Felix Aumüller

Felix Aumüller was a German political functionary ( NSDAP ) and SA leader, most recently with the rank of SA group leader and assessor at the People's Court during the Second World War .

Life and activity

In the Foreign Policy Office of the NSDAP (APA) formed in 1933 , a parallel organization to the Foreign Office (AA) headed by Alfred Rosenberg , Aumüller became Head of Department III (Inland) of Main Department I (Intelligence and Organization) headed by Arthur Schumann instructed. In reality, behind the bureaucratic name was the NSDAP's party intelligence service (ND), which had existed since 1931 and was transferred to the APA by the Reich leadership of the NSDAP in 1933. In 1933, the main task of the ND was to monitor the Foreign Office and its staff with regard to their political reliability. Alongside Schumann's deputy Wilhelm Zelger, Aumüller was the most important employee of the ND boss.

After the Nazi leadership decided in the summer of 1934 to incorporate all of the NSDAP's intelligence services and its sub-organizations (in practice this was only the ND) into the security service of the Reichsführer SS (SD), Schumann was ordered by Rudolf Hess - which the latter issued in his capacity as Hitler's deputy in the leadership of the party apparatus of the NSDAP - commissioned on June 9, 1934 to take care of the transfer of the ND to the SD. After it was established in July that this order had not been carried out in full, but that Schumann's own domestic intelligence service still existed secretly within the SD, the latter was accused of having sabotaged Hess's order of July 1934 and joined the SS leadership to have been guilty of infidelity, temporarily detained and expelled from the Schutzstaffel (SS) in December 1934 . In a re-examination of the facts in 1937, however, the SS court came to the conclusion that Schumann had not sabotaged the integration of his intelligence service into the SD at the time, but that he rather "had the honest will to join the domestic intelligence service he headed To transfer the security service of the RFSS unreservedly ”, but that his then employees Wilhelm Zelger and Aumüller had thwarted the transfer by failing to carry out appropriate orders from Schumann. Schumann was therefore credited with having been deceived by his employees. Therefore, the accusation that he had betrayed his superior Reinhard Heydrich and knowingly failed to obey Hess's order of June 1934 - and thereby grossly violated his duty of loyalty and obedience as an SS leader - was withdrawn. His expulsion from the SS was therefore converted into a (not dishonorable) dismissal.

After retiring from the APA, Aumüller worked as a full-time SA leader: until 1937 he worked for the SA group in Thuringia, only to switch to the highest SA leadership that year . After promotions to SA-Oberführer and SA-Brigadführer (1937), he reached his highest rank in the SA on November 9, 1942 when he was promoted to SA-Gruppenführer.

Second World War

During the Second World War, Aumüller was head of Chamber 1 of the Reichsehrenhof in the main office for war victims . In addition, he was an assessor at the People's Court from 1940 and in this capacity was involved in various death sentences of the Nazi judiciary. B. in March 1943 against the Meissen businessman William Otto Bauer , in August 1943 against the lawyer Theodor Korselt , the machine fitter Heinrich Oetting in October 1943 or in November 1944 against the crane operator's wife Emma Hölterhoff , all of whom were sentenced to execution by guillotine for degrading military strength : In a conversation with an acquaintance in June 1942, Bauer announced that there were only two political options left for the German people: "Either we kill Hitler or Hitler kill us". Korselt had said during a tram ride that Hitler would resign as head of government due to the impossibility of victory and that peace must be made. After the fall of Benito Mussolini in July 1943, Oetting had told work colleagues at the Vulkan shipyard that the German war situation was hopeless and that the country would have a democratic government in three months. And Hölterhoff had stated in a conversation with some younger men that if she was sent to the front, she would throw away her weapon, pretend dead and run over to the other side.

literature

• Hans Adolf Jacobsen: National Socialist Foreign Policy, 1933–1938 , 1968.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ His appointment was u. a. announced in: The archive. Reference work for politics, economics, culture , issues 76–78, 1940, p. 515.
2. ↑ On Aumüller's participation in the death sentence against Bauer, see Bernward Dörner: "Heimtücke": The law as a weapon: control, deterrence and persecution in Germany 1933–1945 , 1998, p. 280; on Aumüller's involvement in the death sentence against Oetting see Inge Marssolek / René Ott: Bremen in the Third Reich: Adaptation, Resistance, Persecution , Vol. 3, 1986, p. 396; on Aumüller's involvement in the death sentence against Hölterhoff, see Horst Gädtke: Zeit, Tod und Ewigkeit , 2006, pp. 299–301.