Erna Jaenichen

Matilde Elisabeth "Erna" Jaenichen (born October 14, 1905 in Wörmlitz near Halle an der Saale ; † unknown, after 1961) was a German seamstress and later a prostitute . She became known because of her role in the affair of the murder of her partner, SA-Sturmführer Horst Wessel , who after his death was elevated to a political martyr of the Nazi movement by Nazi propaganda .

Life and activity

Origin and career up to 1930

Jaenichen was the daughter of the night watchman August Ludwig Jänichen and his wife Marie Ida Jänichen, nee. Schlesiger. After attending school, she learned the trade of a seamstress. In the 1920s, Jaenichen moved to Berlin, where she finally began to work as a prostitute. The Wessel biographer Daniel Siemens considers it most likely that she went to the big city in search of work and slipped into the prostitute milieu as a largely destitute sleeper and subtenant .

Until 1929 Jaenichen worked primarily as a prostitute on Münzstrasse . A chauffeur named Georg Ruhnke acted as her pimp at the time .

In 1929 Jaenichen got to know Horst Wessel, who had dropped out of studies from a middle-class family and had been involved in the Sturmabteilung (SA), the street fighting association of the National Socialist German Workers' Party , in whose Berlin section Wessel had held a leading position since 1928. From the beginning of 1929 he led SA-Sturm 5 in the working-class district of Friedrichshain . Allegedly, Wessel met Jaenichen when he stepped in when she was beaten by her pimp on the street in front of the Mexico-Diele entertainment place. In any case, Jaenichen and Wessel entered into a relationship with each other in the course of 1929, which ultimately led to an engagement with the plan to get married.

In October 1929 Jaenichen moved to Wessel at Grosse Frankfurter Strasse 62. There, the widow Salm had rented her one-room apartment that was forcibly managed to Wessel when she moved from Berlin. After moving in with Wessel, Jaenichen no longer worked as a prostitute, but received her livelihood from him. In addition, she is said to have earned some extra money in her traditional job as a tailor .

The murder of Horst Wessel

When Salm returned to Berlin to take possession of her apartment again, there was considerable tension with the Wessel / Jaenichen couple. In January 1930 Salm requested that her subtenants move out of the apartment. After repeated clashes, they finally agreed to move out on February 1, 1930. At this point, however, Salm's rejection of the presence of Wessel and, above all, Jaenichen in her apartment was so strong that she wanted to move out immediately.

Since the police, to whom Salm complained, gave her to understand that they had better things to do than settle private rental disputes, Salm went to Baer's restaurant at Dragonerstrasse 48 on the evening of January 14, 1930 . The bar was the meeting point of a communist "Sturmabteilung", an illegal successor organization of the banned Red Front Fighters' League . Since Salm's deceased husband had been an active member of the Red Front Fighters League, she asked some of the communists staying in Baer's restaurant to help her remove her unloved lodgers from her apartment. The men she addressed initially turned out to be disinterested and unwilling. When Salm mentioned the name of Wessels as the troublemaker to be dealt with, the communists jumped in because Wessel was known in the relevant circles as an "SA chief" and had even been denounced as a worker murderer on communist leaflets. In view of this, the men Salm asked for help declared themselves ready to give the Nazi bully Wessel a "proletarian rub-off".

A group of around a dozen people from Baer's restaurant and Adolf Galsk's neighboring restaurant went to Salm's apartment on Grosse Frankfurter Strasse at around 9 p.m. When Wessel opened his room door at Albrecht Höhler's knock , he immediately shot him in the mouth. During the subsequent search of Wessel's room by several other members of the raid squad, Jaenichen and a friend present were held at bay by Höhler at gunpoint. After Höhler and the other intruders had fled, the NSDAP headquarters was notified and an ambulance was called to transport Wessel to the Friedrichshain hospital, where an emergency operation initially saved his life. The injury turned out to be fatal. When Wessel died of blood poisoning in hospital on February 23, 1930 , Goebbels had already begun to make him a martyr.

