Adolf Rall

Adolf Anselm Rall (born June 7, 1905 in Berlin-Neukölln , † around November 2, 1933 near Berlin ) was a German SA man. Rall became known as the victim of a murder often associated with the Reichstag fire of February 1933.

Live and act

Early life

Rall was born as the eldest of five children of railway chief secretary Valentin Rall and his wife Marianna, née Kaminsky. After attending school, he spent four or five years studying to be an automobile fitter at Maibach . On April 21, 1924, he was responsible for the first time when he was fingerprinted for "moral crimes".

In 1926, Rall passed the driving test for all classes. In the following years, Rall, who lived at Knesebeckstrasse 120 (now Silbersteinstrasse 63), earned his living as a driver. Due to a serious injury, he is said to have worked for the city of Berlin as a clerk, later as a radio assistant and finally as a driver for electric cars for the city of Berlin. Afterwards he was a private driver. According to his own statements, he claims to have driven Reich Interior Minister Carl Severing for a year and a half. In the late 1920s he allegedly joined the Sturmabteilung (SA).

On April 30, 1932, Rall was arrested in Dresden for various cases of car theft. After spending several weeks in the Meißen remand prison, he was transferred to Berlin in August, where he was released on October 10, 1932, after serving further. According to his own information in the investigation files received, Rall claims to have traveled with others to Marseille soon after his release from prison and joined the Foreign Legion there. According to Rall, the men should soon have stormed out of this again.

Arrest and trial

On December 5, 1932, the Berlin-Charlottenburg District Court again issued an arrest warrant against Rall for stealing a car. For reasons that were not clear, he was arrested in Lörrach on December 17, 1932 , but apparently released again after a short time: At this point in time, despite an arrest warrant, no wanted report had yet been received. On the evening of December 19, 1932, he stole a dark blue Daimler limousine in front of Stuttgart Central Station. After Rall repeatedly during his trip through Bavaria fuel bills had not been paid, the local police noticed him and began following the procedure described by the station operators car to look for: On 21 December 1932, an official Rall on a farm in Eschenbach at Landshut , to that he had stopped to do minor repairs on the car. When it turned out that he had stolen the vehicle, he was taken to Landshut regional court prison.

After the chief public prosecutor at District Court III in Berlin had brought charges against Rall for theft in four cases on January 19, 1933, he was transferred from Landshut to the Berlin District Court prison on February 1, 1933. On February 8, 1933, he was transferred to the Berlin-Moabit remand prison.

On April 11, 1933, Rall was sentenced by Regional Court III in Berlin to one year in prison for the theft of the Daimler limousine in Stuttgart on December 19, 1932, including pre-trial detention. Since evidence of further car thefts could not be produced, he was acquitted by them for lack of evidence. The appeal against the judgment requested by Rall was finally rejected by the Reichsgericht on July 6, 1933.

On July 19, 1933, Rall was transferred from the remand prison to the Moabit cell prison. From there he was sent to Plötzensee prison for a short time before he was transferred to Tegel prison on August 22, 1933, from where he was transferred to Pritzwalk prison on September 6. March 19, 1933 was planned as the end of the sentence. On October 20, 1933, however, Rall was transferred back to the Berlin-Tegel prison.

Involvement in the Reichstag fire and murder

On October 20, 1933, a few days after the start of the so-called Reichstag fire trial , Rall, who was at the time in Tegel prison , requested to be brought before the judge on the grounds that he should provide information of great importance in connection with this trial have. As a result, he was brought before a judge at the Berlin Regional Court in Moabit shortly afterwards. Both the Gestapo official Hans Bernd Gisevius and the Gestapo chief Rudolf Diels claimed after the Second World War in her memoirs that Rall had the judge against on record that a group of SA men in front of the Reichstag fire to the SA group leader Karl Ernst had been appointed who had ordered them to penetrate the latter through an underground tunnel between the Reichstag presidential palace and the Reichstag and to set it on fire with the help of a special tincture that ignited itself after a while, in order to create a pretext for attacking the communists. Diels and Gisevius both stated that the recording officer was Karl Reineking, who had recently been expelled from the SA and was looking for ways to rehabilitate himself. Reineking had therefore alerted the Berlin SA leadership about the explosive allegations of Rall: The SA group leader Ernst then arranged that the protocol of the district court, which the investigating judge had sent to the senior Reich attorney in Leipzig , was intercepted and put aside.

