August Schneidhuber

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August Schneidhuber (1930)

Ludwig Ernst August Schneidhuber (born May 8, 1887 in Traunstein , † June 30, 1934 in Stadelheim ) was a German politician ( NSDAP ), SA leader and police chief in Munich .

Live and act

As an adolescent, Schneidhuber, the son of a judicial officer, went through the Bavarian Cadet Corps . He then joined the 1st Foot Artillery Regiment in 1905 as an ensign . In the First World War , Schneidhuber was deployed on the Western Front from 1914 to 1918 . In 1914 he was promoted to first lieutenant and in 1916 to captain . In 1920 he left the army. In later years, Schneidhuber was referred to as a "major". In the 1920s, Schneidhuber worked as a farmer.

According to Baldur von Schirach , Schneidhuber came into contact with the National Socialist movement at an early age. In 1921 he was a member of the resident army and, from that year, he was also a member of the NSDAP for the first time. He lived in Chiemgau . From 1924 to 1925 he headed the German-Völkisch Officers' Union in Rosenheim . There is evidence that Schneidhuber joined the Sturmabteilung (SA), the military arm of the Nazi movement, in 1928 at the latest , in which he practically immediately assumed a leading position: from February 8, 1929 to April 1, 1931, he was Supreme SA Leader South (also OSAF Deputy South) and entrusted with the management of the SA in the Bavarian region. After the reorganization of the SA in the spring of 1931, following the appointment of Ernst Röhm as the new SA chief on January 1, 1931, Schneidhuber acted from April 2 to July 1931 as the commissioned leader of the newly formed SA Group South based in Munich. In contrast to his position until 1931, he no longer held the rank and no longer held the title of OSAF deputy. As part of the reorganization of the SA, Schneidhuber had previously tried to put through his own ideas regarding the structure and organization of the party army with an extensive memorandum that he submitted to Adolf Hitler , but was largely rejected by Hitler.

In the summer of 1931 there were violent differences between Schneidhuber and his superior Ernst Röhm - with whom the relationship was tense anyway after Röhm's and not Schneidhuber's reform ideas for the SA had been carried out by Hitler - after Schneidhuber accused the SA chief of his , Schneidhubers, to interfere in matters of the SA Group South. On May 16, 1931, Schneidhuber announced his resignation as head of this group. After lengthy disputes, Schneidhuber tried to turn Hitler on in his favor, but he stood behind Röhm. After numerous of the sub-groups under him had expressed their confidence in Schneidhuber in writing, a settlement between Röhm and Schneidhuber came about in autumn 1931 under circumstances that were not fully clarified. Before the settlement with Röhm, Schneidhuber was among the supporters of the for a short time, not only because of internal SA conflicts Stennes putsch , but also because he rejected Röhm's homosexuality, which had become public .

From September 10, 1931 until the SA was banned by the Brüning government on April 13, 1932, Schneidhuber led the SA Group West with its headquarters in Koblenz . During this time he was promoted to SA group leader on October 14, 1931. After the re-admission of the SA by the Papen government , Schneidhuber led the SA Group West again from July 1 to September 14, 1932. On September 15, 1932, Schneidhuber took over the leadership of the newly formed SA Group III, which included Groups West, Thuringia and southwest and which he maintained until March 31, 1933. He kept Koblenz as his official seat. On January 1, 1933, he was promoted to SA-Obergruppenführer.

In the elections in July 1932 , Schneidhuber was elected to the Reichstag for the constituency of Hessen-Darmstadt , to which he subsequently belonged without interruption until his death on June 30, 1934. Martin Seidel continued his mandate for the remainder of the term .

On April 1, 1933, shortly after the National Socialists came to power , Schneidhuber returned to Bavaria, where he initially took over the leadership of SA Upper Group IV (Ingolstadt) until June 30, 1933. On April 23, 1933, he was appointed as the successor to Heinrich Himmler - who had held this office for a good month from March to April - as police chief of Munich . In this capacity, over the course of the following fourteen months, he increasingly came into conflict with Himmler, who after his replacement by Schneidhuber had taken over the position of commander of the Bavarian Political Police and who constantly tried to challenge the president of the regular police from this position of power.

