Gtze Walter

German criminal who, along with his brother Max, formed the duo Gebrüder Götze (Brothers Götze). They carried out a series of thefts and murders of vehicle occupants in Berlin in the 1930s. Their criminal case resulted in the new law "against street robbery by means of car traps" (Reichsautofallengesetz) of 22 June 1938 passed by the National Socialists (Nazis) in a departure from the rule of law, retrospectively issued as harsher punishment for the perpetrators. The law entered jurisprudence and criminal history as Lex Götze (or lex Goetze). The streets in the Little Star in Berlins Grunewald forest district were a popular nightly gathering for lovers in their cars at the beginning of the 1930s. On the night of 1-2 November 1934, two masked men attacked several parked cars and robbed the occupants at gunpoint. Further robberies of this kind took place in the spring of 1935. After the number of robberies had increased rapidly in June 1935 with injured parties reporting to the police almost daily, Reich Propaganda Minister Goebbels banned the media from reporting on the robberies, because it might discredit Berlin in the year before its hosting of the Olympic Games. When injuries were sustained from gunshots in some of the attacks, the police formed the "Grunewald" special commission, unsuccessfully using "decoys" but all that was found were cartridge cases from the gun of the perpetrator. The perpetrators then changed territories and looked for their victims at the other end of the city. The first attack in the forest near Grünau took place in July 1935. More lovers were robbed around Müggelsee and in the forest between Grünau and Schmöckwitz. In the meantime, the perpetrators were no longer satisfied with robbing cash and valuables from the lovers, they raided gas stations and robbed the coffers of the Grunewald S-Bahn stations, Hirschgarten and Rahnsdorf. A little later in the south-eastern outskirts of the capital, the brothers started using tree branches on the road to trap delivery vehicles then rob the occupants. On 2 November 1935, such an attack on a night bus to Köpenick failed. In order to prevent their intended victims from escaping, the traps were later built from tensioned wire ropes and ultimately from felled trees. On 23 December 1936, an SS senior leader was robbed on the Berlin-Küstrin road. On 12 January 1937, a convoy drove on the road between Hangelsberg and Neu Hartmannsdorf, several vehicles with armed Nazi officials were caught in a tree trap. While the first car managed to escape, the following cars got stuck in the obstacle. The occupants, including an SS leader, a Gauamt leader, an NSDAP district leader and a regimental commander from Fürstenwalde / Spreewere were robbed without resistance. On the evening of 24 March 1937, the body of chief sergeant of the police Artur Herrmann (1903–1937) was found in the forest between Grünau and Schmöckwitz, where he had been on a bicycle patrol. The murder commissions investigation under Ernst Gennat revealed that Herrmann had stopped a pedestrian and was immediately fatally injured by a shot in the left half of his chest. Before he died, Herrmann had followed the fleeing perpetrator into the forest about 30 metres and fired a shot from his service weapon. With the help of several reports on the deadly projectile, Gennat recognized that it came from the same weapon that was used in the car trap attacks. A little later, another murder occurred in the Grunewald; 20-year-old b Read less