revolutionary riots in Berlin in 1847/48; but also, for example, the action against the members of the Welfenlegion after the annexation of the Kingdom of Hanover to Prussia. <br />After the establishment of the public prosecutor's office at the Berlin Appellate Court, there are in some cases two traditional strands: the judicial strands and the public prosecutor's office strands. In contrast to the tradition of modern criminal proceedings, however, it is not yet the case that the tradition of the public prosecutor's office is the more complete. On the contrary: the personal case files of the public prosecutor's office at the Supreme Court are predominantly extremely narrow. The more meaningful tradition should therefore be sought from the Criminal Senate. <br />In the mass proceedings of the state court, it should be borne in mind that the record keeping is divided into two parts: On the one hand, the results of the investigation were compiled in general files, but personal special files were also kept. In the registry of the Court of Appeal, however, the mass proceedings were - in contrast to the present inventory - not arranged according to events or offences, but exclusively according to the names of the persons involved. Nevertheless, in order to preserve the connection between the interrelated files of a group of perpetrators - from the point of view of the court - both the general files and the personal special files were linked to the name of a 'lead procedure'. For example, the proceedings against the student Karl Heinrich Brüggemann were associated with numerous proceedings against other persons who were described by the court as 'Consorten'. The thesis that the accused had constituted themselves as 'leaders' and 'accomplices' in a gang is already laid out in the judicial file management - a thesis that would have to be critically examined in the course of an evaluation of the files. Accordingly, the files dealing with the proceedings against "Brüggemann and co-defendants" are the general files of the trial. <br />As already mentioned, another large organizational unit of the Court of Appeal was the Upper Appeal Senate. With a few exceptions from the 18th century, however, no documents have survived that can be attributed to this senate. <br /><br />4. user instructions <br /><br />Order of the units of description within the classification groups <br />- fact files: From general to particular <br />- procedural files: Alphabetically according to the name of the defendant or person concerned <br /><br />Person names <br />- Surnames: according to file cover/Altfindbuch <br />- First name: according to file cover/Altfindbuch, but normalized (for exampleB. always Karl, instead of Carl and Karl) <br />- Polish surnames: according to file cover, but without diacritical characters <br />- Polish first names: according to file cover, d.h. in germanized form (e.g. Joseph instead of Jerzy) <br /><br />Location names <br />- Location names were checked and reproduced with the addition of the province in the spelling used today. If the place name is part of the public authority company (e.g. Stadtgericht Potsdam), the province is not added. <br />- Place names without indication of the province: spelling checked and modernized, but the province could not be determined with certainty because of multiple occurrences of the place name. <br />- Location name in quotation marks: Location name not identified, spelling taken from file cover/old index. <br /><br />occupations and terms technici: <br />- Occupations and terms technici were modernized as far as possible. Where this seemed appropriate, the source term was added in normalized spelling (e.g. Aktuarius, not Actuarius). <br /><br />5 Literature <br /><br />The Court of Appeal <br />Friedrich Holtze, History of the Court of Appeal in Brandenburg-Prussia, 1. Part: Until the Reformation of the Court of Appeal of March 8, 1540, Berlin 1890 (contributions to the Brandenburg-Prussian Legal History 1) <br />Ders.., History of the Court of Appeal in Brandenburg-Prussia, Part 2: The Court of Appeal 1540-1688, Berlin 1891 (Contributions to the History of Brandenburg-Prussian Law 2) <br />Ders.., History of the Court of Appeal in Brandenburg-Prussia, Part 3: The Court of Appeal in the 18th Century, Berlin 1891 (Contributions to the History of Brandenburg-Prussian Law 5) <br />Ders.., History of the Court of Appeal in Brandenburg-Prussia, Part 4: The Court of Appeal in the 19th Century, Berlin 1904. (Contributions to the History of Brandenburg-Prussian Law 6) <br /><br />On the Accommodation of the Court of Appeal: <br />Friedrich Holtze, Local History of the Royal Court of Appeal, Berlin 1896. (Contributions to the History of Brandenburg-Prussian Law 4) <br /><br />6. References to other holdings and archives <br /><br />Other holdings in the GStA PK <br />- HA Geheimer Rat Rep. 9 Allgemeine Verwaltung D [et.al. Bailiwick, Court of War, Court and Criminal Court] <br />- HA Privy Council Rep. 9 General Administration J [and.a. Court of Appeal] <br />- HA Rep. 77 Ministry of the Interior Abt. II Sekt 10b Tit. 11 No. 9, 10 (to fraternity trials) <br />- HA Rep. 84 a Ministry of Justice <br />- HA Rep. 89 Secret Civil Cabinet, Younger Period No. 14984-15074 (to fraternity trials) <br />- HA Rep. 97 A High Court of Appeal <br />- HA Rep. 97 A Obertribunal <br /><br />Equities in other archives <br />- Brandenburgisches Landeshauptarchiv, Rep. 4a - Kurmärkisches Kammergericht <br />- Landesarchiv Berlin, B Rep. 38 - Kammergericht Berlin <br /><br />7. Remarks, order signature and citation <br />Content: 5465 VE (103.5 lfm) <br />Duration: 1643 - 1944 <br />Not documented signatures: 1804, 2505, 2723-2732, 3141, 3404, 3411, 3736-3835, 4237-4246, 4355, 5202, 5494 <br /><br />The files are to be ordered: I. HA Rep. 97 No () <br /><br />The files are to be cited: GStA PK, I. HA, Rep. 97 Court of Appeal, No. () <br /><br /><br /><br />Berlin, 05.11.2010 <br /><br />Dr. Leibetseder <br />(Archivrat) <br /> <br /><br /> Find aids: Database; Find book, 4 volumes

Exercise of justice and revision jurisdiction

Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz

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