Bernhard Weiß (lawyer)

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Bernhard White (1930)
Bernhard Weiß (2nd from right, with cylinder) next to Police President Albert Grzesinski during the funeral procession for the two police officers murdered by Erich Mielke and Erich Ziemer , Berlin, August 1931
Berlin memorial plaque in Berlin-Charlottenburg
Memorial plaque on Haus Kaiserdamm 1, in Berlin-Charlottenburg

Bernhard Weiß (born July 30, 1880 in Berlin , † July 29, 1951 in London ) was a German lawyer and police vice-president in Berlin at the time of the Weimar Republic .

biography

Weiß was a son of the grain wholesaler Max Weiß and his wife Emma, ​​nee. Strelitz. The parents came from liberal Jewish families. The father was chairman of the Jewish community in Fasanenstrasse in Berlin and on the advisory board of the University for the Science of Judaism . After graduating from high school in 1900, Bernhard Weiß studied law in Berlin , Munich , Freiburg im Breisgau and Würzburg and completed his studies with a doctorate .

Because of the anti-Semitic reservations in the Prussian military , he joined the 1st Chevaulegers regiment "Emperor Nikolaus von Russland" of the Bavarian army in 1904 as a one-year volunteer , where he received the reserve officer license in 1906 and became a lieutenant in the reserve in 1908 . During the First World War , he was promoted to Rittmeister and earned the Iron Cross 1st class .

In the summer of 1918, at the request of the Prussian Interior Minister Bill Drews, he was released in Bavaria and accepted into the police service as deputy head of the criminal investigation department in Berlin. In 1925 he became chief of the criminal police and in 1927 police vice-president. His marriage to his art-loving wife Lotte introduced him to the leading artists of the Weimar Republic . Artists like Richard Tauber were friends of the house, so that white became a fixture in Berlin's cultural scene.

Like Walther Rathenau, Weiß was a member of the DDP , had a fighter nature and, together with the then Berlin Police President Albert Grzesinski, was one of the few republican-minded higher police officers who systematically opposed breaches of the law. The investigation of the murderers of Walther Rathenau with the unusual involvement of the press was considered to be Weiss' merit. He was the victim of regular defamation campaigns by the emerging NSDAP under the Berlin Gauleiter Joseph Goebbels , who always referred to Weiss as "Isidor Weiss" because of his Jewish origins and who introduced the abusive term "ViPoPrä" (for Vice-Police President) against him. Especially in Goebbels' hate speech The attack , white was constantly the subject of anti-Semitic defamation in texts and caricatures. In Weiß Goebbels had found an enemy who corresponded to his National Socialist ideology: a citizen of Jewish origin and representative of the republic, in NSDAP jargon "representative of the system". White struck back and covered Goebbels with more than 60 successful lawsuits.

A police operation personally led by Weiss in the plenary hall of the Reichstag on May 12, 1932, attracted a great deal of public attention. The reason was that on the morning of the same day several NSDAP MPs had beaten up journalist Helmuth Klotz while he was in the restaurant with SPD chairman Otto Wels of the Reichstag. In the plenary session, the President of the Reichstag, Paul Löbe , announced that he had given the police the authority to prosecute the crimes committed in the house and closed the four NSDAP MPs Edmund Heines , Hans Krause , Fritz Weitzel and Wilhelm Stegmann from the sessions for 30 days of the Reichstag. When they refused to leave the plenary hall, Löbe broke off the session. A few minutes later the present Dr. Bernhard Weiß stormed the plenary hall through police forces, with calls from the NSDAP faction "Isidor" being loud. Two NSDAP MPs were arrested, the other suspects finally presented themselves after a corresponding promise by the NSDAP parliamentary group leader Wilhelm Frick .

After Chancellor Franz von Papen's “ Prussian strike ” in 1932, Weiß lost  his office - like the entire government of Prussia . After a brief detention he was released together with Grzesinski and the commander of the Prussian police force, Magnus Heimannsberg . One of the conditions for this was that he had to declare in writing that he would renounce any further official activity. Weiss confirmed: "After my forcible removal from office, I declare myself ready to refrain from any further official measure." After the transfer of government power in the German Reich to the NSDAP on January 30, 1933, he initially lived in until March 1933 Berlin. Then arrest warrant issued against him and a bounty exposed to him. When his apartment was stormed and looted, Weiss escaped through the back exit and from then on hid in different places. Finally, with the help of colleagues, he initially fled to Prague . In 1933, his name and that of 32 others, including Albert Grzesinski , Alfred Kerr , Kurt Tucholsky , Heinrich Mann , Wilhelm Pieck , Ernst Toller , Kurt Grossmann and Otto Wels , were on the first expatriation list of the German Reich published on August 25 from 1933 . At the beginning of 1934 he and his wife came to London with Czechoslovak passports , where he set up a small graphic company. In 1949, Weiss visited Berlin again for the first time after emigrating . He said that his dearest wish in life was to return to Berlin. Ernst Reuter offered him an office with an advisory function in the police service. For health reasons, this never happened: In 1951, shortly before regaining his German citizenship, Weiss died of cancer in London.

