Georg Bell

This article is about the spy Georg Bell. For other people, see George Bell .

Georg Emil Bell (born July 27, 1898 in Laufamholz near Nuremberg ; † April 3, 1933 in Durchholzen ) was a German engineer and spy . He was best known as a close associate of the long-time chief of staff of the SA Ernst Röhm .

Live and act

Earlier career

Bell came from a well-to-do middle-class family. He was born in 1898 as the son of businessman Emil G. Bell († 1931/1932), director of a watch factory in Laufamholz near Nuremberg. His biographers have not yet been able to determine any information about Bell's mother. Bell had Scottish roots through his father, but the - u. a. Spread by Bell himself - the claim that the British archaeologist of the same name, Gertrude Bell , who became famous as a British agent in the Orient during the First World War, was an aunt of his, is today disproved. The English Society of Genealogists considers a distant relationship to be possible.

In his youth, Bell attended secondary school in Nuremberg. From around 1916 he took part in the First World War as a soldier , probably in a Bavarian unit. He himself later stated that he had been deployed as a "war correspondent in Turkey". Bell's biographer Andrea Dornheim considers his use as a war correspondent - partly because of his age - to be very questionable, but considers it relatively certain that Bell was actually used in Turkey.

In the academic year 1919/1920, Bell began a four-semester degree in electrical engineering at the Higher Technical State College in Nuremberg, which he completed on July 31, 1921 with the grade “good”. As a student he belonged to the striking association "Bavaria". Bell also worked in right-wing, paramilitary circles and military associations during his studies. In 1919 or 1920 he became a member of the Reichsflagge association , where he a. a. the later chief of staff of the SA Ernst Röhm and the later chief of the intelligence service of the SA, Karl Leon Du Moulin-Eckart .

After completing his studies, Bell worked as an electrical engineer for various companies in Nuremberg, including for the Nuremberg branch of Siemens-Schuckert-Werke, for Sachsenwerke and as a senior engineer at Elektromaschinen AG. Around 1925 he moved to Munich, where he worked as an engineer in the Munich department of the Berlin Maffei Schwartzkopff works . He gave up this position on May 1, 1927.

Tscherwonzen Affair (1927 to 1930)

Bell first became known to a broader public as one of the defendants in the so-called “Chervonzen Trial” (1928): The background was the Chervonzen affair , an attempt by anti-Soviet-minded exiles and, with these representatives of the German political right, the young Soviet Union in 1927 to flood counterfeit Chervonzen (10 ruble notes) in order to trigger extreme inflation of the Soviet currency and thus an economic and political destabilization of the Soviet state. In addition, the activities of Georgian underground organizations in the Georgian Soviet Republic , which were striving to restore their homeland's independence from Russia, were to be supported by the supply of counterfeit money. These efforts became public after the Berlin police received notification in August 1927 that fake Russian Tscherwonzen had been put into circulation in Berlin and that they were able to arrest the distributor of the same, the engineer Leonhard Becker, a former superior of Bell.

The following investigations led the authorities to the Georgians in exile Schalwa Alexander Karumidze and Basilius Sadathieraschwili in Munich. In a local printing 20,000 sheets watermarked paper were seized, out of which 120,000 notes counterfeit money (= 1.2 million rubles) would have to be produced. A total of 400,000 sheets of watermark paper had been ordered, from which 800,000 to 1,200,000 banknotes could have been made. At this point in time around 12,000 to 13,000 successful Chervonzen notes had come into circulation in Russia. The Soviet Union then attempted to establish a connection between these activities and the then ongoing trial in Leningrad of Rittmeister Schiller - who was on trial for counterrevolutionary efforts - by claiming that Schiller had false Tscherwon notes in Russia on behalf of the Tscherwon forgers Circulated. The Foreign Office in Berlin, however, considered this to be implausible and classified it as a pure propaganda maneuver through which the Soviets would try to increase the likelihood of a conviction of the anti-Soviet activists accused in Berlin. The press reported on the events from November 1927, with numerous speculations and rumors further dramatizing the events and thus increasing public interest in the matter. So the assertion - probably spread by Bell's defense lawyers - made the rounds that Wolfgang Stresemann , the son of the Foreign Minister, was involved in the affair. Liberal and left-wing newspapers speculated that powerful backers were behind the whole process, with the general manager of the Royal Dutch Shell , Henri Deterding , and the former general Max Hoffmann being "identified" as pulling the cord.

