Abschaffung der Todesstrafe als humanitärer Akt?

Nur, um mal der weitverbreiteten Glorifizierung der Abschaffung der Todesstrafe als menschlicher Akt der Verfassungsväter entgegenzutreten:

Germans began the formal process of writing the new Basic Law in August 1948. Initial drafts submitted to a 65-member Parliamentary Council contemplated retention of capital punishment. It was not until a meeting of a special subcommittee on Dec. 6 that a single delegate, Hans-Christoph Seebohm, surprised everyone by proposing to get rid of the death penalty. Seebohm, who ran various industrial enterprises under the Nazis, led the tiny, far-right German Party — which also advocated using “German Reich” instead of “Federal Republic.”

Addressing the council, Seebohm equated executions “in the period before 1945 and in the period since 1945.” As British historian Richard J. Evans notes in “Rituals of Retribution: Capital Punishment in Germany, 1600-1987,” the rightist politician was “thinking above all of the execution of war criminals, to which he and his party were bitterly opposed. Preventing Nazi war criminals from being sentenced to death would certainly help the German Party in its search…