Eugen von Kessel

Sigismund Armin Eugen von Kessel (born October 29, 1890 in Frankfurt am Main , † June 30, 1934 in Berlin ) was a German officer and head of a private news agency.

Live and act

Youth, World War I (1890 to 1918)

Birth certificate of Eugen von Kessel.

Eugen von Kessel was born as the son of Christian Karl August Friedrich Eugen von Kessel (born May 19, 1852 in Saarlouis; † July 5, 1907 in Zurich) and his wife Luise (born November 14, 1867 in Paris; † June 13, 1956 in Goslar), née Moeser, born. His younger brother was the journalist Friedrich Kurt Harald Hans von Kessel (born May 27, 1894 in Wiesbaden; † 1973).

After attending school, Kessel embarked on a military career: in 1909 he joined the 4th Guards Regiment on foot in the Prussian army in Berlin. There he received the lieutenant's license in 1910.

From 1914 to 1918 von Kessel took part in an artillery regiment in the First World War, in which he was promoted to first lieutenant . During the war, he married Edda Joachimi (born February 1, 1895 in Meiningen) in Berlin-Schmargendorf on February 1, 1915. The marriage, which was divorced on January 23, 1926 in Hamburg, resulted in a daughter, Edda-Elisabeth (born October 28, 1915 in Berlin-Grunewald).

Since March 22, 1929, Kessels was divorced in second marriage to the officer and lawyer Franz Maria Liedig .

Freikorps activities and the Kapp Putsch (1919 to 1920)

After the end of the First World War, Kessel joined the volunteer regiment led by Colonel Reinhard , in which he set up and led the so-called 3rd patrol company (also: Department for police patrol service; patrol company von Kessel), a special force for police tasks , which was housed in the Westend barracks in Charlottenburg, took over. With this unit, which also included around fifty political police officers, Kessel participated in the persecution of socialist organizations in the Berlin area in 1919 and 1920 (monitoring and elimination of KPD functionaries in particular , setting up spy networks) and in the German-Polish border conflicts this time. The Kessel unit eventually grew to a division of around 300 men called the auxiliary police of the Berlin police president, which also included the so-called flying motor unit K, which was equipped with cars, armored cars, machine guns and flamethrowers and was based in the criminal court Moabit had. The unit was hierarchically subordinate to the Guard Cavalry Rifle Division and worked with the public prosecutor.

At the beginning of March 1919, Kessel's company was able to prevent the Red Flag from appearing and arrest around 120 radical left functionaries. She also carried out the arrest of Karl Radek and eighty members of the Red Soldiers' Union. There was also the shooting of twenty-four sailors on March 11th in the Französische Strasse on the orders of Lieutenant Otto Marloh of the 3rd Patrol Company.

The burning of French war trophies from the Berlin arsenal in front of the monument to Frederick the Great on Unter den Linden, ordered by Kessel, caused international irritation, in order to prevent the return of the trophies, which the Allies demanded in the Treaty of Versailles.

In 1919 Kessel was accepted into the Prussian police , where he made it to the position of police captain. Because of his role in the release of Marloh, who was arrested for the unmotivated shooting of the sailors in March 1919, and because of his support for the Kapp Putsch in March 1920 - in which he was involved in the occupation of the Reich Chancellery by the putschists and, among other things. a. seized the papers (name directories, rules of procedure, military orders and negotiation notes) that had remained in the rooms of the office as incriminating material for a proposed trial against the government - but he was released from the police in 1920. The trial against him because of the unjustified shootings was decided in his favor. Uwe Backes assessed the corresponding judgment as an example of the “one-eyedness” of the Weimar judiciary against politically motivated violations of the law.

In the first years of the Weimar Republic , Kessel is also said to have been involved in some Fememorden .

Later life and murder (1920-1934)

Around 1921 Kessel settled in Hamburg, where he worked as managing director for the wholesale company "Georg von der Busche Handels-Gesellschaft mbH". In August 1932 he joined the Sturmabteilung (SA). In March 1933 he became a member of the NSDAP (membership number 1.499.331).

In June 1933, Kessel moved to Berlin, where he became a the Gestapo by Rudolf Diels operation related party private news agency. For this purpose he worked with the Gestapo commissioner Konrad Nussbaum . Later it was often claimed that Kessel's office was particularly concerned with the investigation of the Reichstag fire of February 1933, with Kessel providing internal information from Nazi leadership circles through Nussbaum and through his, Kessels, former Free Corps comrades from 1919/1920 Kurt Heller - active in the Gestapo since 1933 - and Martin Kirschbaum - since 1933 on the staff of the Berlin SA group leader Ernst - and some other confidants had been leaked. The historians Walter Hofer and Eduard Calic later attributed the anonymous, so-called "K records" they found after the Second World War, in which a research report on the Reichstag fire is presented, to Kessel and argued that these were the result of Kessel's investigations, that this could have brought him to safety before his death.