On July 1, 1933, Schneidhuber was appointed leader of the newly established SA Upper Group VII (SA Groups Bavarian Ostmark , Franconia and Highlands) with headquarters in Munich. Since April 10, 1934, Schneidhuber also belonged to the Bavarian Council of Ministers as a representative of the SA (or Röhm's permanent deputy) .

Arrest and death

August Schneidhuber
Death certificate for August Schneidhuber

On the night of June 29th to 30th, 1934, Schneidhuber was arrested together with his deputy Wilhelm Schmid as part of the Röhm affair in Munich: After his arrival from Essen, Hitler had invited them to a meeting at the Ministry of the Interior, where he told them announced that they had been arrested for high treason and would be shot. On this occasion he personally relieved Schneidhuber and Schmid of all their political offices and, in a fit of rage, tore the medals and badges of rank from their uniforms. The reason for Hitler's anger against the two was a “spontaneous” march of the Munich SA the day before, which Hitler's surroundings believed to be the first wave of an SA uprising and for which Schneidhuber and Schmid were held responsible. In the research it is predominantly assumed that both actually had nothing to do with the SA demonstrations, that they were provoked by fake alarm notes at the instigation of the SD chief Reinhard Heydrich , in order to give Hitler the impression of a local SA uprising to pretend and thus to emphasize the claims of the SA rivals within the Nazi movement that the SA intends to carry out a “Second Revolution against the Führer”.

Schneidhuber and Schmid were taken to the Stadelheim prison, where they, together with four other SA leaders ( Hans Hayn , Peter von Heydebreck , Hans Erwin von Spreti-Weilbach and Edmund Heines ) on the personal orders of Hitler von an SS commando were shot.

Erwein von Aretin , a prisoner in Stadelheim in 1934, later handed down the course of the execution of Schneidhuber, which he had learned from the police sergeant Zink:

"When the police chief Schneidhuber came out on the [...] small stairs, he lit a cigarette and took a few deep puffs out of it. Then he looked up at the sky, went to his seat, heard his verdict and asked the SS men to shoot properly. Then he threw his cigarette at their feet, brought out his Heil Hitler and collapsed. "

It is noticeable that Schneidhuber was shot on June 30, 1934, although he was not one of the SA leaders who belonged to Ernst Röhm's inner circle, from whom the majority of those selected for execution came. In addition, Schneidhuber, unlike most of the higher SA leaders - who were often notorious for excesses of violence and alcohol, as well as for their generally undisciplined manner and self-indulgence - enjoyed a good reputation in public and was considered a "moderate" man.

Schneidhuber also had a good reputation among the party leadership of the NSDAP: On June 30, Rudolf Hess tried unsuccessfully to convince Hitler to spare Schneidhuber and to remove his name from the execution list. Schneidhuber was also widely popular in the SS. It is indicative of Schneidhuber's popularity with the Munich police, which he led, that a few hours after his execution on June 30th, at 9:00 p.m., two police officers appeared in the Stadelheim prison , demanding that Schneidhuber's body be stored in a shed of the penal institution was kept to see. According to the prison sergeant, Zink, both officers saluted for five minutes and "stood with tears in their eyes" in front of Schneidhuber's body. During a walk, they would have assured Zink again and again that they had known no nobler person than the dead.

Schneidhuber's body, like that of the other five shot dead, was initially buried in a wooden box in the Perlach cemetery on the night of July 1, 1934 . A wreath laid by his son Otto "for our dear father" was removed from the grave by order of the authorities , according to the New York Times report . On July 10, 1934, an order was issued by the Bavarian Gauleiter Adolf Wagner to exhume and burn the bodies of the men who were shot in Stadelheim, including Röhm, on June 30 and July 1, "with the ashes according to the existing legal provisions regarding the ashes of those executed ”. This took place on July 21st. The families were ordered to bury the urns with the remains of their dead within five minutes. Only five family members and one clergyman were allowed to participate.

