Gerhard Rossbach

Paul Wilhelm Gerhard Karl Roßbach (born February 28, 1893 in Kehrberg , Pomerania Province , † August 30, 1967 in Hamburg ) was a German free corps leader and right-wing extremist political activist.

biography

Roßbach was born in 1893 as the son of a classical singer; the father died early. In 1913 he became a royal Prussian lieutenant in the 8th West Prussian Infantry Regiment No. 175 , with which he took part in the First World War . After the armistice of Compiègne in 1918, now a set Lieutenant Rossbach promoted in November 1918 in Graudenz a volunteer - machine gun - company , which was in charge of border security tasks.

In January 1919, this unit was renamed the Sturmabteilung Roßbach as part of the Eastern Border Guard , which was taken over as Jäger Battalion 37 in the provisional Reichswehr in early 1919 .

In October 1919 Rossbach marched with his unit of about 1000 men over the blocked border at Tilsit via Lithuania to Latvia. There he was able to cover the withdrawal of the Baltic Freikorps from Thorensberg near Riga . On December 12, 1919, the troops had to return to their own territory.

The decision against orders to move with his unit to the Baltic States led to the exclusion of the Freikorps from the Provisional Reichswehr for mutiny . At the beginning of 1920 the Sturmabteilung Roßbach was officially dissolved, but existed underground in so-called "working groups" in Pomerania and Mecklenburg and took part in the fighting in Upper Silesia as a volunteer regiment in Silesia . The Roßbach troops were unofficially supported by deliveries by the Reichswehr . His troops also took part in the Kapp Putsch in 1920. This "probation" meant that Roßbach was also allowed to participate in the suppression of the Ruhr uprising.

In May 1920 his troops in Güstrow were disbanded. The men in his unit were accepted into the Pomeranian Land League , which was founded as a “ self-protection formation ” . When this formation was dissolved in November 1921, various successor organizations were founded, such as the “Association for Hiking Trips”, the “National Savings Association” and the “Association for Agricultural Vocational Training”.

At the same time, Roßbach built up a network throughout the republic that comprised up to 8,000 members. At the end of 1921, his people in Upper Silesia organized themselves particularly tightly into guard and lock companies. In Berlin-Wannsee , Otto-Ehrich-Strasse 10, he ran an "information office" with a branch at Bayreuther Strasse 13.

Rossbach's sharp political opposition to the democratic-parliamentary republic led to his arrest under the law for the protection of the republic on November 11, 1922, but he was released shortly afterwards. Its front organizations were declared disbanded. On November 19, 1922, Roßbach wanted to found a local branch of the NSDAP , of which he was now a member, in Berlin. Since the NSDAP had already been banned on November 15, he founded the Greater German Workers' Party (GAP) as a replacement , which, however, was dissolved again on January 20, 1923 by a board decision, to join the German Volkish Freedom Party on February 10, 1923 . Rossbach was fought against by the police at the same time , while Reichswehr posts courted him.

On February 17, 1923, Roßbach was arrested again when he appeared in Altona , but released a day later. In October 1923 he was detained again, but surprisingly and with practically no conditions or bail, he was released by the State Court in Leipzig in order to forestall a protective custody warrant from the Saxon state government. Rossbach immediately escaped to Munich , where he joined the Hitler-Ludendorff Putsch in November 1923 and tried to persuade the Central Infantry School of the Reichswehr to participate in the putsch. After the coup failed, he fled into exile in Austria. There he turned away from Hitler and founded the Schilljugend , a military youth movement , together with Werner Lass in 1925 . In 1926 he founded the Ekkehard Association . In 1927 he also started the sports and judging school on Lake Plauer in Mecklenburg.

In 1933 he was appointed training inspector in the Reich Air Protection Association. In June 1934 he was briefly arrested as part of the Röhm putsch . Rossbach had close contacts to Ernst Röhm and Edmund Heines . On June 30, 1934, his home was searched and numerous homoerotic photographs were confiscated. According to his own statements, given the alternative of shooting himself or having himself officially declared dead, he decided to take a job with the Iduna Germania insurance company under a new name . He continued his work in insurance until the end of the war. After the war he worked in Bayreuth in the vicinity of the Wagner family and took part in the organization of the festival . In 1949 he was one of the founders of the Society of Friends of Bayreuth .

In 1950 he published his autobiography Mein Weg durch die Zeit . At the end of World War II, he was married for the second time and had a one-year-old daughter.

literature

• Gerhard Rossbach: My way through time. Memories and Confessions , Weilburg - Lahn 1950
• Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich . Who was what before and after 1945. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2003, ISBN 3-10-039309-0 .
• Emil Julius Gumbel : Conspirators. To the story u. Sociology of the German nationalist secret societies 1918 - 1924. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1984, ISBN 3-596-24338-6 .
• Hannsjoachim W. Koch: The German Civil War. A history of the German and Austrian Freikorps 1918-1923. Ullstein, Frankfurt 1978, ISBN 3-550-07379-8 .
• Lexicon on Party History , Volume 2, Leipzig 1984
• Bernhard Sauer: Black Reichswehr and Fememicide. A milieu study on right-wing radicalism in the Weimar Republic. Metropol, Berlin 2004, ISBN 3-936411-06-9 .
• Bernhard Sauer: Gerhard Roßbach - Hitler's representative for Berlin. On the early history of right-wing radicalism in the Weimar Republic. In: Journal of History. 50th year 2002, issue 1, pp. 5–21. ( PDF, 3.8 Mbyte )
• Bernhard Sauer: "On to Oberschlesien" - The struggles of the German Freikorps 1921 in Oberschlesien and the other former German eastern provinces In: Journal for historical science. 58th year 2010, issue 4, pp. 297-320. ( PDF, 7.6 Mbyte )

Web links

• Literature by and about Gerhard Roßbach in the catalog of the German National Library
• Gerhard Roßbach in the online version of the Reich Chancellery Files Edition . Weimar Republic
• Christoph Hübner: " Freikorps Roßbach, 1919-1923 ", Historical Lexicon of Bavaria

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Die Weltbühne 1923 / II (25.10.1923), p. 416
2. ^ Ernst Klee: The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945 (= The time of National Socialism. Bd. 16048). 2nd updated edition. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-596-16048-8 , p. 509.
3. ↑ Bernd-Ulrich Hergemöller , man for man, page 593
4. ^ Gerhard Roßbach, Mein Weg durch die Zeit , Weilburg (Lahn) 1950, page 216
5. ^ Ernst Klee : The culture lexicon for the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-10-039326-5 , p. 499.