Ernst Reins

Ernst Reins (born August 14, 1907 in Berlin-Charlottenburg ; † May 9, 1933 in Plötzensee prison , Berlin) was a German bricklayer and robbery murderer. Reins became known as the protagonist of a violent crime that was widely publicized at the time and as the first person to be executed in Germany after the National Socialists came to power .

Life

Career until 1931

Reins was the seventeenth child of a bricklayer who died early of paralysis . Apart from Reins, only two sisters were born alive or survived early childhood. Due to the early death of his father and aggravated by the particular hardship of the conditions during the First World War and the post-war period, he grew up in poverty. Due to the difficult situation of his family, Reins - although he was unusually intelligent according to contemporary newspaper reports - could not take up the commercial profession he was striving for, but had to work as a bricklayer, like his father, in the profession he hated, but carried himself with hope to one day become an architect and be able to advance socially.

In 1927 Reins got engaged to a girl from a middle-class family. After he became unemployed in 1930 as a result of the global economic crisis , the girl broke off the engagement under pressure from her parents. Embittered by this episode and strengthened in his ambition to escape the "wretched proletarian life", he looked for an opportunity to quickly raise enough money to finance his advanced training as an architect.

In April 1931, Reins finally decided to attempt a robbery on a mailman. He had noticed them repeatedly because of the “thick pockets” ( Stefan Großmann ) they carried with them.

The attack on the postal carrier Schwan

On April 29, 1931, Reins came to see the widow Möbius, who had advertised a room for rent in her house at Gossowstrasse 10 in Berlin-Schöneberg, and rented it under the name Erich Wiechl. Then he went to the post office in Genthiner Strasse, where he posted a postal order for 5 marks in the name of Wiechl with the order to deliver it to the address in Gossowstrasse.

On May 1, 1931, Reins moved into the room in the ground floor apartment of the widow Möbius' house as the new tenant. Shortly afterwards he sent the landlady away to have his glasses repaired. Finally, the postal carrier Gustav Schwan (born September 8, 1878) appeared with the postal order posted the day before. Reins asked him to come into the apartment and presented him with a business card in the name of Erich Wiechl with an address in Mödling near Vienna . While Schwan was reading the card, he knocked it down with a piece of lead pipe wrapped in canvas and filled with sand, so that he went unconscious to the ground and died soon after of a serious head injury. Reins / Wiechl opened the postman's wallet and withdrew all of the cash he had carried with him, amounting to 13,500 RM, and left the place of his act.

Investigation and arrest of Reins'

The very next day, the commissioners Karl Draeger and Mielenz of the Berlin Murder Commission, who were in charge of the investigation into the case, were able to determine that the alleged tenant of the murder room, Wiechl, was a former dancer of the Hotel Adlon , who now lived in Vienna.

Wiechl could quickly be excluded as a perpetrator due to his whereabouts at the time of the crime, especially since the widow Möbius confirmed that he was not identical to the man who had rented the room from her. Due to Wiechl's statements and the offender's shirt collar left at the scene of the crime, which had a faded distinction, the Berlin criminal police were instead able to visit Reins on May 4, 1931, the Wiechl of visits to the Hotel Adlon, where the two Reins sisters were called " Demonstration ladies "(at that time this term was used to describe employees of boutiques who showed clothes to wealthy customers) regularly perverted, knew and identified them as suspects. That same night an international search warrant was issued for this.

Reins was finally located on May 6, 1931 in Genoa , where he and his two sisters had stayed at the Hotel Excelsior, and was arrested by the local police. He had planned to travel to South America by ship from Genoa. He made a full confession to the police that same day.

Condemnation, public reception of the case and execution

In December 1931, Reins was found guilty of murder by the jury court in Berlin and sentenced to death. The punishment was initially not carried out, however, because - above all in the social democratic and liberal press - there were public protests against it, which referred in particular to the convict's great youth and the difficult fate that he had behind him, as well as to the circumstance that there is much to suggest that the killing of Schwan, contrary to the judgment of the jury, was an (unintentional) manslaughter and not an intentional murder, and against this background called for a mitigation of the sentence. The provisional Prussian state government under Franz von Papen , in office since the Prussian strike of July 20, 1932, discussed a pardon for Rein and three other delinquents sentenced to death at their meeting on October 27, 1932, with the commissioner for the Prussian Ministry of Justice (de facto Minister of Justice ) Heinrich Hölscher , however, spoke out in favor of enforcing the judgment. A final decision was postponed until the government relations in Prussia had been clarified.

