History of the authorities: The institution of the state commissioners was created in Baden in 1863 as part of the extensive reorganization of the administration. The four Commissioners, based in Karlsruhe, Mannheim, Freiburg and Constance, were responsible for supervising the administrative and district authorities and their civil servants. The commissioners were assigned to the Baden Ministry of the Interior and over time were given a number of independent powers where they decided instead of the Ministry of the Interior. These competencies included the supervision of the police administration of the offices and municipalities, the handling of complaints against police penal orders, the ordering of police measures in the event of serious disturbances to public order, as well as questions of war performance and war damage procedures and the controlled economy during the First World War. After the war, they acted as demobilisation and district housing commissioners. In addition, the 1921 municipal regulations entrusted them with state supervision of the cities. Although in some areas the state commissioners acted as a middle instance, they were formally not a middle authority between the Ministry of the Interior and the district offices. During the National Socialist era, the institution of the state commissioners was allowed to exist despite all efforts to unify the administration in the Reich and was not replaced by government presidents. Between 1933 and 1945, however, the state commissioners were treated by the Reich as a middle instance and given corresponding tasks. After the Second World War, the state commissariats were allowed to expire due to the vacancies not being filled. The Constance State Commissioner retired in 1946 and his office was closed. Inventory history: In 1962, the files of the present inventory were transferred from the Constance District Office to the Freiburg branch of the Karlsruhe General State Archives. The inventory was recorded 1962/63 by Paul Waldherr; after a revision a finding aid book was available from 1980. In order to make this finding aid accessible for use on the Internet, it was digitized in 2005 and 2006 by Franziska Mahler and Britta Schwenkreis. For better orientation (especially in the case of local files), the respective headings to which the individual files were assigned within the headings order at that time are shown in brackets. The undersigned was responsible for supervising the work. Freiburg, May 2006 Dr. Christof Strauß

History of the authorities: By decree of the Reich government of 21 March 1933, a special court was formed for each district of the Higher Regional Court. The special court responsible for the Karlsruhe Higher Regional Court district was installed at the Mannheim Regional Court. These special courts were given criminal jurisdiction for offences under the "Ordinance of the Reich President for the Protection of People and State", which had been issued in reaction to the Reichstag fire of 27 February 1933 and which formed the legal background to the wave of arrests, particularly against Communists. In addition, the special courts were responsible for the offences according to the so-called "Heimtückeverordnung", which was cast into legal form in December 1934 under aggravation of the threat of punishment. Originally limited to purely "political" offences, special jurisdiction was extended in 1938 to include areas of "normal" crime. With a decree issued at the beginning of the war in 1939, any offence could be brought before a special court if "public order and security were particularly seriously endangered by the offence". New penal regulations also followed with the beginning of the war. The most important are briefly mentioned here:1. the "Kriegssonderstrafrechtsverordnung" of 17 August 1938 concerned the offences "Wehrkraftzetzung", "Wehrdiensttziehung" and "Selbstverstümmelung", which - depending on the severity of the offence - were placed under death penalty.2The "Ordinance on Extraordinary Broadcasting Measures" of 1 September 1939 punished the listening of foreign broadcasters with imprisonment, in severe cases with the death penalty.3 The "War Economics Ordinance" of 4 September 1939 punished black slaughter, food card fraud and similar offences.4The "Verordnung gegen Volksschädlinge" of 5 September tightened the penal provisions for property offences if the offence was committed "by exploiting the state of war" or "the healthy feeling of the people" "required" this.5 The "Verordnung zum Schutz gegen jugendliche Schwerverbrecher" of 4 October 1939 also made it possible to pronounce the death penalty against criminals who were only 16 years old.6The "Ordinance against Violent Criminals" issued on 5 December 1939 made it possible to impose death sentences for any type of capital crime.All these ordinances led to a tremendous increase in the workload in the Special Courts.Further Special Courts were therefore established, including the Special Court Freiburg im Breisgau from 1 November 1940, which was responsible for the Regional Court districts of Freiburg, Constance, Offenburg and Waldshut. The specially established public prosecutor's office at the Freiburg Special Court initiated more than 1,000 proceedings in the four and a half years up to April 1945. Of these, the records of 727 cases have been preserved. Most of the proceedings, about 30 of which were opened on the basis of the "Heimtückegesetz", were followed by "Kriegswirtschaftsverbrechen" with 23 The proceedings on the basis of the "Volksschädlingsverordnung" comprised 12 the so-called "Rundfunkverbrechen" 14