On October 27th, Rall was picked up from Tegel prison by officers of the Secret State Police and taken to the Secret State Police Office. There he was detained in the Gestapo house prison for a few days and repeatedly interrogated. Among other things, Reineking, who joined the Secret State Police at the end of October, was involved.

On November 2, 1933, a forester found Rall's unclothed body with a broken skull and a bullet hole in the forehead near Strausberg , east of Berlin. As early as November 4th, the Prussian Prime Minister Hermann Göring ordered the crackdown on the "preliminary proceedings [s] against unknown persons for the release of prisoners and manslaughter [sic!]" Initiated by the public prosecutor's office. Rall's death was recorded on November 7th at the registry office in Grazau. In a letter from the Gestapa (Secret State Police Office) to the Tegel prison on November 25, 1933, it was officially stated that Rall escaped from the Secret State Police on November 2, 1933 at 6:35 p.m. while being transported back to the Tegel prison and has since disappeared. Official documents later stated that he had used the transport to attempt to escape and was shot dead.

Both Hans Bernd Gisevius and Rudolf Diels later wrote in their memoirs that Rall von Reineking and two other SA members had been taken from his cell in the Gestapa around November 2, 1933 and stowed in an automobile: they would then be taken out with him Berlin drove out into the country and murdered him in a forest near Strausberg. Immediately after the Second World War, Gisevius published the following report on the murder of Rall, which was allegedly based on information that Reineking had given to his colleagues at the Gestapo:

“[...] the prisoner [was] taken from the police headquarters one night. Allegedly it should be a short comparison. In reality, he had to strip down to his shirt on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. Then the four of them drove out into the city, Rall, trembling with cold and fear of death, crammed into the car below. They stopped where the opportunity seemed favorable, and Reineking knew [...] how to report hideously vividly what happened next. They saw an open field on the edge of the forest, and nearby they spied a viewing bench. Rall had to sit on this, whereupon they strangled him together. According to Reineking's account, it should have taken an endless time until their victim was dead: at least the murderers seem to have turned the minutes into hours. Then they let the body lean on the bench and set about digging a grave in the nearby field. But who described their horror when they suddenly heard a noise, turned around and saw the corpse run away from a distance. The sight of the dead leaping away in the bright moonlight and with a fluttering shirt was horrifying even for the hardened blackjack of the SA. The murder boys' fear that everything could be discovered was even greater. They ran after the corpse in a hurry, and now they choked her so thoroughly that she really lost her breath. She was hastily buried. "

In research - especially due to the fact that Rall had been in custody for more than two months at the time of the Reichstag fire - the majority assume that Rall had no real knowledge of an arson and was certainly not involved in it, but that he had only tried to create a change in his dreary everyday life in detention through a fictitious story, to obtain perks for himself or simply to draw attention to himself. Since Rall's appearance in court - regardless of the likely falsity of his statements - would have been highly compromising for the National Socialists, most historians conclude that the National Socialists wanted to prevent his testimony at all costs and therefore had him killed. Accordingly, Rall was not murdered to prevent that he could reveal a known truth about the Reichstag fire that was incriminating against the National Socialists, but to prevent him from continuing to spread allegations about the Reichstag fire that were false, but immediately appeared credible and would have been disavowing for the Nazi leadership if they had become known to a wider group of people.

