Erich Schiewek

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Erich Schiewek , often incorrectly spelled Schiewe c k, (born August 10, 1913 in Breslau , † July 1, 1934 in Dachau concentration camp ) was a member of the German SA . He became known as one of the victims of the Röhm affair .

Life

Schiewek that the locksmith learned, came on September 1, 1931 in the NSDAP (membership. 606,062) a. He also became a member of the Sturmabteilung (SA), in which he reached the rank of Obertruppführer by 1934.

In 1934 Schiewek lived in an aid camp in Breslau. This was subordinate to the Nazi politician Edmund Heines , who had been the strong man of the Nazi regime in Silesia since 1933 as the commander of the SA Upper Silesia Group - which included almost 200,000 men - as well as the police president of Breslau. After Schiewek had done particularly well in a shooting sport in June 1934, Wilhelm Ott, Heines' staff leader, chose him as a reward for this achievement on June 29, 1934 as Heines' companion for a trip to a short-term SA leaders' conference in Bad Wiessee in southern Germany , to which Heines had been called up on June 28th. When Heines was preparing to leave for his flight to southern Germany on June 29th, he needed a companion at short notice because on the one hand his police adjutant Otto Tillmann was ill and on the other his boy had overslept that day, so that Ott spontaneously chose Schiewek as his companion. Schiewek had had no relationship with Heines before that day.

Arrest and Assassination

Schiewek's arrest

After Schiewek and Heines had flown from Breslau to Bavaria on June 29 , both of them stayed at the Hanselbauer guesthouse around midnight, where the leaders' meeting was to take place the following day and where Ernst Röhm , the SA chief of staff, was already staying would have. Schiewek, who was considered a "sinister fellow" and of the same sex, slept in the same bed with Heines.

In the early morning hours of June 30, 1934, the Hanselbauer guesthouse was unexpectedly stormed by Adolf Hitler and a raid squad made up of SS men from Hitler's escort squad and police officers. They arrested Röhm and most of the other SA members present, including Heines and Schiewek. The reason for this procedure was that Hitler had recently decided to politically disempower the SA. For this purpose he had called the Fiihrers' Conference in Wiessee in order to gather as many SA leaders as possible in one place and to be able to eliminate them as safely as possible - isolated from their crowd. The action in Wiessee was the prelude to the Röhm affair , which was presented as a self-defense measure by the government against a putsch allegedly planned by Röhm .

There are three testimonials about the course of the arrest of Heines and Schiewek, which essentially match: a diary entry by Joseph Goebbels and a report by Erich Kempka , Hitler's chauffeur and bodyguard, for the magazine Quick, as well as a diary entry by Alfred Rosenberg . While Goebbels and Kempka were eyewitnesses of the event, Rosenberg claims to have received his knowledge from Max Amann .

Rosenberg recorded in his diary in July 1934 that Hitler had burst into anger after hearing about Heine's homosexual activity with a 'lust boy':

“ In the next room [von Röhm] Heines was engaged in homosexual activities. 'All that want to be leaders in Germany,' said the leader, tormented. Heines performed a crying scene: 'My Führer, I did nothing to the boy.' And the pleasure boy kisses his darling on the cheek in fear and woe. 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 this way, he orders the pleasure boys and [nd] special to pack them into the cellar and [nd] to shoot them. "

In the entry of July 1, 1934, Goebbels wrote in his diary only briefly in the course of his description of the events in the Pension Hanslbaur: “Heine's pathetic. With a pleasure boy. ”And Kemkpa reported the following to the illustrated magazine Quick in the 1950s about the confrontation between Heines and Hitler:

“Two detectives come out of the hotel room opposite [Röhm's room]. One of them reports to Hitler: 'My Fuehrer ... the police chief of Breslau refuses to get dressed!' Without paying any attention to me, Hitler steps into the room where SA Obergruppenführer Heines lives. I hear him scream, 'Heines, if you're not dressed in five minutes, I'll have you shot on the spot!' I take a few steps back and a police officer whispers to me that Heines was in bed with an eighteen-year-old SA senior squad leader. Finally Heines comes out of the room and an eighteen-year-old blond kid is dancing in front of him. "

