Emil Sembach

Emil Sembach

Emil Sembach (born March 2, 1891 in the Forsthaus Stifting near Greinburg / Lower Austria ; † July 1, 1934 in Oels ) was a German politician ( NSDAP ) and SS officer.

Live and act

Training, World War I, Free Corps time

Sembach was the son of forester Emil Sembach (1860–1933). After attending school, which he completed with the Abitur at a humanistic grammar school in Coburg , Sembach joined the foot artillery regiment "Enke" No. 4 in Magdeburg as a flag junior .

From 1914 to 1918 Sembach took part in the First World War. He was u. a. as battery chief in Reserve Foot Artillery Regiment 16 (January to September 1916) and as battery chief of the 4th battery of the heavy howitzer battalion of Reserve Foot Artillery Regiment 1 (September 1917 to November 1918).

In the first post-war years, Sembach took part in battles in the Baltic States from 1919 to 1921 as a member of a free corps , most recently as a captain on the staff of Detachmenet Austria in the Buchholtz division.

Weimar Republic and the Nazi era

From 1921 to 1932, Sembach earned his living in commercial professions: In the mid-1920s, he had the reputation of being an "adventurer" and impostor for the first time, after an overhaul was found in the course of his work as a representative of the Deutscher Herold insurance company in Coburg, that the agency he ran had a deficit of 4,000 RM, which was attributed to likely embezzlement on his part. He later worked as a management assistant in Berlin .

Politically, Sembach has been active in the völkisch movement since the post-war period : after having belonged to the Bund Wiking before 1925 , he joined the NSDAP on May 9, 1925 ( membership number 3.575). On April 1, 1931, he also became a member of the SS (membership number 6,640).

From February 1, 1932 to July 1, 1932, Sembach led the 15th SS standard in Berlin (unofficially after the SS ban issued by the Brüning government in spring 1932). In this position he was subordinate to the Berlin SS chief Kurt Daluege . In Berlin he lived in a wing of the Bellevue Palace.

In the Prussian state elections on April 24, 1932, Sembach ran unsuccessfully in constituency 4 (Potsdam I) for a seat in the state parliament.

From October 1, 1932, Sembach officiated as leader of SS Section VI in Brieg in the Breslau district . Due to the entrustment with this position, in which he succeeded Udo von Woyrsch (who at that time took over the SS Upper Section Silesia), he was promoted to SS-Oberführer on October 6, 1932 .

On the occasion of the Reichstag election of November 1933, Sembach received a seat as a member of the National Socialist Reichstag . In this he represented constituency 8 (Liegnitz) from November 1933 until his death on July 1, 1934. After his death, Sembach's mandate was continued by Rudolf Klieber for the rest of the electoral term .

On December 11, 1933, Sembach was relieved of his position as leader of Section VI as a result of allegations brought against him (see below) and assigned to the staff of the SS Upper Section "Southeast" in Breslau until further notice . Theodor Berkelmann took over the leadership of SS Section VI in place of Sembach .

Exclusion from the SS and murder

On the occasion of a revision of the cash register of the SS section led by Sembach, deficits were found in November 1933, which in the subsequent investigation were attributed to embezzlement by Sembach. After Sembach did not obey an order from SS chief Heinrich Himmler to report to him, Himmler, for questioning in this matter on February 7, 1934, Himmler relegated him from Oberführer to a simple SS man on the same day and pushed him at the same time from the SS.

In the following months, Sembach tried to join the Sturmabteilung (SA). He won the Silesian Gauleiter Helmuth Brückner as protector . In addition, because he feared persecution by the Silesian SS chief Udo von Woyrsch , he turned to the Supreme Party Judge of the NSDAP, Walter Buch , to the Reich Minister of the Interior Wilhelm Frick and to his old superior Kurt Daluege, now chief of the Prussian police, with the Ask for protection.