In Hitler's Reichstag speech on July 13, 1934, in which Hitler gave an account of the action of June 30, Schneidhuber, unlike most of the other high SA leaders who were shot (Ernst, Hayn, Heines, Heydebreck), did not find any abusive mention. Schneidhuber's widow was initially refused a pension because her husband was "not a regular official, but only acting chief of police", but later for reasons of state (there should be no new "unrest" about the events of June 30th). Schneidhuber's divorced first wife Ida received a monthly allowance of 10 RM . His second wife Annemarie received 240 RM per month in compensation.

Schneidhuber himself fell victim to a Damnatio memoriae immediately after his murder : From then on, his name was no longer allowed to be mentioned in the press or in public. So was z. B. The Illustrierte Beobachter of July 7, 1934, which was already printed at the time of Schneidhuber's shooting and which contained a picture article about Schneidhuber ("SA in Allgäu. Obergruppenführer Schneidhuber visits Standarte 20 in Kempten"), was withdrawn by the publisher and reprinted with a brought another article for distribution.

Wolfram Selig judged the reasons for Schneidhuber's murder in his study of the Munich victims of the Röhm affair:

“In spite of his temporary opposition to Röhm, Schneidhuber, who was one of the moderate leaders, was probably doomed by his deputy role in the Council of Ministers, since he had to represent the interests of the SA vis-à-vis the political organization represented by Gauleiter Wagner. Wagner, the mastermind behind the action in Munich and who has long been enemies with the police chief, took the opportunity to have his opponent liquidated. "

family

In his first marriage, Schneidhuber was married to the Jew Ida Franziska Wassermann (born June 7, 1892 in Munich). The couple had two daughters, Elisabeth Gertrud Wilhelmina (born December 13, 1914) and Marianne (born December 5, 1919). However, the marriage ended in divorce in 1920. Franziska Schneidhuber was deported as a prominent prisoner during the Second World War to the Theresienstadt ghetto at the end of July 1942 , where she was liberated in May 1945.

In his second marriage, Schneidhuber was married to Annamaria, nee Wölkerling. From this marriage the daughter Barbara (born June 18, 1923), the son Otto (born May 10, 1926) and the daughter Adelheid (born June 18, 1929) emerged.

Archival tradition

A large part of Schneidhuber's personnel records was burned after his murder. There are no SA or NSDAP files on him in the holdings of the Berlin Document Center in the Federal Archives: only a short file from the Supreme Party Court (BDC: OPG files Eberstein / Schneidhuber) about a dispute between Schneidhuber and the SA leader at the time Friedrich Karl von Eberstein from 1931 is still present in the BDC inventory, as this was filed under Eberstein's name as the first party in the dispute in alphabetical order.

In the Bavarian Main State Archives in Munich there is still an officer personnel file on Schneidhuber from his time as an officer in the Bavarian Army, while the State Archives in Munich keeps two files from the Munich Police Directorate on him: a personnel file on Schneidhuber, in which u. a. Correspondence between Schneidhuber and Ernst Röhm has been preserved (PD 10146) as well as a file on Schneidhuber's widow (PD 8547). In addition, this archive contains an estate file on Schneidhuber (AG Munich No. 1934/1723) and a rulings chamber file of the Munich Spruchkammer, which carried out posthumous proceedings against Schneidhuber after the Second World War (Spruchkammern, Ktn. 1674).

literature

Non-scientific literature:

Secondary literature:

  • Joachim Lilla , Martin Döring, Andreas Schulz: extras in uniform: the members of the Reichstag 1933–1945. A biographical manual. Including the Volkish and National Socialist members of the Reichstag from May 1924 . Droste, Düsseldorf 2004, ISBN 3-7700-5254-4 . P. 581.
  • Peter Longerich : The Brown Battalions. History of the SA , 1989. (contains excerpts from Schneidhuber's memoranda of 1930/1931 on SA reform)
  • Wolfram Selig : The victims of the Röhm putsch in Munich , in: Winfried Becker / Werner Chrobak (ed.): State, culture, politics. Contributions to the history of Bavaria and Catholicism. Festschrift for Dieter Albrecht's 65th birthday. , Lassleben, Kallmünz 1992, ISBN 3-7847-3109-0 , pp. 341-356.
  • Erich Stockhorst: 5000 people. Who was what in the 3rd Reich . Arndt, Kiel 2000, ISBN 3-88741-116-1 (unchanged reprint of the first edition from 1967).