In the post-war period, advocates of the thesis of National Socialist responsibility for the Reichstag fire nevertheless tried to use the Rall case as evidence to confirm their view that the Reichstag was set on fire by the SA. More recently, Alexander Bahar and Wilfried Kugel have tried again to use Rall's murder as evidence of Nazi involvement in the Reichstag fire, arguing that, despite his imprisonment at the time of the Reichstag fire, he might have had intimate knowledge of it, since, as the news magazine Der Spiegel summarized their thesis, "the SA might have prepared the fire and secretly brought the incendiary material to the Reichstag weeks before Adolf Hitler's ' seizure of power ', when Rall was still free."

More recently, the American historian Benjamin Carter Hett has suggested that, although Rall was certainly not involved in the burning of the Reichstag building himself, as he was imprisoned at the time of the fire, he was one of the 1931/1932 Hans Georg rifle led special unit of the Berlin SA could have belonged, which u in the context of the political struggle of these years. a. also with arson tasks, such as B. the setting on fire of election posters of opposing parties by spraying them with special tinctures that spontaneously ignite due to contact with oxygen. For this reason, Hett believes it is plausible that Rall was able to do so during his prison time in 1933 through reading newspaper reports on the Reichstag fire on the one hand and through his insider knowledge about the working methods of the arsonist unit of the Berlin SA and the arson agents used by them on the other would be to piece together the probable technical process of the Reichstag arson and its background and possibly even, based on his relationships with SA members who had been involved in technically similar arson activities in the past, to infer some people who might be involved in the Reichstag arson. Since Rall had made largely correct assumptions about those responsible and the practical implementation of the arson in the protocol that he recorded together with the prison director Brucks in October 1933 and the content of which was then communicated to Karl Ernst via Reineking, the SA had - so Hett - eliminated him because she recognized that Rall had largely correctly combined the actual course and the actual background of the fire based on the inside information available to him and wanted to prevent him from disclosing his correct conclusions and insights in court or on other occasions that would reveal the truth about the fire.

An investigation into the murder of Rall by the Berlin public prosecutor's office was discontinued in the 1960s after Reineking's death had been established (so that the proceedings against him were automatically settled) and further suspects could not be determined.

family

Rall had three younger brothers: Maximilian Rall (born July 30, 1913 in Berlin-Neukölln; ​​† June 8, 1944 in Normandy), Georg Karl Rall (born March 11, 1915 in Berlin-Neukölln) and Eduard Rall (* 20. January 1919 in Berlin-Neukölln).

Archival material

A contemporary investigation file against Rall is in the Brandenburg State Main Archive in Potsdam. A police warning about Rall's alleged recruitment by the French secret service is also kept there (C-Rep. 375-01-14, No. 18315).

Contemporary investigation files on the discovery of Rall's corpse in 1933 have been preserved in the Secret State Archives (Rep. 84a, No. 53360, 53361, 53362 [22 sheets]).

In the Brandenburg State Main Archives there are 2 files with court and imprisonment documents on Rall from 1932 and 1933 (Rep. 12 B, Vol. 1 and Vol. 2).

The files relating to the investigation by the Berlin public prosecutor's office in the 1960s into the Rall murder (which was a condensed trial in which several different acts of homicide were investigated in 1933) are kept in the Berlin State Archives. There are also two contemporary files on criminal proceedings against Rall for serious theft.

literature

• Alexander Bahar / Wilfried Kugel: The Reichstag fire. How history is made. edition q, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-86124-513-2 , especially pp. 524-594.
• Benjamin Carter Hett : Burning the Reichstag. An investigation into the Third Reich's enduring mystery , Oxford 2014.
• Anonymus: "An uncomfortable confidant eliminated, in: Pariser Tageblatt of December 12, 1933. ( digitized version )

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Hans Bernd Gisevius: Until the bitter end. 1946, p. 77.
2. ^ Klaus Wiegrefe : Flammendes Fanal , Der Spiegel , April 9, 2001.