Otto Ballerstedt

Otto Ballerstedt (born April 1, 1887 in Munich , † June 30 or July 1, 1934 in or near the Dachau concentration camp ) was a German engineer, writer and politician. Ballerstedt was best known as the leader of the particularist Bayernbund (not to be confused with today's Bayernbund , which was called Bayerischer Heimat- und Königsbund until 1967), as a political rival of Adolf Hitler in the early days of his political career and for supporting Hitler in 1922 imprisoned for a month.

Live and act

Empire and First World War

Ballerstedt was the son of Otto Ballerstedt Senior, a well-known editor of the Münchner Neuesten Nachrichten, and his wife Julie, née Lagel. His uncle Max Ballerstedt was a famous paleontologist. Ballerstedt completed his engineering studies with a degree in electrical engineering. At the First World War Ballerstedt participated as an officer. During the war, in which he was wounded in the head and lost an eye, he emerged politically for the first time: In April 1918 he challenged the Bavarian King Ludwig III. against the background of the far-reaching German territorial gains in the peace treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Russia in a petition not to allow the newly won territories to fall to Prussia . This is already much too powerful within the Confederation of German Territories; therefore it is important to prevent the Baltic States from being annexed to Prussia in order to prevent the Prussian preponderance within the imperial community from growing any further.

Bayernbund and confrontation with Hitler

After the German defeat in the autumn of 1918, Ballerstedt founded the at times very successful Bayernbund, a political organization that emphasized regional independence and regional peculiarities and aimed to reorganize the German Empire on a “strictly federal basis”. According to Ballerstedt's idea - “white-blue” and monarchistically minded - imperial unity should be preserved, but the internal autonomy and independence of the individual federal states should be significantly strengthened.

As the founder and head of the Bayernbund, Ballerstedt was a very prominent figure in the politics of the Free State and its capital in the early 1920s. Adolf Hitler, who entered the political arena at this time, regarded the “separatist” - as he called Ballerstedt - as a rival and for a time had violent arguments with the Bayernbund, which he publicly attacked and also physically attacked by it had political gatherings blown up by militant thugs. Hitler later described Ballerstedt in retrospect in one of his monologues in the Führer Headquarters during the Second World War as his most dangerous opponent in the field of public speaking, and decades later he took credit for having asserted himself against Ballerstedt at the time.

On September 14, 1921, a sensational incident occurred when Hitler, Hermann Esser , Oskar Körner and several other NSDAP supporters stormed a meeting led by Ballerstedt in Munich's Löwenbräukeller to prevent him from giving a lecture. Hitler achieved this goal with drastic means: He physically attacked Ballerstedt and seriously injured him. As a result, from January 27 to 29, 1922, Hitler was tried for breach of the peace , public nuisance and bodily harm and sentenced to a (delayed) imprisonment of 100 days and the payment of 1,000 Reichsmarks . Hitler served his sentence from June 24th to July 27th, 1922 in Munich's Stadelheim prison , where he only remained in prison for one month and the remaining 70 days were released.

Later years of life and murder

From 1925 on, Ballerstedt took a more and more political role in the background. In the early 1930s he shifted to the writing of photographically illustrated landscape and homeland books.

On June 30, 1934, one day before a planned trip to Austria, Ballerstedt was deported to the Dachau concentration camp in the course of the Röhm affair and shot there or outside the camp in the Gündinger Forest near Neuhimmelreich . At the same time as him, Fritz Beck , Fritz Gerlich , Wilhelm Eduard Schmid and the housekeeper Ernestine Zoref were murdered.

Today Ballerstedtstrasse in Munich reminds of Otto Ballerstedt.

Archival tradition

Ballerstedt's estate is now in the main state archive in Munich. In the war archive department of the same archive there is also Ballerstedt's officer personnel file from the First World War. In the Munich State Archives there is also a file from the Munich Police Directorate with material on the confrontations between Hitler and Ballerstedt in the early 1920s ( Munich State Archive: Police Directorate No. 6698 (digitally available) ).

Fonts

• Great Prussia and the destruction of the Reich. German particularism and Germany's future , 1918.
• To the Zugspitzbahn. Printed as a manuscript , 1925.
• From our mountains. Text and pictures , 1930.
• The wonder world of the Alps. 71 illustrations from the Oberammergau area , 1930.
• The mountain photography. A field of joy for every photographer , 1934.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Erwein Arretin: Fritz Michael Gerlich. A martyr of our day. 1949, p. 142.
2. ↑ http://www.bundesarchiv.de/aktenreichskanzlei/1919-1933/1020/mu1/mu11p/kap1_2/para2_18.html The Prussian Legation Munich to the Foreign Office. April 6, 1920, Federal Archives. In all historical sources like this one speaks of the Bayernbund Ballerstedts, not of the Heimat- und Königsbund, which has only been called Bayernbund since 1967. So these are clearly two different organizations.
3. ↑ ^{a b} Otto Gritschneder: “The Führer has sentenced you to death…” Hitler's “Röhm Putsch” murders in court , Verlag CH Beck, Munich 1993, ISBN 3-406-37651-7 , p. 122.
4. ^ Karl-Ludwig Ay : The emergence of a revolution. The popular mood in Bavaria during the First World War (= contributions to a historical structural analysis of Bavaria in the industrial age. Vol. 1). Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1968, also dissertation, University of Munich, 1968, p. 138.
5. ^ Robert Payne: The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler. 1973, p. 160: “As an orator, Ballerstedt was my most dangerous opponent. What a feat it was to hold my own against him! His father was a Hessian, his mother was from Lorraine. He was a diabolical dialectician. To give his hearers the impression that he agreed with them, he'd begin with a eulogy of the Prussians. I've been condemned several times for accusing this man of treason— and yet, he was in fact sold to the French. "
6. ^ Richard J Evans: The Coming of the Third Reich. A History , 2004, p. 181; Joachim Fest: Hitler , 2002, pp. 160, 225.

Web links

• Works by and about Otto Ballerstedt  in the German Digital Library