In her interrogations by the police after the fact, Jaenichen suspected on the one hand that the men who attacked Wessel had been summoned to the apartment by Salm to "wipe out" their fiancé and that the incident was based on housing disputes. On the other hand, she thought it was possible that the attack was staged by her former friend and pimp Ruhnke. She would have separated from him around the beginning of 1929, but since then he had repeatedly asked her to part with Wessel and return to him, Ruhnke. He also hit her repeatedly on the street. In addition, she confidently stated that she had known one of the perpetrators, Höhler, by reputation from Münzstrasse since around 1928: he had been a pimp there at the same time that she was engaged in prostitution there. She knew that Höhler, whom she had known by the first name Ali, was well acquainted with her former pimp Ruhnke, and that Höhler may have been induced to commit the crime against Wessel.

In the following trial in the fall of 1930 for the killing of Wessel, Jaenichen appeared as a witness.

Jaenichen's role

Soon after Wessel's death, a fierce propaganda battle began about himself, his career, and the circumstances and reasons for his murder. In this, Jaenichen and her disreputable past in the red-light district played a decisive role: while the Nazi press stylized Wessel as a hero with a flawless biography, who selflessly rescued a slipped proletarian girl from the gutter in order to marry her, and claimed, that he was murdered for political reasons (due to his success in converting the workers in Berlin to National Socialism) by criminal subjects (in particular the professional criminal and pimp Höhler), with whom the Communist Party is naturally firmly connected as an organization that is by nature criminal , the communist press tried to counteract the National Socialist glorification of Wessel as much as possible: it distanced itself from the criminal Höhler, from whom it declared that he had nothing to do with the KPD, and spread the claim that Wessel himself was a pimp. Wessel was said to have died in an argument between two pimps over a girl (Jaenichen). The whole incident was completely apolitical in nature. According to this communist narrative, on the day of Wessel's funeral in the St. Nikolai cemetery, thousands of communists were rioting on the street next to the cemetery and chanting maliciously, "One last Heil Hitler to the pimp Horst Wessel!"

Further whereabouts

After the Wessel trial, Jaenichen withdrew into private life. While Wessel disappeared from 1930 onwards through the National Socialist propaganda directed by his former sponsor, the Berlin Gauleiter Joseph Goebbels , first to be the main martyr of the Nazi movement and then, after the establishment of the Nazi dictatorship in 1933, to become the national saint of Nazi Germany Jaenichen largely from the scene. As Wessel's biographer Siemens wrote, this was probably the smartest thing she could do in the situation she found herself in, since the NSDAP and then the Nazi-led German state naturally wanted the embarrassing relationship of the radiant overhero of the party- and state propaganda, Wessel, about a stick girl should be discussed as little as possible.

Jaenichen married twice in quick succession in the 1930s, the first time in 1932 with Georg Ruhnke. He died in 1934. On October 5, 1934, she married the locksmith Paul Felgner in Berlin-Weißensee. In the mid-1930s, she brought a lawsuit against the writer Heinz Ewers and his publishing house, Cotta'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung , for portraying her personality in a Wessel biography written by Ewers, which she rated as defamatory. She therefore asked for the book to be stopped. The process ended in a settlement.

Jaenichen's whereabouts after this trial are unclear.

In September 1939 Jänichen married Albin Scherzer for the third time in Berlin-Charlottenburg.

literature

• Daniel Siemens: Horst Wessel. Death and Transfiguration of a National Socialist. Siedler, Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-88680-926-4 .
• Heinz Knobloch: Poor Epstein. How death came to Horst Wessel. Aufbau-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Berlin 1996, ISBN 3-7466-8021-2 .
• Thomas Oertel: Horst Wessel - investigation of a legend. Böhlau, Cologne 1988, ISBN 3-412-06487-4 .

Individual evidence

1. ^ List of names of the registry office Weißensee for the year 1934 ; Address book for Berlin for 1935
2. ↑ Landesarchiv Berlin: Marriage register of the registry office Charlottenburg von Berlin for the year 1939, p. 57 and 223 (entry no. 3397)