ller cases.literature:Hans Wüllenweber: Special courts in the Third Reich. Forgotten crimes of justice. Frankfurt a.M. 1990.Michael P. Hensle: The death sentences of the Special Court Freiburg 1940-1945. Munich 1996.Michael P. Hensle: Radio crime. Listening to 'enemy stations' in National Socialism. Berlin 2003: Inventory history: The present inventory was delivered in 1975 (receipt 1975/10-II) by the public prosecutor's office in Freiburg. At the beginning of the 90's the documents were indexed with the help of the archiving program MIDOSA by ABM forces in terms of content and with a place and person index, and in 1996 made available to the users as finding aid of the state archives Freiburg the MIDOSA data of the existence were converted in the year 2005 into the MIDOSA95 format; the existence were revised even by the undersigned in the years 2006 and 2007 and provided with a subject index on the basis of the regulations quoted above. The data was then transferred to the archive management program SCOPE-Archiv of the Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg. The stock was organized according to the crime scene, the alphabet of names, and the duration of the investigation. 2,427 order numbers in 20.4 m were now included in the stock. The following order numbers are not assigned: 17, 1000, 1195, 1773-1778. The indices refer to the order number Freiburg, in August 2007 Kurt Hochstuhl.

Curriculum vitae Karl Fritz: Karl Fritz, born on 29 November 1914 in Pfullendorf as the son of a plasterer and a part-time farmer, was made possible by a scholarship to attend the grammar school in Constance. Immediately after graduating from high school, he completed his work service, which was followed by military service with the infantry regiment 114 in Konstanz and with the military district command in Ehingen an der Donau. From November 1, 1938, the day he joined the NSDAP, until October 31, 1941, he was an administrative candidate for the "upper middle administrative service" (including Überlingen, Konstanz, and Stockach), and from November 1, 1942 he was employed as a government inspector in various positions (including Karlsruhe and Sinsheim). From the summer of 1943 until the end of the war, he had joined the Wehrmacht and served in southern France. Based in Freiburg since October 1945, Karl Fritz resumed his administrative duties at the Ministry of the Interior. In 1952 he was transferred to the Transport Department of the South Baden Regional Council, where he retired in 1977 as a senior civil servant. Karl Fritz died on 29 November 1990 in Freiburg. Inventory history: According to family tradition, Karl Fritz, possibly inspired by the example of an uncle, began to "collect" contemporary historical material at an early age. He was employed by the authorities in which he was employed, and the main focus was on posters and brochures with duplicates. Its content is enhanced by the collection of banknotes, especially emergency money, which has been collected from all over the German Reich. The "Karl Fritz" collection, which had grown to a height of 40 m, was donated to the Freiburg State Archives in 1993. An initial inspection revealed that not all the documents were worthy of archiving. In addition, the collection contained material that was difficult to include in the documentation profile of the State Archives. Extensive order work followed. First, the newspaper collection and the literature on contemporary history were transferred to the service library of the State Archives and - in the case of documents on military history - to the Federal Archives and Military Archives; then the posters were separated and the W 113 collection of Karl Fritz posters was formed. A number of posters of East Prussian origin were handed over to the Geheime Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz, some pieces of Berlin origin to the Landesarchiv Berlin. The same happened with the picture material, from which the stock W 145/2 - picture collection Karl Fritz was created. The documents remaining in the remaining stock W 307 were subjected to a further examination in October 1998 and were roughly sorted after the non-archival documents (law and official gazettes, newspaper cuttings, duplicates of printed material and banknotes as well as newspaper series, which are available in the Freiburg UB) had been sorted out. Around 11 metres of shelving were fed into the cassation and the remaining nine metres were listed in order to obtain an initial overview of the available material and to allow provisional access. The collection consists of various contemporary materials on German history since the foundation of the German Reich in 1871 with a clear focus on the period of National Socialism as well as on the post-war period. 2004-2005, as part of an ABM measure, this provisional indexing of the W 307 - Karl Fritz Collection was replaced by a more in-depth indexing. The intention was to generally improve the accessibility of this collection. In addition, preparatory work should also be carried out to enable the digital presentation of the banknotes on the Internet. The archive employee Martin Schittny took over the task of cataloguing and digitising the collection. As the first result the archive find book for the stock W 307 - Collection Karl Fritz can now be presented. It will be followed as an online application by the approximately 5,500 digitalised Karl Fritz image database, which now comprises 1531 numbers (numbers 265, 512, 609 and 706 are not documented) in 6.5 lfd.m.Freiburg, in January 2006 Kurt Hochstuhl.