Bell had come into contact with the circle of Tscherwon forgers through the painter Otto von Kursell : In April 1926 he met Karumdize in Kursell's Munich studio and on this occasion talked to him about possibilities of liberating the Caucasus peoples from the yoke of the The oppression of the Soviet system was exchanged. In the spring of 1927 he met Karumidze, Sadathieraschwili and a printer's owner at the Excelsior Hotel in Munich. Further meetings followed until Karumidze Bell offered to accommodate him as a political agent for the Caucasian Committee in Trebizond , Turkey, since the Turkish government had expelled the previous agent under pressure from the Soviet government. Bell had agreed to take on this post. In May 1927 he then tried to raise funds for the Georgians in exile. Together with Becker, he was finally able to win over the Munich engineer Max-Otto Wurmbach to provide a loan of RM 15,000, but had to submit 1000 fake Tscherwonz notes to Wurmbach as a condition, which he deposited with the bank Seuss & Strobel . Lieutenant Hanns Günther von Obernitz acted as the shop steward . Wurmbach thereupon gave him 3000 RM in cash and 12,000 as a letter of credit in English pounds. Bell then traveled to Sofia and then to Constantinople and Trebizond and back to Sofia. There, according to Karumdize's later statements, he is said to have commented on the forgery issue in front of outsiders in a careless manner on numerous occasions. In particular, however, he was later accused of fraud and self-enrichment because, contrary to his promise to Wurmbacher to withdraw as much money from the account set up as he absolutely needed each time, he withdrew all the funds made available in one fell swoop had taken his trip to the Balkans and Turkey with him. Becker also stated that he had been financially cheated by Bell so that he stood penniless, so that Sadathierashvili had given him around 500 Cherwon notes to cover his running costs. The use of these notes by Becker enabled the Berlin police to track down the counterfeiters ahead of time - i.e. before the production of the majority of the counterfeit Tscherwonzen had even started and especially before they could be distributed. Also in 1927 Bell tricked himself into a large amount of money by pretending to the merchant Theodor Rieger that he had given him, Rieger, a prestigious position as Bulgarian consul through his good relationships with important Bulgarian circles, for which he earned a considerable fee with which he ran off before Rieger realized that Bell had made a fool of him.

The legal proceedings initiated because of the Tscherwonzen affair initially ended lightly for Bell: On July 27, 1928, the Holiday Criminal Section I of the District Court I in Berlin set the proceedings against seven of the fifteen people who had been charged in the matter, including Bell, with a notice the Act on Impunity of July 13, 1928 (Amnesty Act), which stipulates a penalty for political offenses. In this instance, the district court affirmed the view that the defendants had acted for political reasons. Bell had surrendered to the authorities in May 1928 and had been in custody from May 15 to July 27, 1928, before he was released on the basis of the July 27, 1928 judgment. As a result of a complaint by the Berlin public prosecutor's office, the judgment of July 27, 1928 was overturned on September 26, 1928 for Bell, Sadathierashvili and one other accused by the 2nd criminal division of the Berlin Higher Regional Court and the re-arrest of Sadathierashvili and Bell was ordered. On October 8, 1928, the Prussian Regional Court I in Berlin opened the main proceedings against Georg Bell and Wilhelm Schmidt at the request of the public prosecutor. In Bell's case, however, this could not be carried out due to the inability to determine his whereabouts - he was hiding with a friend in Rosenheim . After he was assured of safe conduct on October 31, 1928, he again surrendered to the authorities. Another arrest warrant was issued in February 1929. In May 1929 the attorney general intended to apply to Regional Court I in Berlin for the preliminary termination of the proceedings, but instead filed a supplementary indictment against Bell in the summer of 1929: in this he was charged that he acted not for political, but primarily for profit-seeking motives, which is why the conditions for the applicability of the amnesty of 1928, which only applies to political offenses, to his person are not given. The public prosecutor said that Bell was indifferent to Sadathierashvili and Karumidze's political plans. “All that mattered to him was to get money for himself.” This applied even more clearly to the Rieger fraud, to the “political motives for Bell out of the question ”. In the interests of German-Soviet relations, the Foreign Office in particular urged the Prussian Ministry of Justice not to give the perpetrators amnesty.

On January 6, 1930, the Tscherwonzen trial was finally opened. Previously, the temporary theft of the case files had caused considerable delays. The press speculated that they were brought to England and photographed there. The Foreign Office, on the other hand, suspected the Berlin Soviet embassy to have temporarily seized the files and photographed them. On February 8, 1930, the Berlin-Moabit lay judge acquitted some of the defendants, while the proceedings against the others (including Bell, Karumidze and Sadathieraschwili) were initially suspended due to the amnesty law. After the public prosecutor's office appealed, the appeal hearing took place in July 1930. This ended on July 21, 1930 when Bell, Karl Böhle, Schalwa Karumidze, Basilius Sadathieraschwili and Wilhelm Schmidt were convicted. Bell received a fine of RM 300. The main defendants Karumidze and Sadathierashvili were sentenced to prison terms of two years and ten months and two years, respectively, for "continued joint, partly completed, partly attempted coinage and fraud" and forgery of documents. The appeal submitted by the four defendants was finally rejected on January 14, 1932 by the 2nd criminal division of the Reichsgericht , which was justified by the fact that only "German political motives" within the meaning of the amnesty law could be considered for impunity, which the four men considered were not considered given.

