Claus Heim

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Claus Heim (often incorrectly spelled Klaus Heim ) (born March 24, 1884 in St. Annen , Dithmarschen ; † January 1, 1968 on his farm in Dithmarschen) was a German farmer and political activist. Alongside Wilhelm Hamkens, Heim was the most important leader of the Schleswig-Holstein rural people movement .

Life

Early years (1884 to 1923)

Claus Heim came from an old Dithmarsch peasant dynasty , the Russebullingern , an amalgamation of several families. After attending school, he went through agricultural training. He then went on a journey to Denmark . After that he temporarily managed part of his father's farm in St. Annen-Österfeld between Lunden and Friedrichstadt , which he had leased. In 1909 he emigrated to South America due to disagreements with his family. In Paraguay , he and a partner bought an estancia where he raised cattle that he had to defend against civil war troops. At the beginning of the First World War , in which he took part as an officer, he was visiting Europe. After the war Heim returned to Paraguay, but the estancia was now completely in debt.

Return to Germany and leader of the rural people movement

Heim returned to Germany in 1923: he now took over his parents' 120  hectare farm in Österfeld. In 1927 he had to sell around 40 hectares of the plant to discharge the company's debt. It is believed that this event contributed to his political radicalization.

At the turn of the year 1927/1928 Heim, who was already a member of the Stahlhelm , began to be more politically active: He was one of the initiators of the peasant demonstrations that took place on January 28, 1928 all over Schleswig-Holstein. In Heide (Holstein) alone , more than 14,000 farmers demonstrated; Claus Heim himself made his first public appearance there. As an unpretentious and energetic personality, he advanced alongside the farmer Wilhelm Hamkens from Tetenbüll to become the most important leader and figure of identification of the so-called rural people's movement, which, against the background of the agricultural crisis of the second half of the 1920s and fueled by the gradually onset of the general economic crisis, found rapid popularity .

A contemporary described Heim as follows: “He was an impressive personality in every respect: a man six feet tall, broad-shouldered, with an angular head and a calm, deliberate, but determined manner of speaking. Impressive even in its peculiarities - so he was firmly convinced of a program that had come his way. One of his ancestors had played a prominent role in the struggles of the Dithmarschen farmers against feudal oppression in the Middle Ages and Heim declared that this ancestor, who was also called Claus, had reappeared in him and that he had therefore assumed the leading role in the rural people's movement. "

At that time Heim represented a mixture of social revolutionary and nationalist ideas. Historically, like the entire rural people movement, he placed himself in the tradition of the peasant wars of the 16th century. So they resorted to the black flag of the peasant wars as the symbol of the rural people, with whom one turned against seizures and reckless tax collection from peasants.

While Hamkens, who was considered a brilliant speaker, stood for the moderate wing of the rural people's movement, which pursued the strategy of expressing the political discontent of the peasants through protest and civil disobedience, Heim became a symbol of radical methods and politically motivated acts of violence.

In September 1928 Heim announced publicly in the regional newspaper Heider Anzeiger that he was rejecting the existing state and would therefore no longer pay taxes (“From today onwards, I will no longer pay taxes!”) And urged his peers to do the same. This demand met with a strong response from the north German peasantry. Heim flatly rejected the state of the Weimar Republic as a "political system that wants to destroy the free peasant".

On November 19, 1928, over 200 farmers prevented the seizure of two oxen in Beidenfleth , which were to be forcibly auctioned off in order to pay the owner's arrears local taxes. Out of solidarity, the cattle markets in Hamburg and Altona refused to sell seized cattle.

The boycott movement of the peasants against the foreclosure of cattle and farms culminated in a series of thirteen bomb attacks that Heim and his supporters carried out on government buildings between May and September 1929. These attacks, which were primarily intended to be demonstrative, caused considerable property damage, but were designed not to kill or injure anyone. The targets of the attack included district offices, official apartments and even the editorial rooms of a newspaper that was critical of the rural people's movement. The cities of Rendsburg , Niebüll , Schleswig , Itzehoe , Lüneburg and Neumünster were affected . In addition, there was the so-called Neumünster tumult of August 1, 1929 on the occasion of Wilhelm Hamkens' release from prison, who had been sentenced to prison for his activities in the rural people's movement. Because of the brutal police action during the tumult, the city of Neumünster was boycotted by the farmers for a year.

On September 1, 1929, Heim was caught by the carelessness of one of his accomplices. Besides him, more than thirty other representatives of the radical, terrorist wing of the rural people's movement were arrested.

Trial, imprisonment and release (1930 to 1932)

From August 26 to October 31, 1930 Heim and some accomplices in the so-called Great Bombing Trial in Altona were tried. The trial, in which the defendants were demonstratively uncooperative (Heim refused to speak a word in the courtroom), ended on October 31, 1930 with Heim's sentencing to seven years in prison . He and Herbert Volck received the highest sentence among the 14 defendants . Since the court saw Heim as a convict with honorable and selfless basic motives and he tried to avoid fatalities, the sentence was relatively mild.

Even during his detention, Heim continued to behave uncooperatively towards the "system": According to one observer, he had "the fanaticism of the revolutionary", "who only saw the correctness of his idea confirmed in the enemy's dungeon".

Their solidarity with the prisoners' home was shown above all in the respective party press of the radical anti-state parties NSDAP and KPD . Kurt Tucholsky , on the other hand, formulated a critical assessment of the prisoner in his article Anstaltsgemeinschaft , which appeared on January 19, 1932 in the Weltbühne under the pseudonym Ignaz Wrobel.