Web links

Commons : August Schneidhuber  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv IV , cf. 15337. War ranking
  2. See e.g. B. the contemporary publication Das Archiv. Reference book for politics, economics, culture. Supplementary volume , Berlin 1933, p. 175, in which he was named "Major a. D." referred to as. In the specialist literature, too, Schneidhuber is shown practically throughout as a "major"; B. with Sven Reichardt : Fascist combat leagues. Violence and Community in Italian Squadrism and in the German SA , Cologne 2009, p. 193.
  3. a b c d e f g Joachim Lilla: Schneidhuber, August , in: ders .: Minister of State, senior administrative officials and (NS) functionaries in Bavaria 1918 to 1945
  4. Baldur von Schirach: The Pioneers of the Third Reich , Essen 1933, p. 201.
  5. a b Wolfram Selig: Victims of the Röhm Putsch , p. 342.
  6. ^ Mathias Rösch: Die Münchner NSDAP 1925 - 1933. An investigation into the inner structure of the NSDAP in the Weimar Republic (= studies on contemporary history, volume 63), Oldenbourg Verlag, Munich 2002, p. 382
  7. 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. 24f.
  8. Herbert Michaelis: Causes and Consequences , Vol. X, p. 176.
  9. ^ In the Germany reports of the SPD in exile, z. B. notes that Schneidhuber and his deputy Schmid “enjoyed great popularity in wide circles” (Social Democratic Party of Germany: Germany Report of Sopade , vol. 1, p. 196).
  10. a b c Wolfram Selig: Victims of the Röhm Putsch , p. 343.
  11. See Wulf Schwarzwäller: Rudolf Heß, der Stellvertreter , 1987, p. 119. There Heß's adjutant reports: “My boss was pale as death, but outwardly very calm when Dietrich read out the names [of the men who were to be shot]. But when the name Schneidhuber was mentioned, he made a movement, threw back his head and mumbled something. He leaned over to Hitler and whispered a few words to him. He shook his head unwillingly. Hess suddenly turned green in the face. He went into an adjoining room. When I followed him a short time later, he waved me out. He doubled up in pain as if he had a stomach cramp. There were tears in his eyes. Schneidhuber had been his friend. "; on his good reputation in party circles see also a homage that Baldur von Schirach paid him in 1933. He praised him as "one of the most original and robust figures of the leadership corps within the SA" (Baldur von Schirach: Die Pioniere des Third Reich , 1933, p. 201.)
  12. The SD leader Werner Best , who had got to know and appreciate Schneidhuber through joint political work before 1933, sat down in June 1934 at a conference in the Secret State Police Office a few days before June 30th against the organizational preparations for the action the SA leaders were discussed, asked Heydrich to spare Schneidhuber as a “good man” ( Ulrich Herbert : Best , p. 83). And the commander of the Leibstandarte Sepp Dietrich later stated that the shooting of Schneidhuber was particularly difficult for him.
  13. Herbert Michaelis: Causes and Consequences , Vol. X, p. 176.
  14. Otto Gritschneder: The Führer has sentenced her to death , p. 36, Wolfram Selig: The victims of the Röhm putsch in Munich, in: Werner Chrobak: State, Culture, Politics. Contributions to the history of Bavaria and Catholicism: Festschrift for the 65th birthday of Dieter Albrecht , p. 346f., As well as “Grave Wreaths Forbidden”, in: New York Times of July 5, 1934.
  15. ^ Protocols to the Reichstag .
  16. Michaelis: Causes and Consequences , Vol. 10, p. 185.
  17. Otto Gritscheder: "The Führer has sentenced you to death ..." Hitler's "Röhm Putsch" murders in front of the court , Munich 1993, p. 144.
  18. Axel Feuss: The Theresienstadt convolute. Hamburg / Munich 2002, p. 66
  19. Short biography and picture of Ida Franziska Schneidhuber at www.ghetto-theresienstadt.info