Andreas von Flotow

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Andreas von Flotow (born July 25, 1900 in Wedendorf ; †  April 30, 1933 near Neubukow ) was a German politician (NSDAP).

Life

Flotow came from the since 1241 documented proven family Flotow and was the eldest son of the landowner Georg (Jürgen) von Flotow (1868-1956) on Stuer . On October 3, 1924, he married in Groß Potrems near Laage Anna-Margarethe von Gadow (born June 7, 1901 in Klein-Ridsenow; † November 4, 1986 in Börssum near Wolfenbüttel), a daughter of the landlord Fritz von Gadow and Elisabeth von Randow, from whom he was divorced in 1930. The children Andreas von Flotow (born April 5, 1926 in Niegleve), Barbara von Flotow (born September 20, 1927 in Niegleve) and Sabine von Flotow (born June 15, 1929 in Groß Potrems) resulted from the marriage.

Flotow visited the Friderico-Francisceum in Doberan . Then he learned the officer profession. As a young man, he took part in the First World War in 1917/18 with the Mecklenburg Dragoon Regiment 17 . After that he belonged to a volunteer corps until 1923 .

Weimar Republic

In 1924 von Flotow took over the Stuer near Plau am See property, which covers over 1,000 hectares, from his father . He also attended an agricultural college. At the end of the 1920s, Flotow joined the National Socialist German Workers' Party . He also became a member of the Sturmabteilung (SA), in which he quickly made a career. In 1931 he was the first organizer and leader of the Mecklenburg SS that was created that year . In spring 1932 he took over the post of SA-Oberführer of the Baltic Sea group. In this function he led the party army of the NSDAP in the German northern areas, i. H. in Pomerania , Mecklenburg and Lübeck .

In the general election in July 1932 Flotow was 9 (Opole) as a candidate of his party for the constituency in the Reichstag voted, of which he was subsequently until November of the same year. On the occasion of the Reichstag election of November 1932 , in which the National Socialists had to post a significant loss of votes, Flotow left the Reichstag.

The murder of Andreas von Flotow

In February 1933 von Flotow was expelled from the NSDAP - just a few months after the peak of his career. The reason for his dismissal from the NSDAP was an article that Flotow had published on January 3, 1933 under the abbreviation vF in the daily newspaper Tagelschau, which is close to Hitler's adversary Kurt von Schleicher . In the said article he had stated that it was time for the NSDAP to “die and give space to new forms” and that a new fighting alliance had to take the place of the party.

Flotow then left Mecklenburg and went to Berlin, where he joined the Black Front and became the Mecklenburg District Leader for the Revolutionary National Socialist Combat Group around Otto Strasser . His apartment in the capital has been under constant surveillance since late February 1933.

On April 30, 1933, Flotow was arrested by a three-man SA command led by Julius Uhl . On the way to Schwerin by car , he was shot on the road between Neubukow and Teschow . Uhl and his employees, Truppführer Alfa and Scharführer Schuhböck, justified the shooting by saying that Flotow had tried to flee. It should be noted that in the period between the two world wars, it was a common practice in the case of politically motivated murder by state or semi-state organs such as the Freikorps of the early 1920s or the SA and SS after 1933 to abandon unpleasant people on transports in remote areas to force the vehicle and then shoot them in open terrain (mostly from behind). In this way, a formal legal justification for the shooting without a court judgment, i.e. a disguise for a murder carried out by violent state agents, should be established.

The then chief of staff of the SA Ernst Röhm is considered to be the likely commissioner of the shooting : this suspicion was not only expressed by Flotow's father in a letter to the public prosecutor, but is also obvious from the fact that Uhl was the chief of Röhm's personal staff guard and in the It was reputed to be Röhm's “body murderer”. From Röhm's point of view, Flotow's political departure from the NSDAP due to his earlier work as a high SA leader could be viewed as a personal breach of loyalty.

Criminal proceedings against Uhl and others before the Rostock Higher Regional Court were discontinued on March 10, 1934. After the shooting of Röhm and Uhl in the course of the so-called Röhm Putsch in July 1934, the proceedings were resumed and discontinued again in November 1934. Several attempts by Flotow's father to reopen the case were rejected by the public prosecutor. The government commissioner of Mecklenburg, Friedrich Hildebrandt , gave insight into the background to the shooting of Flotov as a witness in another trial. He testified that Flotow had visited Schleicher for a secret meeting at the end of December 1932 / beginning of January 1933 and had subsequently become a member of a secret front whose aim was to eliminate Adolf Hitler , which is why he was viewed as a traitor and enemy of the movement .

Archival material

  • Bundesarchiv Berlin: R 3001/112425 (files of the Reich Ministry of Justice on the Flotow case)

literature

  • The "Flotow case" - on the rise and fall of a Mecklenburg SA leader , in: Geschichtswerkstatt Rostock eV (ed.): Contemporary history regional. Messages from Mecklenburg , Rostock, Volume 7 (2003), Issue 2, pp. 5–13.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ University of Rostock: Scientific journal of the University of Rostock , 1951, p. 240.
personal data
SURNAME Flotow, Andreas von
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician (NSDAP), MdR
DATE OF BIRTH July 25, 1900
PLACE OF BIRTH Wedendorf
DATE OF DEATH April 30, 1933
Place of death Neubukow