Franz Exner (1881-1947)

Abstract

Franz Exner (1881-1947) was one of Germany’s foremost criminologists during the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. His professional life began during the Habsburg Empire and only ended after the Second World War when he was engaged as a defense counsel for Alfred Jodl during the Nuremberg Trials in 1945/46. While having been remembered with “pride and recognition” until some three decades ago, most younger authors tend to see him something like an ideological twin brother of Edmund Mezger’s, the chief ideologist among criminologists and the more prominent of the two colleagues (Exner and Mezger) at Munich University during the Third Reich. The recent discovery of Exner’s estate in the attic of a Bavarian farm house gives rise to the hypothesis that Exner followed a distinctly different strategy during the Nazi years —one that kept him apart from most Nazi involvement, but not all. An analysis of Exner’s dilemmatic situation leads to the unearthing of uncomfortable questions regarding criminology and politics.