On June 30, 1934, in the course of the Röhm affair , von Kessel was shot dead by members of the Gestapo or the SS security service in his Berlin office on Tiergartenstrasse . The Freikorpsführer Heinz Hauenstein reported after the Second World War that he had found Kessel, brought by his secretary, in his apartment on the afternoon of June 30th with two shots in the back of his head.

Kessel's murder was kept from the German public. But it was reported in various foreign newspapers.

Theories about the Kessel murder

Hans von Kessel claimed in 1957 in a letter to the news magazine Der Spiegel , the murder of his brother was like expired follows: First, was Reinhard Heydrich with a rolling command of the SS appeared in the boiler house in the Tiergarten district. The latter opened fire immediately upon entering the premises, whereupon Eugen von Kessel slumped behind his desk. Soon after, says Hans runs from boiler - citing alleged statements of his mother and a secretary of his brother - gone, was Hermann Goering appeared and had "the rattling the coup de grace given." Kessel himself admitted that this description did not agree with the "idea that one usually has of him (Göring)", but pointed out that his brother Göring through his affidavits in connection with the police investigation of the Reichstag fire and heavily burdened the murder of DNVP politician Oberfohren . In historical research, however, there are strong doubts about this portrayal: Backes confirms in his account of the events that "three Gestapo agents" appeared in Kessel's apartment and shot him, but Hans von Kessel describes the portrayal as a "robber pistol". In particular, he distrusts the allegation of Heydrich and Göring's presence, since, according to him, the presence of “so many celebrities” at the scene of a murder on June 30th did not occur anywhere else and precisely these two Nazi leaders on June 30th most of the time their respective command centers. Kessel later specified his account to the effect that his brother had been arrested in the Ministry of the Interior and brought to his apartment on the pretext of being searched for a house search, where he was shot and tried to disguise the act as a suicide.

While Christoph Graf and Walther Hofer assumed that with Kessel an "inconvenient carrier of secrets" in connection with the Reichstag fire of February 1933 was eliminated, Backes sees Kessel's murder in the rivalry between Himmler and Heydrich and the fallen former Gestapo chief Diels.

Heinz Hauenstein reported in the 1950s that Kessel had reported reports of attacks by the SS to the Gestapo (before it was taken over by the SS in April 1934) on behalf of Franz von Papen. The "group of SS men whose crossing Kessel reported" shot him.

In his memoirs, Hans Bernd Gisevius claimed that Kessel's murderers were the same men who shot the ministerial director Erich Klausener in the Ministry of Transport and several other people in the government district who were unpopular to the Nazi leadership . Their approach was very systematic and the execution of the deeds was always the same: They would gradually break into the offices and apartments of their victims like a checklist, would have shot them down without a word and then immediately drove on to their next victim. The general motive for the murder of von Kessel was that he ran “a news office on Potsdamer Strasse that was uncomfortable for the Gestapo”. Since numerous claims made by Gisevius were later refuted by historical research, this statement must also be treated with skepticism.

Archival material

The NSDAP index card for Eugen von Kessel has been preserved in the Federal Archives. Also the administrative act for his admission into the NSDAP (NS 23/157).

Web links

• Bernhard Sauer: On the political position of the Berlin security police in the Weimar Republic. (PDF, 87 KB) In: ZfG , 53rd year 2005, issue 1

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Place and date of birth and place and date of death according to Matthias Schmettow: Gedenkbuch des Deutschen Adels , 1967, p. 161.
2. ↑ Dieter Dreetz / Klaus Gessner / Heinz Sperling: Armed Fights in Germany 1918–1923 , 1988, p. 53.
3. ^ Uwe Backes: Reichstag fire. Clarification of a historical legend . Piper, Munich 1986, ISBN 3-492-03027-0 , p. 180.
4. ^ IfZ: Witness literature Hauenstein: Record of a questioning of Hauenstein on July 18, 1956 .
5. ↑ See e.g. B. “Another murdered man”, in: Pariser Tageblatt of July 11, 1934 ( digitized version ). There it says that Kessel, who is identified as an officer of the Secret State Police, was one of the first to be killed in his apartment around noon and that his murder caused a greater stir.
6. ↑ Der Spiegel No. 23/1957, p. 6.
7. ^ Uwe Backes: Reichstagbrand , 1986, p. 179.
8. ↑ Christoph Graf: Political Police Between Democracy and Dictatorship , 1983, p. 371 or Walther Hofer: Der Reichstagbrand. A scientific documentation , 1978, p. 462 (Hofer speaks briefly of the fact that the act is the proof "that a carrier of secrets was removed here"). An article in the journal Wissenschaft und Studium speaks of Kessel as an "inconvenient information carrier".
9. ^ IfZ: Witness literature Hauenstein: Record of a questioning of Hauenstein on July 18, 1956 .
10. ^ Hans Bernd Gisevius: Until the bitter end , 1946, p. 242.