Daniel Gerth

Daniel Gerth, probably in 1918 after receiving the Pour le Mérite

Johann Daniel Edmund Gerth (* 10. February 1891 in Stepenitz ; † 2. July 1934 in Berlin light field ) was a SA -Offizier and leader of an eponymous volunteer corps . He was best known as one of those killed in the so-called Röhm Putsch .

Live and act

Previous career and First World War

After attending school, Gerth joined the 150 Infantry Regiment in 1911. On June 16, 1913, Gerth reached the rank of lieutenant.

During World War I , Gerth served as a company commander in the 150th Infantry Regiment from November 1914 to March 1918. On September 13, 1917 he was awarded the Knight's Cross of the Royal House Order of Hohenzollern with Swords for his achievements in the war. A wound that Gerth suffered on March 21, 1918 resulted in a lengthy hospital stay. After his recovery, he returned to his position as company commander on May 27, 1918. On August 18, 1918 he was promoted to first lieutenant and at the same time with the leadership of the III. Battalion of the 150th Infantry Regiment commissioned.

Since the 1930s, the persistently recurring legend has been found in literature that Gerth was used as a fighter pilot during the war and that he was awarded the Order Pour le Mérite, the highest German war medal, for his achievements as a pilot in aerial combat in September 1918 has been. It should be noted that Gerth actually received the Pour le Mérite, but that he was never used as an aviator and consequently did not receive the aforementioned medal for flying achievements: The contemporary announcement of October 13, 1918 shows that the actual The reason for Gerth's award was that on September 29, 1918, as battalion commander in fighting between Argonne and Maas, he fought back ten American attacks in a row and then thwarted a subsequent tank attack by climbing the American tanks with his men and through them with hand grenades and pistol shots Sehschlitze put six armored cars out of action and that on October 1, 1918, at that time with the rank of first lieutenant, he was awarded the Pour le Mérite. In the official award list, Gerth was listed as medal bearer 5310.

The origin of the legend that Gerth received the Pour le Mérite for piloting services has not been clarified with any certainty: However, it is likely that it arose in connection with the information and rumors about his death that came into circulation after his murder by the National Socialists in 1934 . It is known that the Nazi politician Hermann Göring , who was largely responsible for Gerth's death in numerous reports about Gerth's death, was a fighter pilot in World War I and was awarded the Pour le Mérite for his achievements as a pilot. These characteristics of the perpetrator Göring were probably transferred in a distorting way by contemporary reporters to his alleged victim Gerth, especially since Gerth himself had been awarded the Pour le Mérite for infantry performance in the war rather than for aviation.

It is also conceivable that the foreign press or its informants deliberately stylized the infantryman Gerth in the reports of his death as a pilot against their better judgment and claimed that he received his medal for services rendered as a pilot in order to avoid these detailed falsifications of the report that the Pour-le-Mérite-wearer Göring had another Pour-le-Mérite-wearer named Gerth executed to give it an additional repugnant note: by highlighting the fact that Göring even had an (alleged) other fighter pilot - not only just a fellow World War II veteran, but even a member of the same exclusive branch of service to which he, Göring, had belonged, that is, a "comrade" - who had been brutally and insidiously liquidated in the purge he helped organize, should the negative impression that the readers of Goering's foreign press because of his role in the murder of Had to win in the summer of 1934 anyway, had to be reinforced. Because in this way the actions of Göring, who murdered from the political power calculation, were also put in a low and mean-looking light on a human level.

Significantly, in some depictions of the Gerth assassination in 1934, it was even claimed that Gerth was the same squadron as Göring during the war, so that the Nazi politician in these depictions even figured as the murderer of his own former comrade. The earliest sources claiming that Gerth was a flier (and received the Pour-le-Merite as such) are the communist white book on the shootings of June 30th and an article in the Pariser Tageblatt of June 18th. July 1934.

Weimar Republic and Nazi state

During the revolutionary turmoil , Gerth was the leader of the Gerth Freikorps ("Freiwilliges Jägerkorps Gerth") named after him , a more than 600-man task force that took part in the violent fight against civil unrest and border security from January to June 1919. Gerth's Freikorps was mainly used in the Allenstein Corps District, East Prussia, where it fought left revolutionaries and, according to a paper from 1930, conquered "half the province". On October 1, 1920 Gerth retired as first lieutenant. D. with the character of a captain from the military.

In 1926 Gerth married Erna Ilchmann in Berlin.

