Crimes as Part of Organized Power Structures
![handle is hein.journals/jicj9 and id is 195 raw text is: Crimes as Part of Organized Power Structures
Service) or Gestapo (Geheime Staatspolizei, Secret State Police). The courts held
that all persons who had merely followed and implemented orders had lacked
animus auctoris and were therefore only accessories to the crimes. Only those
few accused who had exceeded their superior's orders and acted with addition-
al private motives were found criminally responsible as perpetrators. The prac-
tical consequences of this legal evaluation were all the more devastating,
given that from 1January 1960 statutory limitations barred all prosecutions
of accessories.
Things changed slowly over the next three decades. In 1975, the relevant
provision on perpetratorship in the German Criminal Code was reformulated,
borrowing visibly from Roxin's theory of perpetratorship. Subsequently,
German courts started shifting away from a purely or even predominantly
subjective approach, including more and more objective elements in their
definition of perpetration. In the early 1990s, when courts were dealing with
the crimes of yet another German dictatorial regime, time was eventually ripe
for the German judiciary to accept the concept of indirect perpetration by
means of control over an organized power structure - some 30 years after
Roxin had presented his idea for the first time.
Crimes as Part of Organized
Power Structures*
Claus Roxin
1. [Introduction]
In recent years, jurisprudence has had to deal in increasing measure with
offences that deviate in fundamental ways from the traditional concept of
crime. These are crimes that are not committed by individual perpetrators or
a few people on the basis of independent initiative, but for which - to use pre-
liminary and imprecise wording - organized power structures are responsi-
ble. This is the case, for example, in numerous war crime trials about which
newspapers report almost daily, even today; and it is also true of the two sensa-
tional cases that I would like to take as examples for my thoughts on criminal
law doctrine, due to their paradigmatic clarity: the trials of Eichmann and
Note of the editors: Originally published in Goltdammers Archivftir Strafrecht, or GA (1963) 193-
207. The segment, here extracted, translated, edited and annotated by kind permission of Prof.
Dr Claus Roxin and the board of editors of the Goltdammer's Archivfur Strafrecht. Translation
by Ms Belinda Cooper; page numbers in the original are indicated by square parenthesis in
bold.](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/jicj9&div=15&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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Crimes as Part of Organized Power Structures
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