August doll

August Doll (* 1904 ; † October 1, 1933 in Wuppertal ) was a German SA leader. He was responsible for numerous killings committed by the Wuppertaler SA, which he led in 1933, and was himself the victim of a political murder in October 1933.

Life and activity

Doll joined the SA around 1930, in which he took over the leadership of the storm in Wuppertal-Mitte around 1931.

After the National Socialists came to power in the spring of 1933, the SA-Sturm (“Doll Storm” or “Murder Storm”) led by Doll hit the city of Wuppertal with a terror that was extremely brutal even for the conditions at the time. Doll and his subordinates were persecuted by him killed numerous political opponents of the National Socialists and these otherwise unpleasant people. The victims included the KPD functionary Heinrich Born (kidnapped in a quarry on March 1, 1933 and shot), the businessman and Reichsbannermann Oswald Laufer (shot on March 7, 1933 in front of his father's shop on Wilhelmstrasse), the young communist Fritz Dähler († March 20, 1933), the communist Erwin Kraehkamp (shot on the street in front of the Volkshaus in Elberfeld on June 26, 1933), the Social Democrat Wolfram Custin (shot on June 26, 1933 in Simonstrasse in Elberfeld), Hans Goersmann ( shot in a car on June 26, 1933 after his arrest and thrown into a pond on the outskirts) and the communist Fritz Merseburg (mistreated and shot on July 28, 1933).

Because of its responsibility for more than twenty deaths, Doll became known beyond Germany's borders as the "killer of Elberfeld". In particular, the world public was informed in the brown books published by exile communist circles about the murders initiated and co-committed by Doll .

On October 1, 1933, Doll was killed under circumstances that were not entirely clear. In the literature it is usually assumed that he was killed by "comrades" from the Wuppertal SA and SS circles . Allegedly he was found with a dagger in his back at the back exit of a pub in Harzgäßchen in Wuppertal. The Hohenzollern Prince August Wilhelm of Prussia attended his funeral .

Paul Zech (1881–1946) used the doll in the posthumously published factual novel Germany, your dancer is death . There he wrote u. a. about him:

“He should have his whole uniform covered with skulls from top to bottom, not just the one on his cap. Because if he doesn't have at least a hundred of our people on his conscience ... This horse butcher rules here. He has the power. Before that they all crawl into the mousehole, even the mayor. And such a beast chases our people day and night. And if he gets hold of you, he's finished, you have to go looking for him with the lantern. After all, some women were still lucky and found their husbands in the Wupper, in the dam or buried, up in the Mirker Wald or on the Königshöhe. "

literature

• Kurt Schnöring : Auschwitz began in Wuppertal: Jewish fate under the swastika , 1984.