Bequest Walter Witte

In 2002, the Fritz Bauer Institute obtained the bequest of the lawyer Walter Witte (1928-2020) with extensive records regarding his lawyerly occupation. Walter Witte was born in 1928 und died in 2020. He worked at Henry Ormond's law firm as an employed lawyer and later conducted his own law firm in Frankfurt (Main) with his wife. His bequest mainly consists of records created in the context of compensation proceedings. In 1959, the federal law regarding the compensation of victims of National Socialist persecution (BEG) was passed with retroactive effect to the year 1953, enabling the victims to claim compensation. In 2020, the Fritz Bauer Institute obtained further documents by a nephew of Witte, for example, a trial index with an alphabetical index of persons, as well as additional compensation files. The bequest Walter Witte contains after description, demetallization and filing 560 archival units with a total extent of 9 running meters. During indexing from May to June 2021, the processor Sophia Steinmetz reorganized the collection. The holding is now structured in two sections: "compensation proceedings" ("Entschädigungsverfahren") and "further documents of lawyerly occupation" ("Weitere Dokumente der anwaltlichen Tätigkeit"). The first section covers files regarding various compensation proceedings of victims persecuted by the Nazi regime. The second section contains documents originating from Witte's time as a lawyer and from Witte's law firm.