Edmund Heines

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Edmund Heines in SA uniform (1922)

Edmund Heines (born July 21, 1897 in Munich , † June 30, 1934 in Munich-Stadelheim ) was a German politician ( NSDAP ) and SA leader.

Live and act

Heines was born out of wedlock to the maid Helene Martha Heines (1872–1944). His father was First Lieutenant Edmund von Parish (1862–1916), who came from a Hamburg merchant family and whose mother was a nanny. The maternal grandfather was Johann Baptist Heines, a mechanic from Esslingen . Heines' younger brother was the later NSDAP activist Oskar Heines (1903-1934), who, like sister Martha, also came from the extramarital union of the mother with von Parish. Heines' half-sister was the costume designer Hermine von Parish (1907-1998). After attending a grammar school and a secondary school , where he graduated from high school in 1915, Heines volunteered in the Bavarian army . During the First World War he was used in the field artillery on the Western Front. Heines was seriously wounded in the head in the autumn of 1915, received several awards and was promoted to lieutenant in the reserve in 1918.

Freikorps and Kapp Putsch

After the end of the war, Heines joined the Roßbach Freikorps and was involved in fighting in the Baltic States in 1919 and then in the Kapp Putsch in March 1920 . Two months earlier, Gerhard Roßbach had taken over the Berlin Tiergarten Club, in which Heines took on the role of managing director. During the putsch, the club was converted into the fortified headquarters of the Roßbach troops. After the failure of the coup, the members of the Freikorps went into hiding, especially in Mecklenburg and Pomerania. Heines took over the supervision of members who were housed on three estates in the district of Greifenhagen in Pomerania. In July 1920, Heines was involved in the fememicide of Willi Schmidt. Schmidt, a 20-year-old farm worker, allegedly wanted to reveal the hiding places of the camouflaged volunteer corps.

Entry into the NSDAP and SA

Heines fled to Munich , where in 1922 he took over the leadership of the local group of the Freikorps Roßbach. In December 1922 the entire local group joined the SA; Heines took over the leadership of the second battalion in the Munich SA regiment and also became a member of the NSDAP ( membership number 78). Because of his participation in Hitler's attempted coup in November 1923, Heines was sentenced to 15 months in prison in 1924. Imprisoned together with Hitler in Landsberg , Heines was released early in September 1924. At that time the SA and NSDAP were banned; Heines took over the command of the Second Battalion of the Munich Frontbann Regiment, a substitute organization of the SA.

After the NSDAP was re-admitted in 1925, Heines rejoined the party and the SA again. In the SA he had achieved the rank of Standartenführer (Colonel) in 1926 and appeared as a speaker for the NSDAP . From 1925 to August 1926, Heine was the federal director of the Schill Wehrjugendverband ( Schilljugend ) and managed the affiliated Schill sports mail order company. The Schilljugend functioned as the youth organization of the NSDAP since Hitler transferred responsibility for youth affairs to the party on May 6, 1925. On May 31, 1927, Heines was expelled from the NSDAP and the SA as the leader of a rebellion by the Munich SA. From the perspective of the Munich SA, the party was too moderate and too bureaucratic. In the opinion of the social democratic forward , Heines was "one of the worst phenomena in the Munich Hitler era".

Szczecin femicide trial

Edmund Heines (2nd from left) with Heinrich Himmler, Franz von Epp and Ernst Röhm (1933)

The murder of Willi Schmidt became known in 1927 through an attempt at extortion. Heines was arrested on January 22, 1928 in Schongau and taken to Stettin. Defended by Rüdiger von der Goltz , Heines was the main defendant in the Stettin fememord trial in April and May 1928. According to a report in the Vossische Zeitung of the beginning of the trial, the dock showed

“The now typical picture of such processes. A bunch of young people with the staring gaze of dependent people and one or two intelligent leaders. This time this is Lieutenant A. D. stud. jur. Heines, a barely adult despite his thirty years, whose life has rolled between school desk, war and war games, who until his arrest went through the country with a group of boys-style singspiels and himself with sad pride the 'German Landsknecht' type Now is called [...] “.

