12 Facts About Leonhard Drach

Leonhard Drach was a German jurist and convicted war criminal.

Leonhard Drach was pardoned in 1954 and made his way back into the legal service as a regional prosecutor in Frankenthal, Germany.

However, in 1965 his Nazi past was raised in the press by a disgruntled party whom Drach had recently prosecuted, and a wider media storm ensued.

Leonhard Josef Hubert Drach was born and grew up in Aachen.

Leonhard Drach studied jurisprudence at Cologne and Bonn, qualifying in 1928 and taking a post as a Court Assessor in Aachen.

Leonhard Drach was rewarded with the Cross of Merit for his "constructive work" and "fact based conduct of political criminal cases".

Leonhard Drach's job was to prosecute the cases, and he demanded the death sentence for all 20 of the accused.

On 14 September 1942 Leonhard Drach received a note from Hartmann congratulating him for his part in the proceedings.

On his return from Luxembourg, Leonhard Drach was accepted back into the Rhineland-Palatinate prosecution service.

Leonhard Drach was prosecuted for what might today be defined as a form of insider trading.

However, on 9 January 1965 Luxembourg's Foreign Minister, Pierre Werner, countered that Leonhard Drach was indeed a convicted war criminal.

Leonhard Drach's name was included in Albert Norden's "Brown Book" in which the author "outed" approximately 1,800 members of the West German political and administrative establishment whom he claimed to have identified as former Nazis.