At the end of the 1920s, Gerth joined the NSDAP . In the following years he made a career in the party's private army, the so-called Sturmabteilung (SA), in which he made it up to Obersturmbannführer , according to other sources up to Standartenführer . In addition, he was a sports advisor for the SA group Berlin-Brandenburg and, as an adjutant and close employee of Karl Ernst, was part of the management team of the SA.

Arrest and Assassination

On June 30, 1934, Gerth was executed in the course of the early summer 1934 political cleansing wave of the National Socialists, known as the “Röhm Putsch”. According to a source, he was arrested by the Schutzstaffel (SS) at noon on June 30th when he made a detour to his office in the headquarters of the Berlin SA group on his way to a hunting excursion in the countryside to look for the Right to see. He was then taken to the SS barracks in Berlin-Lichterfelde . There he was brought before a court martial, which declared him guilty of high treason, and on July 1 or 2, 1934, he was fused by a firing squad made up of members of the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler . According to tradition, he greeted the execution squad with the request that the "comrades", as he is said to have addressed the shooters, should aim well. Based on reports from the Gestapo at the Lichterfelde registry office, July 2, 1934, 2.15 a.m., was entered as the official time of Gerth's death. In the internal list of persons executed by the Secret State Police from June 30 to July 2, however, June 30 was recorded as the date of his death.

The police officer Alfred Martin , who was held prisoner together with Gerth and numerous other arrested persons on June 30th and July 1st, 1934 in a coal cellar of the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler barracks, reported after the Second World War that Gerth's last hours had played out as follows would have: He and Gerth had sat together in the cellar and drank schnapps together while they had waited for the announced execution. Gerth did not know why he was arrested and "what was going on". On the morning of July 1, Gerth was fetched from the cellar and taken to Hermann Göring at the Aviation Ministry. He returned two hours later: when Gerth had to present himself to the Prime Minister, Göring tore down the order Pour le Mérite in a demonstrative “desecration” scene. After his return to the “death cellar” in Lichterfelde, he said no more sound and was shot - it was still dark - in the light of truck headlights in the Leibstandarte courtyard.

The early Hitler biographer Konrad Heiden had already reported in his book published in the 1930s that one of the arrested inmates named “Gehre” was called from the cellar by an adjutant and sent home with instructions to go home go to wash, shave and then appear at Goering in full representative uniform with all medals. After "Gehren" did as he was told and appeared in full gear at Göring's house in the expectation that he would inform him that his innocence (ie his non-participation in the alleged SA revolt that of the treacherous circles of the SA leadership had been instigated) and that he, "Gehre", would therefore be considered exonerated and rehabilitated and a free man, Göring, to his shocked horror, had "Gehrt" the Pour le Mérite from the neck and the other medals from torn in his chest and insulted him in front of the rest of the crowd. Afterwards "Gehre" was brought back to the coal cellar of the Leibstandarte in Lichterfelde. There he remained in a completely broken condition until he was shot and even had to be supported on the way to the execution because of his condition.

The executive board of the exile SPD received information about Gerth's execution: they had carried out a cruel "shooting torture" with him. Shortly before the firing squad was given the order to shoot, a man from the second floor of the house next to the firing point had stopped. Gerth had been taken away. He was shot two hours later. Similarly, the Daily Express reported in an article on July 4, 1934 that Gerth's execution was a particularly gruesome spectacle: According to this article, Gerth had been taken to the Leibstandarte barracks yard, had taken off his coat and cleared his chest and before taken to the firing squad when a voice from the window above him called out to the firing squad. not to shoot him. Thereupon Gerth was brought before the court martial again with a shaky step: He was "bombarded" with questions for two more hours in the hope of getting him to divulge information about the alleged SA conspiracy. When Gerth refused to say anything, he was finally handed over to the firing squad again: he was again put up in the courtyard without a coat and bare breasted, although this second shooting was not an agonizing mock shooting that was stopped at the last moment, but a regular shooting that was carried out.

On July 2, 1934, Gerth's wife received his wallet and watch back. His body was cremated in the Wedding crematorium and then brought to the former Prussian manor house for relatives to collect.

A few weeks after Gerth's execution, the foreign press spread the news that Gerth's mother had cried when she was picking up her son's ashes and that she had asked to speak to “the murderer of her innocent murdered son”. When asked who she meant by that, she replied "the murderer Göring". They were then removed from the building. When she then shouted loudly on the avenue Unter den Linden that Göring had murdered her son. She was then picked up and driven home.