Demolition of the organisation of justice in the "Third Reich" until 1935: By a decree of the Ministry of Justice of 20 April 1933 on the competence of the ministries, a new Ministry of Culture, Education and Justice was formed from the previously independent Ministries of Culture and Education and the Ministry of Justice. The Justice Department resided in the old premises of the Ministry at Herrenstraße 1 in Karlsruhe. Reichskommissar Otto Wacker became head of the new ministry. With the "Law on the Reconstruction of the Reich" of 30 January 1934, the sovereign rights of the Länder were transferred to the Reich. Thus also the entire administration of justice became a matter for the Reich. Initially, however, the administration of justice continued to be administered by the Länder on behalf of the Reich (1st Ordinance of the Reich Minister of the Interior on the Reconstruction of the Reich of 2 February 1934). The Reich Law of 5 December 1934 created a department Württemberg-Baden with a branch in Karlsruhe at the Reich Ministry of Justice, which from 1 January to 31 March 1935 temporarily continued the business of the Baden Ministry of Justice. On April 1, 1935, the administration of justice was finally taken over by the Reich in all German states. Any remaining business of the former Baden Ministry of Justice that was not affected by the release was transferred to the President of the Karlsruhe Higher Regional Court and the General Prosecutor's Office. A separate administrative department was set up at the Higher Regional Court for this purpose. With the German occupation of Alsace in 1940, the jurisdiction of the Prosecutor General also partly extended to Alsace. Inventory history: In 1987, the present inventory reached the General State Archives in a disordered manner and without a list of consignments. The registry office of the Attorney General was located in the old premises of the former Baden Ministry of Justice at Herrenstraße 1 in Karlsruhe. As can be seen from handwritten notes on two file books (order numbers 281 and 1563), a considerable part of the files stored in the registry was probably burnt by the effects of war on 27 September 1944. After the annexation of Alsace in 1940, the registry was divided into two partial registries with their own business marks (Z4 for Baden and Z5 for Alsace). The files were arranged according to the general file plan of the judiciary and were left in this order at the time of recording. Some of the files were continued beyond the end of the war in 1945, and the order and registration work was carried out by archive inspector Bernd Breitkopf from March 1989 to June 1990. Mrs. L. Hessler took care of the title recordings and corrections. References to related holdings in the General State Archives: Individual further files of the Attorney General from the time of the "Third Reich" can be found in holdings 309, 309-2 and 309 access 1996-66. Together with the files of the present holdings, documents of the administration department of the Higher Regional Court Karlsruhe were also handed over to the General State Archives (240 access 1987-53). The files of the presidential department of the Higher Regional Court were completely destroyed by the effects of war in 1944. Karlsruhe, March 1991Bernd Breitkopf Conversion 2014: In 2014, this finding aid was converted in order to prepare it for the Internet. The conversion and data processing was done by Mr. Alexander Hoffmann, the final editor of the undersigned.Karlsruhe, in March 2014Dr. Martin Stingl Literature selection (as of 1991): Verfolgung und Widerstand unter dem Nationalsozialismus. The situation reports of the Gestapo and the General Prosecutor Karlsruhe 1933-1940, edited by Jörg Schadt, edited by the Stadtarchiv Mannheim, Stuttgart 1976, in the name of the people. Justice and National Socialism. Catalogue for the exhibition of the Federal Minister of Justice. Conception and text: Gerhard Fieberg, Cologne 1989.Rehberger, Horst: Die Gleichschaltung des Landes Baden 1932/33, Heidelberg 1966 (Heidelberger Rechtswissenschaftliche Abhandlung N.F. 19).