Erich Sparmann

Erich Sparmann as a witness at the Nuremberg trials (around 1946)

Erich Sparmann (born July 19, 1907 in Passendorf ; † unknown, after 1949) was a German SS functionary. Among other things, he was staff leader of the Germanic control center in the SS main office from 1943 to 1945 .

Live and act

Sparmann was the son of the mason Louis Sparmann and his wife Minna, nee. Mueller. In his youth he attended elementary school until he was fourteen . He then completed an apprenticeship as a bricklayer in Halle an der Saale from 1921 to 1924/1925.

Politically, Sparmann, whose father had joined the Communist Party after the First World War and served as a community representative in Passendorf, belonged to the Communist Youth Movement in the early 1920s. In 1923 he left this to instead join the right-wing National Federation. At this time he also met the racial researcher Otto Hauser , who had a lasting influence on him.

Conflicts in which Sparmann got involved at his workplaces due to his political orientation - the majority of his work colleagues were communist - prompted him to leave his home country soon after completing his apprenticeship around 1925. Until 1931/1932 he worked in different places as a bricklayer as well as a gardener and driver. In between - from 1925 to 1926 - he was also a member of the Reichswehr. From 1932 to 1934 he worked as an office clerk in the office of a lawyer in Rosenheim through Hauser's mediation .

At the end of 1927, Sparmann joined the NSDAP (membership number 72.030). He was a member of the Sturmabteilung (SA) from 1928 to 1929. During this time he led the small group of SA men in Dörzbach an der Jagst, which could hold about a dozen men. After returning to his traditional home in Passendorf in autumn 1929, he switched to the Schutzstaffel (SS) (SS number 1.752). In this he remained until 1945, most recently - since 1944 - in the rank of SS standard leader.

In April 1933 Sparmann belonged to a group of SS and SA members as well as members of the Bavarian Political Police who drove from Rosenheim to Durchholzen in Austria to meet the agent Georg Bell , who had previously worked in the SA intelligence service , and who went abroad in March 1933 had fled to induce them to return to Germany. On this occasion Bell was gunned down by one of the participants in this "expedition" - in the literature it is usually assumed that it was the leader of the SA chief Ernst Röhm's staff, Julius Uhl . The mixed command then fled back to Germany, breaking through the border barrier. Sparmann later stated that, as a local SS leader in Rosenheim, he had been called in by the Bavarian Political Police to the company and that he had previously known nothing of Bell's intentions to kill.

At the beginning of 1934 Sparmann became a full-time employee of the SS: initially he worked until 1936 as a race and settlement leader in the SS-Oberabschnitt Südwest in Stuttgart . From 1936 to 1938 he held the same position in Braunschweig . He then worked for a short time as staff leader in the SS section in Würzburg . This was followed by a short interlude lasting almost a month as Wolff's employee in the SS Reich leadership .

After the German occupation of the Sudeten areas in autumn 1938, Sparmann was sent there to advertise entry into the General SS . Subsequently, in December 1938, he was given the leadership of the newly established 95th SS Standard in Trautenau , which he held until shortly after the outbreak of World War II in 1939.

In October 1939 Sparmann was called up to the death's head recruit standard in Dachau , where he took over duties as a suitability examiner on the staff. In this position he was assigned to the so-called immigrant central office in 1940 , and from spring 1940 he was appointed to the settlement staff in Lodz .

In the summer of 1942, Sparmann reported to the Waffen SS . After training as a tank destroyer in the occupied Netherlands , he was sent to the Eastern Front . Since the summer of 1943 he was trained at an officers' school in Prosetschnitz. While he last held the rank of Standartenführer in the regular SS since 1944, he achieved the rank of Untersturmführer in the Waffen SS and - as part of his work as a senior administrative functionary of the Waffen SS - that of Standartenführer F (specialist leader).

In October 1943 Sparmann was transferred to the SS main office in Berlin , where he held the position of Staff Leader of Office Group D ( Germanic Control Center ) until the end of World War II . The Germanic control center was an agency entrusted with the recruitment of "volunteers" for the Waffen SS in the German-occupied countries of Europe (see Foreign volunteers of the Waffen SS ).

post war period

After the Second World War, Sparmann was questioned as a witness in the course of the Nuremberg trials . Among other things, he appeared as a witness in the Wilhelmstrasse trial against his superior in the SS main office Gottlob Berger .

Sparmann himself was indicted together with Ludwig Kuchler in 1948 in a trial before the Traunstein Regional Court on suspicion of being involved in the murder of the agent Georg Bell in 1933. While Kuchler was initially sentenced to a sentence of seven years, the case against Sparmann was dropped. On December 7, 1948, the Munich Higher Regional Court changed the judgments in the appeal proceedings to the effect that both defendants were found guilty of a "complicity in the crime of deprivation of liberty resulting in death". After the case was referred back to the Traunstein Regional Court, both men were sentenced to three years in prison on March 30, 1949.

family

Sparmann was married to Maria Luise Luber, with whom he had five children.

literature

• Andreas Dornheim : Röhm's man for abroad. Lit, Münster 1998, ISBN 3-8258-3596-0 .

Web links

• Institute for Contemporary History : Protocols of Sparmann's interrogations after the Second World War (Sparmann Witness 4) (PDF; 10.7 MB)