Erich Lindemann (doctor)

Erich Lindemann (born October 4, 1894 in Eberswalde , † July 1, 1934 in Glogischdorf near Glogau ) was a German doctor. Lindemann was best known as a leading member of the Reich League of Jewish Front Soldiers and as one of those killed in the so-called Röhm Putsch in 1934.

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Erich Lindemann

Until 1934

Erich Lindemann was born in 1894 to Jewish parents. His father was the businessman Nathan Lindemann. The mother was born Rosenthal. After participating in the First World War , in which he was awarded the Iron Cross 1st class, he studied medicine . Today there are two dissertations under the name of Lindemann: one is a medical dissertation on the subject of hypertrophic cirrhosis of the liver in children and infants from 1920 in Berlin, and the second is a work entitled Investigations into the primitive intelligence of the highly mentally ill and their relationship to the achievements of Anthropoid , which was submitted as a dissertation to the medical faculty of Ludwig University in Giessen in 1926 .

After completing his studies, Lindemann practiced as a pulmonologist in Glogau, where he ran his own sanatorium.

Lindemann became known in the 1920s as one of the leaders of the Reichsbundischer Jewish Frontsoldaten (RjF), an association of Jewish World War II veterans of the German army, who kept memories of the experience at the front alive and stood up for the interests of Jewish war participants. The RjF was formed after the Stahlhelm - the largest German veterans' association in the interwar period - declared that it would not accept Jews.

As head of the Reich Association of Jewish Frontline Soldiers in Glogau in Silesia and as head of a Jewish youth sports group, Lindemann was targeted by the new rulers after the Nazis came to power in 1933.

Lindemann murder case

On July 1, 1934, Lindemann was murdered as part of the Röhm affair . The aim of the action was primarily to eliminate the actual and / or supposed political opponents of Hitler in their own ranks, ie in the NSDAP and the SA . However, the SS that carried out the murders also used the action to eliminate other people they did not like. Lindemann was one of those who were killed in the slipstream of the blow against the SA.

On the afternoon of July 1, 1934, the head of the SD branch in Breslau , Obersturmführer Laube, ordered the leader of the SS-Standarte Glogau, SS-Standartenführer Bredemeier, to have Lindemann killed. The latter then sent a four-person SS commando under the command of Unterscharführer Schmidt with instructions to shoot the doctor. The SS men met Lindemann in the garden of his sanatorium in Glogischdorf and asked him to accompany them to the nearby high forest. While two SS men (a man named Strauss and an unknown person) stayed behind by the car, the other two men (Schmidt and Herbert Bischoff ) led their prisoners 200 m into the forest and then another 50 m through pine thickets to a clearing. Schmidt briefly told Lindemann that he had been sentenced to death (“You are sentenced to death by the SD”) and fired two pistol shots in the head from a distance of 2 to 3 m. The body was initially buried on the spot, but was later found and handed over to the police.

Legal investigation and processing

At the instigation of Lindemann's wife, the Public Prosecutor's Office in Glogau made inquiries into the doctor's whereabouts in the following weeks. Upon request, the leader of the SS standard in Glogau initially announced, untruthfully, that Lindemann would return in a few days. When this failed to materialize, the public prosecutor initiated proceedings against unknown persons because of Lindemann's disappearance. The Standartenführer reacted by pointing out that " Himmler had ordered that nothing further should be done in the matter". Although the public prosecutor initially resisted this intimidation attempt and took possession of the dead man's body, the proceedings finally came to a standstill. The life insurance of the dead man was initially withheld by the insurer under pressure from the Gestapo , but later - again under pressure from the Gestapo - paid out.

After the end of National Socialist rule in 1945, at least the SS man Herbert Bischoff was brought to justice for the murder of Lindemann: After he was first sentenced to life imprisonment for murder by the Kassel jury on October 10, 1952, the verdict was adopted on October 8, 1952. July 1970 repealed by the Kassel regional court and downgraded to "aiding and abetting murder". The sentence was reduced to five years in prison.

Karl Martin Graß later rated Lindemann's murder as characteristic of the mechanical, completely unreflective manner in which the SS men who carried out the executions on the days around June 30th went about their murderous work, because “Dr. Lindemann from Glogau was simply added to [there], although one obviously didn't know who he was. "

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Date and place of birth according to the library of the Topography of Terror Foundation: The SD man Johannes Schmidt. P. 106.
2. ^ Franz D. Lucas / Margret Heitmann: City of Faith. History and culture of the Jews in Glogau , 1991, p. 343.
3. ↑ Lothar Gruchmann: Justice in the Third Reich 1933–1940, 2001, p. 463. As a motive for the Gestapo's change of opinion, Gruchmann states that the Gestapo probably wanted to prevent a process for the disbursement of the life insurance policy because they then got into the unpleasant situation would be to provide evidence in court that Lindemann had charged a debt that would have justified non-payment. As a consequence, she would have had to reveal unpleasant details.
4. ↑ Otto Gritschneder: The Führer has sentenced you to death ... " , 1993, p. 111.
5. ^ Karl Martin Graß: Edgar Jung, Papenkreis and Röhmkrise 1933-34. 1966, p. 87.