Heines' statements and those of his co-defendants were contradictory; According to Heines' information, Schmidt had been shot while trying to escape. The prosecution called for Heine's death penalty for murder; the verdict of the Szczecin court was 15 years imprisonment for manslaughter. Heines had definitely had a murder plan, but it could not be ruled out that he had doubts and shot Schmidt in the affect , so the verdict. Heines' conviction came at the time of a campaign for the release of the murderers; The NSDAP member Wilhelm Frick referred to Heines in a speech in the Reichstag on June 15, 1928 and called the fememicide trials the “outflow of an infernal Jewish hatred of the spirit of the front, of the spirit of national resistance”.

Because of a procedural error, the trial against Heines was reopened in February and March 1929. Defended by Friedrich Grimm , Heines has now been sentenced to five years in prison. In the grounds of the judgment it was said that Heines had been “permeated by the patriotic importance of his task” , that there had only been an inadequate means of relocation against the impending betrayal of weapons stores; In addition, the peace and security in the Greifenhagen district were at great risk. On May 14, 1929, Heines was released from custody by order of the Szczecin court on bail of 5000 Reichsmarks .

Promotion in the NSDAP and SA

In freedom, Heines appeared - announced as "Femerichter" - at events for the so-called Femegefangen. For example, on August 28, 1929, he appeared as a speaker on the topic of "Five years of fememicide incitement and no end" in Neustadt an der Aisch , where he justified the activities of the femal movement in front of an audience of 400. Because of his criminal record, the University of Munich initially refused to accept Heines as a law student. The Berliner Tageblatt called it "commendable" , "that Mr. Heine wants to inform about the elementary concepts of law" , the Munich University but did not consider the appropriate location.

Re-accepted into the NSDAP and SA in 1929, Heines led the SA standard Munich-Land, was NSDAP local group leader in Munich-Haidhausen in 1930 and also adjutant to Gauleiter Adolf Wagner . In the election in September 1930 , he ran on the national election proposal of the NSDAP and received a mandate in the Reichstag . On May 12, 1932, Heines was involved in an assault on the journalist Helmuth Klotz in the Reichstag restaurant. Klotz had converted from the NSDAP to the SPD and in March 1932 had published letters from Ernst Röhm that addressed his homosexuality. Heines was expelled from parliament together with three other NSDAP members for 30 days; the session had to be broken off as the excluded refused to leave the plenary session. The minutes recorded at the mention of Heine's' name "excited shouts left: The Fememörder!" . On May 14, Heines, like the NSDAP MPs Wilhelm Stegmann and Fritz Weitzel, was sentenced to three months' imprisonment by the Berlin-Mitte rapid lay judge's court for collective bodily harm and assault.

Heines only performed other functions within the SA and NSDAP for a short time. So he was temporarily deputy Gauleiter of the Upper Palatinate Gau , acted as an advisor for the news and the press at the Supreme SA Leadership (OSAF) ​​and led SA units in Berlin in April and May 1931 during the suppression of the Stennes revolt . In May 1931 he was appointed deputy to the SA chief of staff Ernst Röhm . Heines moved to Silesia on July 31, 1931 and took over the leadership of the SA group there.

Time of National Socialism and Death

Edmund Heines (right) and Ernst Röhm during an event in 1933

After the National Socialist " seizure of power " in the spring of 1933, Heines was initially appointed deputy to the Silesian Gauleiter Helmuth Brückner . On July 11, 1933 he was given the honorary rank of a Prussian State Council. In the SA, Heines was promoted from Röhm to Obergruppenführer (General) and was entrusted with the leadership of SA Obergruppe VIII (Silesia).