In 1931 Heim was moved to the Celle prison. There, the NSDAP made him the offer to become their top candidate in the constituency of Schleswig-Holstein in the next Reichstag elections. In the event of an election, as a member of the Reichstag, he would have enjoyed protection from prosecution and should have been released immediately. Heim however harshly rejected this offer: Richard Scheringer reported that Heim had declared to the emissaries: "I would rather go to prison than to the Reichstag for you." A motive for Heim's refusal of the offer might have been a reward that Hitler at the time when the group around Heim was accused of bombing the Nazi party, the perpetrators were arrested. In addition, according to Scheringer, Heim rejected Hitler as a gossip he warned against.

Heim also refused an offered pardon , which was bound by his word of honor not to use force. Instead, at the beginning of 1932, on the initiative of Bruno Ernst Buchrucker, the so-called Claus Heim Committee was founded to campaign for his release. This included the brothers Ernst and Bruno von Salomon , who had both also been active in the rural people's movement, Ernst Jünger , Ernst Niekisch , the “Black Front” around Otto Strasser and the supporters of Walther Stennes .

Ernst Niekisch tried, initially promising, to win the imprisoned Claus Heim as a candidate of a consortium of national-revolutionary groups for the election of the Reich President in 1932 and was supported in this project by Otto Strasser , Karl Otto Paetel and Erich Ludendorff , the Bund Oberland , the Wehrwolf and other groups supported. On behalf of the KPD , which feared that Heim would weaken its candidate Ernst Thälmann , Bodo Uhse managed to split the group of supporters. Heim then withdrew his willingness to run for office.

In September 1932, after almost three years in prison, Heim was released due to an amnesty request by the Prussian state parliament in favor of the members of the rural people's movement, which was accepted with a majority of the votes of the NSDAP, DNVP and KPD . He tried to reactivate the rural people's movement with his newspaper Dusendüwelswarf , but withdrew to his farm in 1933 after the newspaper ban.

In the press and in circles of workers and peasants, Heim was still considered a politically promising man until the early Nazi era. Alfred Kantorowicz wrote

“The Freikorpsführer Heimsoth, the rebel Ernst von Salomon, the peasant leader Klaus Heim are still in the transition camp, but the tendency of their last decision is beyond doubt. You and thousands are avant-garde today. The signal was given through them and the final decision of the millions of people who are still hesitating, still confused and who will one day follow them cannot mean anything other than proletarian revolution. "

- Kantorowicz, Social and National Liberation, Literary World January 6, 1933

In 1933, Karl Otto Paetel called for the formation of a new party headed by Ernst Niekisch and Heim in the National Bolshevik Manifesto .

Later years (1933 to 1968)

As early as 1933, Heim was classified by the state police as "slowly becoming uncomfortable again". In 1939 the Gauleiter of Schleswig-Holstein had Heim arrested. Only through the intervention of his brother-in-law, an influential NSDAP member, did he avoid being transported to a concentration camp . Like various other rural activists, Heim had made himself unpopular with the National Socialists through open rejection.

After the war, Heim rarely appeared in public, for example at Hamken's funeral in 1955, where he gave the eulogy. His memories, "revised by a third party", were published in the magazine "Bauernruf" between November 26, 1965 and August 5, 1966.

Heim died on New Year's Day in 1968.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Cf. Uwe Danker / Astrid Schwabe: Schleswig-Holstein and National Socialism , Neumünster 2005, p. 14.
  2. ↑ Herbert Crüger : An old man tells. Life report of a communist . GNN-Verlag , Schkeuditz 1998, ISBN 3-932725-49-2 , p. 107.
  3. ↑ Hans-Hermann Wiebe: Schleswig-Holstein under the swastika , 1984, p. 47.
  4. ^ Herbert Blank: Adolf Hitler, Wilhelm III , 1931, p. 51.
  5. ↑ Richard Scheringer: The big lot. Among soldiers, peasants and rebels , 1979, p. 173.
  6. ↑ Patrick Moreau: National Socialism from Left , 1984, p. 115 and Otto Ernst Schüddekopf: Left People from Right. National Bolshevism in Germany from 1918 to 1933 , Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1960, p. 311.
  7. ↑ Otto Ernst Schüddekopf: Left people from the right. National Bolshevism in Germany from 1918 to 1933 , Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1960, p. 310 f.
  8. ↑ Also in: Wolfgang Gruner: "A fate that I shared with many others." Alfred Kantorowicz - His life and time from 1899 to 1935 . Kassel university press 2006, p. 239 full text . Heimsoth stands for Karl-Günther Heimsoth
  9. ↑ Three letters from the “peasant general” Claus Heim from pre- trial detention (1929/30) communicated by Klaus-J.Lorenzen-Schmidt in the yearbook, Democratic History, vol. 15, June 1, 2008, note 2.
  10. ↑ The AUTONOMIE authors' collective had access to the following gray literature : Claus Heim: Lebenswogen . Unpublished manuscript in the estate (family property); and Claus Heim: Among the explosives bombers… . Unpublished manuscript in the estate (family property). Heim's granddaughter Susanne Heim also had this access for her (unpublished) diploma thesis: The rural people movement in Schleswig-Holstein 1928/29. An analysis of their socio-economic development conditions . Scientific thesis to obtain the academic degree of diploma in political science, University of Hamburg 1980.
personal data
SURNAME Home, Claus
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Home, Klaus
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German farmer and political activist
DATE OF BIRTH March 24, 1884
PLACE OF BIRTH St. Annen , Dithmarschen
DATE OF DEATH 1st January 1968
Place of death Dithmarschen