Honors

On October 31, 2011, the Berlin Senate named a section of Otto-Braun-Strasse in Berlin-Mitte , which had become its nameless parallel street through new buildings, after Bernhard Weiß.

The Association of Jewish Soldiers in the Bundeswehr (RjF) has awarded the Bernhard Weiß Medal for understanding and tolerance since 2007 . In the laudation of November 18, 2007, it was said in the laudation of November 18, 2007 , that military leaders should not primarily be honored, but rather the little heroes who “courageously take a stand against xenophobia and anti-Semitism”.

literature

  • Michael Berger: Bernhard Weiß, Prussian Jew and officer. In: Iron Cross and Star of David. The history of Jewish soldiers in German armies. trafo verlag, Berlin 2006, ISBN 3-89626-476-1 , pp. 203-207.
  • Michael Berger: Dr. Bernhard White. His struggle for democracy and the rule of law in the Weimar Republic. In: Iron Cross - Double Eagle - Star of David. Jews in German and Austro-Hungarian armies. The military service of Jewish soldiers through two centuries. trafo verlag, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-89626-962-1 , pp. 146–150.
  • Dietz Bering : fight for names. Bernhard Weiß versus Joseph Goebbels. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1991, ISBN 3-608-91350-5 .
  • Joachim Rott: "I go straight ahead, unhindered". Dr. Bernhard Weiss (1880–1951). Police Vice President in Berlin. Live and act. Frank & Timme, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86596-307-9 .
  • Bjoern Weigel: Bernhard White. In: Wolfgang Benz (Hrsg.): Handbuch des Antisemitismus . Hostility to Jews in the past and present. Volume 2: People. de Gruyter / Saur, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-598-24072-0 , pp. 880-882.

Movies

  • The man who chased Goebbels. Documentation, Germany, 2003, 45 min., Script and direction: Reiner Brückner and Mathias Haentjes, editing: Lorenz Beckhardt , production: WDR , part: Doku am Freitag , first broadcast: September 26, 2003 on WDR television , summary of the WDR, ( Memento from May 30, 2004 in the Internet Archive ).
  • In the multi-part historical drama Babylon Berlin , the figure of the republican government councilor and head of the political department in the police headquarters, August Benda, was designed based on Weiß.

broadcast

  • Horst Meier: Prussian, Jew, patriot and democrat. Bernhard Weiß, Vice President of the Berlin Police and Defense of the Weimar Republic. Radio report on Deutschlandfunk in the "Feature" series on June 28, 2005, 45 min., Manuscript.
  • David Dambitsch: “An exemplary liberal personality”: Berlin's police chief Bernhard Weiß against Joseph Goebbels. Radio contribution in RIAS- Berlin as part of the series ›Kulturzeit‹ on October 8, 1991.
  • Wiebke Matyschok: Bernhard Weiß - The man who hunted Goebbels. Radio contribution in Bavaria 2 in the series “radioZeitreisen” on April 10, 2011 from 1.30 p.m.

Web links

Commons : Bernhard Weiß  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikiquote: Bernhard Weiß  - Quotes

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Joachim Rott (2010), p. 165.
  2. ↑ The man who hunted Goebbels. ( Memento of May 30, 2004 in the Internet Archive ). In: WDR , September 26, 2003.
  3. ↑ Michael Hepp (Ed.): The expatriation of German citizens 1933-45 according to the lists published in the Reichsanzeiger . tape 1 : Lists in chronological order. De Gruyter Saur, Munich 1985, ISBN 978-3-11-095062-5 , pp. 3, (reprinted 2010).
  4. ↑ press release. ( Memento from December 1, 2016 in the Internet Archive ). In: Senate Department for Education, Science and Research , October 24, 2011.
       Bernhard-Weiß-Straße. In: Street name lexicon of the Luisenstädtischer Bildungsverein (near  Kaupert )
  5. ^ Dietrich Leder : Babylon Berlin. In: Filmdienst , 2017.
      August Benda, high police official. In: Babylon Berlin Series , March 19, 2018, (English).
personal data
SURNAME White, Bernhard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German policeman and police vice-president in Berlin during the Weimar Republic
DATE OF BIRTH July 30, 1880
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH July 29, 1951
Place of death London