In his role as police chief of Breslau , which he had exercised since March 26, 1933, Heines was largely responsible for the establishment of the Dürrgoy concentration camp , which was also known as Heines' "private camp ". Among the prisoners in Dürrgoy was the former Social Democratic President of the Reichstag, Paul Löbe (1875–1967), who had been kidnapped in August 1933 by a command of the Breslau SA without the knowledge of the Berlin Gestapo. The motive for the kidnapping are Heines' “personal thirst for revenge”, who was excluded from parliament by Löbe in 1932 after the assaults in the Reichstag.

On June 30, 1934, Heines was arrested and shot in the course of the Röhm affair . Heines had come to an SA leaders' meeting scheduled by Hitler for June 30th in the Bavarian spa town of Bad Wiessee , where, like Röhm, he stayed at the Hanselbauer guesthouse. The invitation, however, turned out to be part of a ruse to make the SA leaders politically harmless: The expected meeting did not take place, instead, in the early morning hours of June 30, a roll command under the leadership of Hitler appeared in Bad Wiessee, the Heines and surprised Rohm and her companions in their sleep and arrested them on charges of planning a coup against Hitler. The fact that Heines was found in the same bed with another man - who could later be identified as his driver Erich Schiewek - while storming the Pension Hanselbauer , was later used as part of the propaganda justification of the action against the SA leaders by he was presented to the public as evidence that Hitler had eliminated “pathological elements” and “perverts”.

The prisoners were taken to Stadelheim prison. Along with Hans Hayn , Hans Peter von Heydebreck , Wilhelm Schmid , August Schneidhuber and Hans Erwin von Spreti-Weilbach, Heines was one of six Stadelheim prisoners who were shot on the same day by a firing squad assembled by Sepp Dietrich on Hitler's orders . Heines' younger brother Oskar Heines , also an SA man, was shot two days later on the same charges.

personality

Edmund Heines (1930)

Heines was one of the most feared and hated men in the National Socialist leadership. He was notorious among the population for his brutality, unscrupulousness and sadism . The overwhelming majority of character judgments about him are devastating. A court in the 1920s that sentenced Heines to three months' imprisonment for an act of violence charged him with being a person with a tendency to brutality and anti-social attitudes. The Hitler biographer Konrad Heiden saw in Heines a "monster", Fritz Stern , who spent his childhood in "Heines' Breslau", remembered the police chief as a "despicable man", and the British journalist Sefton Delmer reported that he was even when he met Heines for the first time, I had the feeling that I was facing a "killer". The Briton Stephen Henry Roberts wrote: “For Edmund Heines there is an explanation. Murderer, parasite, sadist and homosexual - there has never been a more perverted guy. ”For the cartoonist Emery Kelen, Heines was simply one of“ those misconstructed half-men who destroyed a good world ”.

According to Delmer, Heines is said to have killed at least eighteen people before 1933 as the "chief executor of the secret murder department of the black Reichswehr". The regime that Heines led as SA-Oberführer of Silesia and Police President of Breslau in the period from spring 1933 to summer 1934 was considered extremely cruel and brutal, even when measured against the arbitrariness and lawlessness that began with the National Socialist “seizure of power”. The communist white paper on the shootings of June 30, 1934 gave him the nickname “the bloody Lord of Breslau” in this sense. Even decades later, Stern remembered that Heines' death was seen as a release in Breslau: "We were happy about his death". Although he was publicly decried as a murderer and bully, Heines, who is said to have preferred to shoot his victims in the face, publicly tried to capitalize on his deeds. In the Reichstag election campaign in 1932, for example, he had advertising posters for his election speeches printed with the words “The Fememord Heine will speak”.

While Hitler seems to have harbored a personal dislike for Heine, Ernst Röhm saw him as one of his closest personal friends, to whom he was united in unshakable loyalty. In Goebbels' diaries, too , there is always a certain sympathy for Heines.