The Nazi press commented on these events in 1933, after Reins' execution, polemically:

“The times when a certain press turned human sympathy on its head and, according to the motto 'It is not the murderer, but the murdered man who is guilty', claimed the public's sympathy not for the victim but for the perpetrator, are a thing of the past forever over. The fuss about the murderer of the mail carrier Ernst Reins was downright outrageous. Again and again the Marxist Prussian government delayed the execution of the death sentence. And even after the Braun-Severing government had long since been ousted, the left-wing press tried to beg pity for this monster, who after the terrible deed, carefree with remorse, went on a pleasure trip to Italy. No wonder if, with such a legal opinion, the death sentence, which had sunk to a mere formality, no longer frightened and we in Germany experienced a true murder epidemic. "

Shortly after the repeal of the Reich Commissioner for the State of Prussia and the establishment of a new Prussian government under the Nazi politician Hermann Göring , who was appointed as the new Prime Minister, the suspension of the execution of the death sentence handed down against Reins was removed. Since Göring refused to make use of the pardon he was entitled to as Prime Minister of Prussia , Reins was taken to the Plötzensee prison yard early in the morning of May 9, 1933 , and there, together with Johannes Kabelitz, who was also sentenced to death for murder, by the Executioner Carl Gröpler executed with a hand ax . The execution of the judgment against Reins took place at 6:00 a.m., that against Kabelitz at 6:08 a.m. According to newspaper reports, both were “completely composed”.

The Nazi press celebrated the double execution with comments like the following from the Havelländische Rundschau :

“With the execution, the long struggle for the death penalty was clearly decided. The death penalty has been reintroduced, and according to the will of the national government, in accordance with a healthy sense of justice, the crime will again result in the punishment it deserves. "

And the echo said quite similarly:

"The Reins case in particular gave rise to the most repulsive apologies and" protests "for a certain breed of publicists against the death penalty, which, according to the ideology of human rights activists, was a" cultural disgrace ". Now this dull confusion of the simplest facts is over. The death penalty is being carried out again, keeping the rabble in check. This corresponds entirely to the healthy sense of justice of the people. In front of the red posters reporting the execution of Reins and Kabelitz, one could only hear loud applause everywhere in the crowd. Only in a sick and weak state will the criminal be presented to the public as an interesting variety. A healthy community relentlessly eliminates anti-social elements and resolutely directs the sharpness of the sword against the criminal. "

In terms of judicial history, the execution of Rein is noteworthy insofar as it represents on the one hand the first execution carried out after the beginning of the Nazi regime in the German Reich and on the other hand it represents the de facto reintroduction of the death penalty in the territory of the state of Prussia, in which it was previously scarce Although it had existed on paper for five years, in practice it had been as good as abolished due to the routine non-execution of the death sentences passed (the only exception was the 1931 execution of the serial killer Peter Kürten ).

literature

• Theo Rasehorn: Judicial criticism in the Weimar Republic: The example of the magazine Die Justiz , 1985, p. 221f.
• Stefan Großmann : The trial against Ernst Reins, in: Die Justiz, Vol. VII, pp. 214–226.
• Margrid Bircken / Helmut Peitsch (ed.): Burning books. Memories of May 10, 1933 , Brandenburg State Center for Political Education, Potsdam 2003, p. 147f.

Web links

• Article "Schöneberg post murderer arrested in Genoa hotel" from 1931 at BZ-online
• Report "I live with a murderer. How Reins became a murderer", in: Sozialistische Arbeiterzeitung from December 5, 1931

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Havelländische Rundschau. Osthavelländisches Kreisblatt. Official organ of the Osthavelland Nauen district of May 10, 1933, p. 3.
2. ↑ Havelländische Rundschau. Osthavelländisches Kreisblatt. Official organ of the Osthavelland Nauen district of May 10, 1933, p. 3.
3. ^ The echo: With supplement German Export Revue. Weekly newspaper for politics, literature, export and import , vol. 52, p. 352.