By order of the Supreme Party Court of the NSDAP on May 26, 1934, a party court case was opened against Sembach. The chairman of the NSDAP gauging court in Central Silesia was charged with carrying out the preliminary investigation against him. However, the proceedings never came to a conclusion.

On June 30, 1934, as part of the Röhm affair , Sembach was arrested together with his wife on the beach at the Baggersee lake in Brieg. Both were initially held in Oels. On the evening of July 1, Sembach was then separated from his wife, taken from the detention room and by an SS command led by Hauptsturmführer Paul Exner in an automobile on the instructions of Berthold Maack , the staff leader of the Silesian SS leader Udo von Woyrsch transported away. On the way he was shot in the Giant Mountains . The corpse was thrown "with the jacket pulled over the head, tied up and weighted down with stones" into the reservoir of Boberröhrsdorf . Since this process had been observed, the body was recovered the next day and cremated in a crematorium in Hirschberg.

A murder investigation initiated by the public prosecutor's office in Oels was soon put down under pressure from the SS leadership. In addition to Anton von Hohberg and Buchwald and three lower-ranking SS officers, Sembach was one of only five SS officers - compared to several dozen SA leaders who were shot - who fell victim to the action.

In the official list of those shot dead on June 30, 1934, Sembach was listed under the name "Sassbach" and identified as an expelled former SA Oberführer. According to the Institute for Contemporary History , the change in name and organizational affiliation was probably intended to cover up Sembach's murder, as he was not one of the actual target groups of the action (the SA), and in order not to raise the question of why an SS leader appears in the death list. Furthermore, the suspicion was expressed that the murder of Sembach had happened in a particularly brutal way and that it should therefore be covered up.

In the weeks after his arrest, when his whereabouts were still unknown to her, Sembach's wife made numerous petitions to the chief of the Prussian police, Daluege, and to the Reich Minister of the Interior, Frick, with the request that she clarify the fate of her husband to stand by and, if he was still alive, to obtain his release. After she was informed of the death of her husband, Maria Sembach traveled to Bayreuth, where she informed Winifred Wagner, who she knew, the director of the Wagner Festival, about the circumstances of the murder of her husband, and asked her - as Wagner was close friends with the dictator to intervene with Hitler on the matter. She handed Wagner the results of the investigation to the public prosecutor and asked them to present the papers to Hitler and convince him to have the murderers punished. In October 1934, Brückner wrote a memorandum on the case based on a submission by Wagner. a. read: "Is it National Socialist, contrary to all law, to lie the murder of National Socialist MP Sembach ... in connection with the Rohm revolt and to put it on the state emergency list and to associate the name and honor of the Führer with it?" Murder cases like Sembach are "no longer calm in the population, not even among the old guard of the NSDAP". When Wagner informed Hitler about the murder of Sembach, he was angry about the act and explained to her using this example that although he had publicly assumed responsibility for the massacre, he had not ordered all executions, including the murder to Sembach.

In the 1950s, the murder of Sembach was one of the charges in the criminal proceedings against Udo von Woyrsch and Ernst Müller-Altenau before the Osnabrück District Court, in which twenty killings carried out in the context of the Röhm affair in the Silesia area formed the subject of the proceedings.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Lothar Gruchmann: Justice in the Third Reich 1933-1940. Adaptation and submission in the Gürtner era , 2001, p. 459.
2. ↑ Brigitta Hamann: Winifred Wagner, or, Hitlers Bayreuth, 2002, p. 281.

literature

• Joachim Lilla , Martin Döring, Andreas Schulz: extras in uniform. The members of the Reichstag 1933–1945. A biographical manual. Including the ethnic and National Socialist members of the Reichstag from May 1924. Droste, Düsseldorf 2004, ISBN 3-7700-5254-4 .
• Andreas Schulz / Günter Wegmann: The Generals of the Waffen-SS and the Police , Vol. 3 (Lammerding-Plesch), 2008, p. 98.

Web links

• Emil Sembach in the database of members of the Reichstag