On May 16, 1933, Heines' defense attorney Friedrich Grimm asked the then State Secretary Roland Freisler to compensate Heines and other former murderers for their actions after Freisler had publicly declared them "heroes of the nation". The following characterization of Heines is contained in Grimm's estate:

"Heines [...] had missed the connection with bourgeois life [...], an unbalanced person, full of storms and stress, a child's head [...]. He was an outspoken soldier , spoiled for normal life. His hatred of political opponents knew no bounds. "

Very often, contemporaries and posterity also commented on Heines' external appearance. Heines was unusually tall and strongly built. Hardly any testimony fails to emphasize his imposing stature, which is usually provided with words such as enormous or gigantic. Already when they first met, Heines noticed Delmer as a man with “a low forehead, light curly hair, bright blue eyes and full cherry-red lips”. The historian William Shirer summarized these contrasting features in the profile that Heines was a man with the "delicate face of a girl and the body of a movers". The Reichstag member of the SPD Toni Sender attested Heines the "hardened, rough features of a killer".

homosexuality

Aside from his brutality and cruelty, Heines also hit the headlines because of his homosexuality . The social democratic newspaper Münchener Post reported in April 1931 under the headline “Stammtisch 175 ” about Röhm and his homosexual circle of friends in the SA, including Heines' name. As Reichsführer SS, Heinrich Himmler commissioned an informer in July 1933 to make inquiries "about the disastrous riots" of Heines, his adjutant Hans Schmidt and the sexual orientation of the Silesian Gauleiter Helmuth Brückner . The information gathered by Himmler contributed to the execution lists on which the "Röhm Putsch" was proceeded.

After the "Röhm murders", the news that the arrest squad, which Heines set up on June 30th, had found him in his room in the Hanselbauer guesthouse together with a "lust boy", caused a particular stir by the Reich press office of the NSDAP whom he shared a bed. The defamation intent and the underlying justification strategy of these pronouncements are easy to see. In private, both Goebbels and Alfred Rosenberg noted what had happened when Heines was arrested , referring to Hitler and Amann . Rosenberg wrote on July 7, 1934:

“Heines was engaged in homosexual activities in the next room. 'All that want to be leaders in Germany,' said the leader, tormented. Heines performed a crying scene: 'My Führer, I haven't done anything to the boy.' And the lust boy kisses his darling on the cheek in fear and pain. Amann recounts: The Fiihrer never made a mistake on a person, but now he would have grabbed the pleasure boy and thrown it on the wall in disgust. In the corridor, the guide is met by a thin figure with red-painted cheeks. ›Who are you?‹ - ›The civil servant of the chief of staff‹. The Fuehrer is seized with an unequaled rage to see his SA soiled in such a way, he orders the pleasure boys and theirs. special to pack in the basement u. to shoot. "

Archival tradition

The files on the trial of Heines for murder in the 1920s have been preserved in the Secret State Archives (Rep. 84a, No. 55029 to 55039; 55029–55031 [case files], 55032 [plea], 55033 [judgment], 55034–55039 [ Newspaper clippings on the trial]). Files relating to investigations against Heines for the attack on the journalist Klotz in 1932 (Rep. 84a, No. 53855), for homosexual offenses (Rep. 84a, No. 53856) and for two other offenses (Rep. 84a, No. 53853 to 53854).

The Federal Archives keep a personal file on Heine's as Police President of Breslau in the holdings of the former Reich Ministry of the Interior (R 1501/207173) and in the holdings of the former Berlin Document Center a file of the Supreme Party Court of the NSDAP on Heine's exclusion from the party in 1927.

In the Bavarian Main State Archives , War Archive Department , there are Heines' military personnel files from the First World War (OP 16521) and a file from the Munich police on Heines (II M Inn 71525). And in the Munich State Archives there is a guardianship file on Heines and his siblings (Edmund Heines, AG Munich IA, VV 1904/592).

Publications

As editor

  • Silesian SA songbook , Breslau 1932.
  • Air raid. The German question of fate , Stuttgart 1934.

