issued on 18.09.1942, with photograph and personal data; stamp: Police President of Prague, used condition. Also includes identity card and refugee identification card of his mother.
In 1939 he became Senior Prosecutor at the German Special Court in Prague, which belonged to the German Regional Court Prague. He participated in at least 59 death sentences. For example, he was the prosecutor in the proceedings against Marianne Golz-Goldlust (1895–1943), in which she was sentenced to death; furthermore, on February 8, 1944, he participated in the death sentence of the Special Court Prague against seven Czechs, including a pregnant woman, who had supported a Soviet prisoner of war, and on August 23, 1944, in the death sentence against three Czechs who had expressed their regret over the failure of an assassination attempt on Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler. In 1944, the Special Court Prague, upon the motion of Prosecutor Rehder-Knöspel, sentenced two married couples to death for harboring two “enemies of the people” sought by police, although the Special Court could have imposed a penitentiary sentence in this case. Rehder-Knöspel ensured that the Special Court Prague received its own execution site with a falling blade machine (guillotine) in the Prague-Pankrác Prison, which could be put into operation on April 1, 1943. Until then, those sentenced to death in Prague had been brought for execution to Dresden to Münchener Platz, where the Regional Court building was also used as a prison and, in the “Third Reich,” as an execution site.
Rehder-Knöspel served after 1945 as prosecutor in Heidelberg and Mannheim. On March 16, 1959, an investigation was initiated against him for his activities at the Special Court Prague. The Karlsruhe Chief Prosecutor Albert Woll, who himself had been active at the Special Court Mannheim before May 1945, protected many judges and prosecutors with Nazi affiliations in his jurisdiction from criminal prosecution after 1945. Rehder-Knöspel also benefited from this; the proceedings against him were discontinued in June 1961.
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