Schiewek's murder and its use to justify the "Röhm Putsch" murders

Schiewek was transferred to the Stadelheim prison together with the other SA members arrested in Bad Wiessee , where he remained from early noon on June 30th until early evening on July 1st. After Heines was shot by SS men in the courtyard of the Stadelheim prison on the evening of June 30, and Ernst Röhm in his cell in Stadelheim by the Dachau concentration camp commander Theodor Eicke and the leader of the guards there, Michel Lippert, in the late afternoon of July 1 were, Schiewek von Eicke and Lippert was taken to the Dachau concentration camp along with three other prisoners from Stadelheim ( Max Vogel , Hans Schweighart , Edmund Paul Neumayer ). There they were shot dead on the wall behind the outer detention building at around 7 p.m. on the same evening by a detachment made up of members of the guards. The shooting was organized by the camp management as a public spectacle: Numerous prisoners were forced to attend the process, before the four men von Eicke personally tore off shoulder pieces and badges of rank. During the execution, as several Dachau prisoners unanimously stated, Schiewek stood out for the great courage that he, like the other death row inmates, displayed in the face of the firing squad. There is also evidence that one of the four executed, probably Schiewek, shouted “Hoch Heine!” As the last words at the moment of the order to shoot.

On the night of July 2 to 3, 1934, Schiewek's body was transferred to the crematorium of Munich's Ostfriedhof and cremated there along with fourteen other bodies of Munich victims of the Röhm affair. The urn could only be handed over to his relatives after two months, against payment of the incineration costs.

In the context of Nazi propaganda , Schiewek, without his name being mentioned, played a major role insofar as the homosexuality of many SA leaders was widely emphasized in the press reports of these days . Already on June 30th, Goebbels stated in a report that was circulated in almost all German newspapers about the course of the action in Bad Wiessee that some SA leaders had been found engaged in illness. In a radio address a few days later, Goebbels specified this information:

“ In Heine's room directly opposite, there was a shameless picture. Heines was in bed with a homosexual youth. The disgusting scene that then played out when Heines and his comrade were arrested cannot be described; it suddenly sheds light on the conditions in the area around the previous Chief of Staff, the elimination of which is thanks to the determined action of the Fuehrer. Most of his staff, along with Röhm, were arrested. "

Similar descriptions of the events in Bad Wiessee on June 30, 1934 as well as the conditions prevailing in the SA under the “Regiment of Perverts” in general, which always aimed at serving anti-homosexual resentment in the population, pervaded the German press in the first few days after the Röhm putsch.

literature

• Otto Gritschneder : "The Führer has sentenced you to death ..." - Hitler's "Röhm Putsch" murders in court. Beck, Munich 1993, ISBN 3-406-37651-7 .
• Heinz Höhne : Mordache Röhm: Hitler's breakthrough to sole rule, 1933–1934. Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 1984, ISBN 3-499-33052-0 .
• Wolfram Selig : The victims of the Röhm putsch in Munich. In: Winfried Becker, Werner Chrobak (Ed.): State, culture, politics, contributions to the history of Bavaria and Catholicism. Festschrift for Dieter Allbrecht's 65th birthday, Kallmütz 1992, pp. 341–356, especially p. 347.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ So with Heinrich Bennecke: The Reichswehr and the "Röhm Putsch". Munich 1963, p. 88; Günther Kimmel: The Dachau Concentration Camp. A study of Nazi violent crimes. In: Bavaria in the Nazi era , vol. 2, p. 366, and Heinz Höhne: Mordsache Röhm. Reinbek 1984, p. 321. The spelling with ck is a wandering error that results from the official list of the dead of the secret state police for the Röhm putsch; Rainer Orth shows that the surname is correctly Schiewek without c: The SD man Johannes Schmidt. Marburg 2012, p. 108 with reference to his birth certificate in the Wrocław City Archives.
2. ^ Heinz Höhne: Mordsache Röhm , 1984, p. 321.
3. ↑ Hans-Günther Seraphim (Ed.): The political diary of Alfred Rosenberg. 1934/35 and 1939/40. Munich 1964, p. 45.
4. ↑ Herbert Michaelis (Ed.): Causes and consequences. From the German collapse in 1918 and 1945 to the state reorganization of Germany in the present; a collection of certificates and documents on contemporary history. Vol. 10, p. 170.
5. ↑ Hans-Günther Richardi: School of violence. The Dachau concentration camp. 1995, p. 237; Stanislav Zámečník : That was Dachau. P. 69; {[Bastille, Eckstein, Hornung, S. xy]}.
6. ↑ Selig: The Victims of the Röhm Putsch in Munich , p. 347.
7. ↑ The archive. Reference book for politics, economics, culture. 1934, p. 327.