Talk:

  • “Heines' last speech: 'We are not over yet ...'”, in: Pariser Tageblatt , vol. 2. 1934, no. 228 (July 28, 1934), p. 2.

literature

  • Wolfgang Mück: Nazi stronghold in Middle Franconia: The völkisch awakening in Neustadt an der Aisch 1922–1933. Verlag Philipp Schmidt, 2016 (=  Streiflichter from the local history. Special volume 4). ISBN 978-3-87707-990-4 , p. 257.
  • Joachim Lilla (arrangement): The deputy Gauleiter and the representation of the Gauleiter of the NSDAP in the "Third Reich" (=  materials from the Federal Archives. Issue 13). Koblenz 2003, ISBN 3-86509-020-6 , pp. 218f.
  • Walter Tausk : Breslau Diary 1933–1940. Published by Ryszard Kincel, Wolf Jobst, Siedler Verlag, Berlin 1988, ISBN 3-88680-274-4 .
  • Hubert Schorn: The judge in the Third Reich. Vittorio Klostermann, Frankfurt 1959, pp. 68, 70.
  • Bernhard Sauer: Goebbels "Rabauken". On the history of the SA in Berlin-Brandenburg. (PDF; 6.5 MB). In: Yearbook of the Berlin State Archives. 2006.
  • Alexander Zinn: The social construction of the homosexual National Socialist. On the genesis and establishment of a stereotype. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1997, ISBN 978-3-631-30776-2 ( full text, PDF ).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Guardianship files in the Munich State Archives : Edmund Heines, AG Munich IA, VV 1904/592.
  2. ^ Extract from the German lists of losses (Bayer. 231) of November 4, 1915, p. 9880 .
  3. ^ Bavarian Main State Archives IV , z. B. War Tribe Roll No. 13335.
  4. ^ Bernhard Sauer: Black Reichswehr and Fememorde. A milieu study on right-wing radicalism in the Weimar Republic. Metropol-Verlag, Berlin 2004, ISBN 3-936411-06-9 , p. 31 f. See also Martin Schuster: The SA in the National Socialist "seizure of power" in Berlin and Brandenburg 1926-1934. Dissertation TU Berlin 2005, p. 21.
  5. ↑ Irmela Nagel: Fememorde und Fememord Trials in the Weimar Republic. Böhlau Verlag, Cologne 1991, ISBN 3-412-06290-1 , p. 57 f. See also Sauer: Black Reichswehr and Fememorde. 2004, p. 37 f.
  6. ^ Tessa Sauerwein: Schilljugend, 1924–1933. In: Historical Lexicon of Bavaria (as of May 29, 2008).
  7. ^ Paul Hoser: Sturmabteilung (SA), 1921–1923, 1925–1945. In: Historical Lexicon of Bavaria (as of April 30, 2008).
  8. ↑ Forward No. 39 of January 21, 1928, quoted by Nagel: Fememorde und Fememordverbindungen in the Weimar Republic. 2004, p. 245.
  9. ↑ Vossische Zeitung No. 181 of April 17, 1928, quoted by Nagel: Fememorde und Fememordverbindungen in the Weimar Republic. 2004, p. 248. Ibid. Pp. 244-257 on the first Stettin trial.
  10. ↑ Minutes of the Reichstag session at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, see also Nagel: Fememorde und Fememordverbindungen in der Weimarer Republik. 2004, p. 342.
  11. ↑ quoted from Nagel: Fememorde und Fememordverbindungen in the Weimar Republic. 2004, p. 277.
  12. ^ Wolfgang Mück: Nazi stronghold in Middle Franconia: The völkisch awakening in Neustadt an der Aisch 1922–1933. Verlag Philipp Schmidt, 2016 (= Streiflichter from home history. Special volume 4); ISBN 978-3-87707-990-4 , pp. 83 and 86.
  13. ↑ Berliner Tageblatt of July 10, 1929, quoted from Nagel: Fememorde und Fememordverbindungen in the Weimar Republic. 2004, p. 348.