After his death, Gerth's widow and mother received lifelong monthly pensions from the Reich government for reasons of “equity” as part of the provision for the survivors of the purge from June 30 to July 2, 1934.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Standesamt Berlin-Lichterfelde: Death certificate 1934/712, issued on August 25, 1934, issued on notification of the Secret State Police Office.
2. ↑ Otto Gritscheder: "The Führer has sentenced you to death ..." Hitler's "Röhm Putsch" murders in court. Verlag CH Beck, Munich 1993, p. 129.
3. ↑ Kriegs-Rundschau: contemporary compilation of the events that were important for the world war, documents, rallies, battle and time reports , Volume 4, 1918, p. 1912.
4. ^ Karl Friedrich Hildebrand / Christian Zweng: The Knights of the Order Pour Le Merite , Vol. 1, 1998, p. 463.
5. ↑ The claim Gerth was a pilot in the same season as Göring can be found u. a. Konrad Heiden: One Man Against Europe , 1939, p. 134 ("Heard to have served in Goering's squadron."); Willi Frischauer: Goering, S. ("Gehrt had served with Goering in the Richthofen Squadron"); Heinrich Fraenkel / Roger Manvell: Goering. The Rise and Fall of the Notorious Nazi Leader , 1962, p. 133 ("Gehre, in spite of his former position as Air Force captain in Goering's squadron [...]"); Max Gallo: The Night of the Long Knives , 1972, p. 259 ("Gehre formerly a member of Goering's squadron"); Paul Maracin: Night of the Long Knives. Forty-Eight Hours that Changed the History of the World , 2007, p. 127 ("[...] Goering indulged in a macabre joke at the expense of Gehrt, his old comrade in arms, who had served with him in the Richthofen Squadron and like Goring had been awarded the Pour le Merite. ")
6. ^ White book on the shootings of June 30 , 1934, p. 96 ("[...] former pilot officer [...]"); “Secrets revealed of June 30th. The truth about the death of Gruppenführer Ernst and his adjutant - a mother accuses Göring ”, in: Pariser Tageblatt of July 18, 1934 ( digitized on the website of the German National Library ) (" [...] the one with the Pour-le -Mérite excellent war pilot, Captain Gert [...] ").
7. ↑ Erich Otto Volkmann: Revolution over Germany , 1930, p. 214f.
8. ↑ Gritscheder: "The Führer has sentenced you to death ..." 1993, p. 129; Edouard Calic: Reinhard Heydrich. Key figure of the Third Reich. 1982, p. 151.
9. ↑ Maximilian Scheer (ed.): The German people accuses . Hitler's war against the peace fighters. Paris 1936, p. 271; again Laika, Hamburg 2012, ISBN 9783942281201 .
10. ↑ Reimund Schnabel: Power without morality. A documentation about the SS. 1957, p. 53.
11. ^ Social Democratic Party of Germany: Report on Germany by Sopade . 1934, p. 192. Also: Hans Bernd Gisevius : Until the bitter end. From the Reichstag fire to July 20, 1944. 1960, p. 177.
12. ^ IfZ: Alfred Martin Witnesses, p. 14
13. ^ Konrad Heiden: One Man Against Europe , 1939, pp. 134f .; see also the take-up of this description in Sebastian Haffner: Writing for freedom: 1942 to 1949: as a journalist in the storm of events , 2001, p. 78, he states that some of the arrested "who were given their lives at the last minute" reported the Gerth incident retrospectively and it was also confirmed by members of the firing squad. In a similar way to Heiden, Frederick Lewis Schuman wrote: The Nazi Dictatorship. A Study in Social Pathology and the Politics of Fascism. 1935, p. 442, that Gerth of the shooting on June 30th / 1. July 1934 escaped because Hermann Göring , who himself was a fighter pilot in World War I and had been Minister of Aviation since 1933, had his execution suspended because he did not want to kill a highly decorated fighter pilot in this way. Instead, during an hour-long interrogation on Hitler's instructions, Gerth had been offered an offer to shoot himself, which according to the military concept of honor at the time was considered a more worthy way of death than being shot by a third party. The regime acted similarly with Ernst Röhm when he was ordered to shoot himself on July 1st. In 1944 Ludwig Beck and Erwin Rommel were also given the choice between suicide and execution. When Gerth refused to shoot himself, asserting his innocence, an hour later he was again taken to the barracks courtyard and shot.
14. ↑ Germany report by Sopade, year 1934, 1980, p. 193.
15. ↑ "Guards horrified," in the Daily Express on 4 July 1934th
16. ↑ “Secrets Unveiled June 30th. The truth about the death of Gruppenführer Ernst and his adjutant - A mother accuses Göring ”, in: Pariser Tageblatt of July 18, 1934 ( digitized on the website of the German National Library ); also Otto Strasser : Die deutsche Bartholomäusnacht , 1935, p. 138 took up this report.