Erich Sstaak

Erich Sstarkak (born December 31, 1907 in Wolfenbüttel ) was a German SS man. He became known as the murderer of the Waldenburg city planning officer Kuno Kamphausen , whom he shot during the Röhm affair .

Live and act

Sstaak was a son of the businessman Valentin Sstaak and his wife Else, nee Lampe. After attending school, he learned the confectionery trade in Braunschweig, before going on a journey as a journeyman for a few years throughout the entire Reich.

In April 1923, Sbestak joined the National Socialist Sturmabteilung (SA) in Wolfenbüttel . At the beginning of 1932 he took part in the establishment of the Schutzstaffel (SS) in Osnabrück (SS no. 26.104), where he was appointed SS squad leader on November 1, 1932.

Shortly after the National Socialists came to power in the spring of 1933, Sstaak moved to his wife's Silesian homeland. On the mediation of Günther Patschowsky he got a position in the Papenburg concentration camp , after which he was employed as a caretaker at the Waldenburg district committee.

During the Röhm affair , on June 30, 1934, on the orders of his superior forester, Sstak shot and killed the Waldenburg town planning officer Kuno Kamphausen. Unlike most of the other murders during the Röhm affair, the order to shoot Kamphausen was not issued by order of the National Socialist leadership, but was an arbitrary order of a subordinate authority (Förster). The background to Förster's order to shoot Kamphausen was that this forester had been hated since he had not approved a building application from Forster's brother. Sstaak later claimed that he did not know anything about the background of the crime and that he shot Kamphausen on the assumption that he was taking part in the defense of state authority against a violent attack by putschists. The Kamphausen murder case was particularly noteworthy because it was the only case of a person murdered during the Röhm affair who was prosecuted during the Nazi era: In September 1934, a trial against the SS involved in the matter took place before the Breslau jury court -Relatives from the Waldenburg area. This sentenced three out of eight defendants for deprivation of liberty and presumption of office to imprisonment between one and five years, whereby all convicts were released within one year under pressure from the SS. Among the five acquitted was Sstaak, who was accused by the court of a "guiltless error" with the argument that he could not have known that the order of his superior did not serve to ward off an attack on state power but to carry out a private feud.

Since Sstaak was exposed to massive hostility from the local population despite his acquittal in Waldenburg, he was transferred to West Germany by order of Heinrich Himmler , where he got a job with the State Police in Saarbrücken in 1935 .

On November 12, 1938, Sstaak was demoted to an SS man for fraud by the SS court and expelled from the SS or demoted and expelled after Himmler's pardon.

literature

• Otto Gritschneder: The Führer sentenced you to death ... " , 1993.

Web links

• Catholic with fatal consequences ( Memento from March 22, 2011 in the Internet Archive )