  14. ↑ Herbert Linder: From the NSDAP to the SPD. The political life of Dr. Hemuth Klotz (1894–1943) (= Karlsruhe Contributions to the History of National Socialism. Volume 3). Universitätsverlag Konstanz, Konstanz 1995, ISBN 3-87940-607-3 , p. 174 ff. Communication in the Reichstag session by Reichstag President Paul Löbe , see minutes of the Reichstag session of May 12, 1932 .
  15. ↑ Burkhard Jellonnek: homosexuals under the swastika. The persecution of homosexuals in the Third Reich. Schöningh, Paderborn 1990, ISBN 3-506-77482-4 , p. 67; Linder: From the NSDAP to the SPD. 1995, p. 168 ff.
  16. ↑ Minutes of the Reichstag session of May 12, 1932 .
  17. ↑ Andrea Rudorff: Breslau-Dürrgoy. In: Wolfgang Benz , Barbara Distel (eds.): The place of terror . History of the National Socialist Concentration Camps. Volume 2: Early camp, Dachau, Emsland camp. CH Beck, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-406-52962-3 , pp. 83-86, here p. 84.
  18. ^ Rudorff: Breslau-Dürrgoy. 2005, p. 85.
  19. ↑ The sadism wrote to him, for example, on Tausk: Breslauer Tagebuch. 1988, p. 83 ("the sadist Edmund Heines"); Delmer: The Germans and me. 1962 ("sadist pretty boy face").
  20. ↑ Journal of History , Volume 50, 2001, p. 13.
  21. ^ Konrad Heiden: Adolf Hitler. P. 376.
  22. ↑ Delmer: The Germans and I. 1962, p. 110.
  23. ↑ Stephen Henry Roberts: The House That Hitler Built. Querido, Amsterdam 1938, p. 162.
  24. ↑ Emery Kelen: All my heads. Encounters with the young and old of our time. Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik, Cologne 1965, p. 132.
  25. ↑ Delmer: The Germans and I. 1962, p. 110.
  26. ↑ Fritz Stern: For Germany and a Life , p. 138.
  27. ^ Sauer: Black Reichswehr and Fememorde. 2004, p. 283.
  28. ↑ Documents in Grimm's estate in the Federal Archives (BAK N 1120/3: Memoirs of a German lawyer, Vol. V: To the inner peace, pp. 25-29), quoted in Sauer: Black Reichswehr and Fememorde. 2004, p. 27.
  29. ^ William L. Shirer: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. 1990, p. 221. Frank Rector: The Nazi Extermination of Homosexuals. 1981, p. 89 speaks similarly of a girlish face on the body of a truck driver ("distinguished by a girlish face on the body of a truck driver") and adds that it was elegant, sleek and impeccably groomed ("elegant , suave, and impeccably groomed killer ").
  30. ↑ Toni Sender: The Autobiography of a German Rebel. 1939, p. 277 (“hardened, brutish features of a killer”).
  31. ↑ Münchener Post of April 14, 1931 (No. 85), quoted in excerpts from Jellonnek: Homosexuals under the swastika. 1990, p. 62.
  32. ↑ Jellonnek: Homosexuals under the swastika. 1990, p. 96.
  33. ^ "A declaration from the Reich Press Office of the NSDAP", reprinted in the special issue of the Völkischer Beobachter of July 1, 1934, p. 1. Quoted from Jellonnek: Homosexuals under the swastika. 1990, p. 97.
  34. ↑ Hans-Günther Seraphim (Ed.): The political diary of Alfred Rosenberg. 1934/35 and 1939/40. Documentation. Munich 1964, p. 45.
personal data
SURNAME Heines, Edmund
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German SA leader and politician (NSDAP), MdR
DATE OF BIRTH July 21, 1897
PLACE OF BIRTH Munich
DATE OF DEATH June 30, 1934
Place of death Munich-Stadelheim