Abstract

The criminal law tries to assign liability and therefore is directed to a person not as a causer, but as a master of his actions. Where several persons are all causers by the fact that each of them set conditions for a success, one of them can be regared as the master of the success, because he steers it by virtue of his free will and makes it so to his own with the result, that his acting preceding conditions are lowered to preconditions, which release no responsibility as perpetrator but only as participant. However, it should not be misjudged that the distinction between perpetration and participation is not made already on the causal level; the perpetrator does not enter interruptingly into the causal course leading to the success, he only thwarts its further control by the participant. Consequently with the distinction between perpetration and participation a decision about imputation is made. This paper pursues the purpose to explain this decision about imputation.