Franz von Puttkamer

Franz Olaf Nicolai von Puttkamer (born March 29, 1890 in Posen , † April 21, 1937 in Davos ) was a German economist, journalist and political activist. Among other things, Puttkamer was a member of the constituent Bavarian National Assembly (provisional National Council) from November 1918 to January 1919.

Life and work

Puttkamer came from an old noble family from Western Pomerania. He was the son of General Franz Ernst Wilhelm Bernhard von Puttkamer (1851-1930) and his wife Kathinka von Puttkamer, née Fritzner (1861-1936). After attending grammar school, he studied economics in Berlin, Munich and Freiburg. Puttkamer took part in the First World War as a non-commissioned officer in the Bavarian army. In 1917 he was seriously injured.

In 1918 Puttkamer went to Munich as a national economist. On the occasion of the November Revolution of 1918 that followed the defeat of the German Reich in World War I, Puttkamer became a member of the Munich Soldiers' Council. As a bourgeois democrat, he was elected to the Bavarian Soldiers 'Council by the Munich Soldiers' Council. As a member of the Bavarian Soldiers' Council, he was a member of the provisional National Council of the Free State of Bavaria from November 1918 to January 1919. Both in the Bavarian Soldiers' Council and in the National Council, Puttkamer was part of the democratic faction. During this time he worked with Klingelhöfer and Ernst Toller.

In 1919 Puttkamer was connected to the Thule Society and participated in the organization of the White Guards. During the time of communist rule in Munich during the Bavarian Räterpulbik, he fled to Bamberg.

Around 1919 Puttkamer became editor of the Social Democratic Correspondence in Berlin and of the Volksstimme in Frankfurt am Main.

Activity as a spy in Munich 1922/1923 and involvement in the "Baur" affair

In 1922 Puttkamer returned to Munich, where he worked as a journalist and as an informant for the Social Democratic press and the Republican police. Until 1923 he researched the völkisch movement in Munich by infiltrating its organizations and pretending to be a sympathizer of the ideas and goals of the radical right.

At the turn of the year 1922/1923 Puttkamer was in circles of the early NSDAP as well as the Munich Roßbach Group and the Blücher Association . In the spring of 1923, Puttkamer came into close contact in particular with the student Karl Baur (1901–1923) from Wismar , a wild, völkisch activist whom he met in the 20th Munich SA Hundred. When Baur reported to him about plans to assassinate the former Chancellor Philipp Scheidemann , which he (Baur) had, Puttkamer encouraged him in these plans. Puttkamer was motivated to do this by the intention to let Baur do it for as long as possible in order to learn as much as possible about the donors and backers of right-wing extremist violence. In order to rule out the risk to Scheidemann's life, Puttkamer warned him personally in mid-January 1923 and advised the Central Party Office in Berlin and the office of the Reich Commissioner for the Monitoring of Public Order (the Weimar Republic's equivalent to the protection of the constitution in the present) through an SPD member of Baur's intentions .

After Karl Baur was murdered in February 1923 and his body was discovered in the Isar in March 1923, Puttkamer was taken into custody by the Munich police on suspicion of involvement in the murder of Baur. Puttkamer's brother and girlfriend were also taken into custody.

Although the police investigations finally revealed that Baur had been killed by his own sympathizers, who had come to the conclusion that Baur was a "pest" who misused the Volkish movement for its own benefit and damaged it by his loud demeanor add, Puttkamer was held in custody for a comparatively long time. Claudia Hoffmann, who has evaluated the relevant police files, came to the conclusion in her study of the Fememorden in Bavaria in the 1920s that the Munich police headquarters unequivocally sympathized with the radical right in 1923 and that Puttkamer therefore carried out his spying activities in favor of the existing republican state (the the police officially served) resented: In the contemporary police report established by Hoffmann it is tellingly stated that no evidence of complicity of the von Puttkamer brothers' complicity in Baur's death can be produced, but that it is "perfectly" established that Puttkamer is a "spy in national Circles "and he then wrote" spy reports "based on the information he had learned there, which he made available to the social democratic newspaper Münchener Post and north German government agencies.

Leading representatives of the state authority in Munich tried to incriminate Puttkamer in connection with Baur's death by making the thesis that Baur was apparently murdered because he had been in contact with Puttkamer, so that Baur was a danger due to his relationship with Puttkamer for the Blücherbund. This attempt to construct Puttkamer's complicity in Baur's death ultimately failed because the witness statements did not support this point of view.

The Munich Post saw a publicity campaign against Puttkamer by the police, who presented him as a questionable person in their press releases, which was picked up by the bourgeois newspapers. She tried to counteract this tendency. In particular, the Social Democratic newspaper criticized the fact that Puttkamer was kept in detention for an unjustified period despite the lack of evidence and particularly criticized the police's tendency to characterize the publication of internal information from right-wing associations as illegal. Ultimately, the Post accused the police of having arrested Puttkamer only because he was “a very intimate expert on the network of legal conspiracies”, which they viewed as a blow to journalistic freedom.

A few weeks after his release, Puttkamer was arrested again on the basis of a new arrest warrant dated April 10, 1923. This time the reason for imprisonment was asserted that, by reinforcing Baur in his intention to murder Scheidemann in January, he was guilty of incitement to murder and subordinate minor offenses.

In the trial before the Munich People's Court on July 26, 1923, the court sentenced Puttkamer to eight months in prison for “inciting murder in unity with a violation of inciting violence”. His six-week pre-trial detention was credited to him. He was also fined 500,000 RM. In Puttkamer's favor, the court cited the attempts to notify Scheidemann that he had made at the time, but at the same time charged him with the fact that Scheidemann had been in Augsburg at the critical time in January 1923, while the warnings were only passed on to Kassel. He was also accused that the security measures he had taken were inadequate, as, for example, he had never sent a photo of Baur to the Reich Commissioner for Public Order Monitoring that would have enabled bodyguards and investigators to identify Baur if he had tried to approach Scheidemann. The conclusion of the court was that Puttkamer was certainly aware at the time that his work represented a serious risk to Scheidemann. Therefore, according to the court, he could not rely on the fact that he only supported the assassination in pretense.

As Hoffmann found in the evaluation of the police files, these investigations against Puttkamer were also based on a prejudice against Puttkamer, motivated by the political attitude of the Munich police, because of his activities directed against the political right. So she was able to infer from the files that the Munich police in the case of the Freikorpsführer Gerhard Roßbach - against whom there were also highly incriminating evidence regarding Roßbach's knowledge of Baur's assassination plans - carried out much less thorough investigations than in the case of Puttkamer to clarify the question how far he had known about Baur's assassination plans.

Next life

Shortly after his release from prison, Puttkamer reported from Munich for Berlin in April 1924.

As an opponent of National Socialism, Puttkamer emigrated in 1933. As an emigrant he lived in Hungary, France and Spain. In 1937 he died of severe tuberculosis .

literature

• Ulrike Claudia Hoffmann: Traitors fall for the distance! ". Fememicide in Bavaria in the twenties , 2000.
• Joachim Lilla (edit.): The Bavarian State Parliament 1917/19 to 1933. Nominations-Composition-Biographies , published by the Commission for Bavarian State History at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences (= vol. 21), Munich 2008, p. 463 (entry 436).