According to his biographer Dornheim, however, the negative effect for Bell was less the verdict in the Tscherwonzen trial than the fact that leading National Socialists like Alfred Rosenberg gained the impression in the course of the court proceedings that Bell had not had political but financial motives ( ie for the purpose of self-enrichment) acted in the Tscherwonzen affair.

Process Bell / Wendt

A second trial initiated against him in 1929 was also of great importance for Bell's later life: On July 20, 1929, the Munich District Court issued an arrest warrant against him for “an offense against Section 6 of the law against the disclosure of military secrets of June 3 1914 ". The arrest warrant was confirmed by the examining magistrate of the Bavarian Supreme Court on August 27, 1929 , but it was revoked on October 15, 1929 after it had been determined that there was no risk of obscuration or flight. As a result, he was released from pretrial detention on that day from the court prison on Neudeck in Munich.

In the further course of the trial, charges were brought against a Karl Franz Wendt . The details of the Bell / Wendt trial are unknown today, as the files of the Bavarian Supreme Court have been lost. These were probably confiscated by the SS security service after 1933. According to records from a friend, Bell had been so clumsy in attempting to detect a French spy that he was charged with divulging military secrets. The main hearing took place in December 1929 and ended with Bell's conviction for betraying military secrets, so that from then on he was considered to have a criminal record - especially because of a dishonorable offense. Following that trial, Bell, who was considered a flawed man by the standards of the day, considered killing himself. In addition, he had great difficulties in finding a job, so that from then on he made a living as an “upscale garage attendant”. In anonymous publications he was attacked at this time, especially by the communist side, as a "boastful, blackmailer and gun dealer [...] [as well as one of the largest and most insidious informers, spies and provocateurs".

In 1929 Georg Bell met Hildegard Huber (* 1905), with whom he became engaged at Easter 1931.

Activity for Ernst Röhm (1931 to 1932)

In November 1930 Bell met the former officer Ernst Röhm , who had recently returned from Bolivia - where he had worked as a military instructor from 1928 to 1930 - whom he knew from his time with the Reichsflagge from 1919 to 1923, but had not seen him for many years happened to be in front of the Herzog garage in Munich. In the period that followed, Bell and Röhm, who at the beginning of 1931 took over the post of Chief of Staff of the Sturmabteilung (SA), the paramilitary fighting organization of the NSDAP, at the request of Adolf Hitler , met repeatedly and renewed their old relationship. This ultimately led to the appointment of Bell as Röhm's personal agent. His main task was initially to undertake “trips to domestic and foreign political personalities” and to advertise the Nazi movement and especially the SA or to counteract its bad reputation through corrective “educational work”. For this purpose he should make his connections and relationships already existing from earlier times available to Röhm or use them in his sense.

On April 21, 1931, Bell's position at Röhm was formalized by a contract in which Bell undertook to give up any independent and personal political activity and instead to do all of Röhm's political and personal assignments, for which he received a monthly fixed salary of 350 RM. In return, he initially received three major orders, namely: 1) Establishment and expansion of a large SA intelligence service at home and abroad (Du Moulin's apartment at Hohenzollernplatz 1 in Munich, into which Bell moved), served as an office; 2) Establishment of a separate press office for the SA with the introduction of its own newspaper; 3) Establishment of a propaganda point for Röhm personally and the SA abroad and in Germany. The framework for Bell's negotiations abroad was a nine-page exposé by Röhm on the foreign policy objectives of the NSDAP, which was handed to him on April 22, 1931. According to his own notes, Röhm Bell is said to have previously described the nature of their collaboration with the words:

“It must be clear to you that we have to stick together for better or worse and that this cooperation is for life. He emphasized that I stand and fall with him. This agreement was then confirmed with a solemn handshake and sealed with a word of honor. "

Bell spent most of 1931 executing Röhm's orders outlined above, making numerous trips abroad. At that time, he summed up his job as Röhm's employee as saying that he should inform Röhm “about the political situation, political factors and political processes in Germany”. His official entry into the NSDAP - in which he belonged to the local group Endorf (membership number 290.055) - followed in autumn 1931. At this time, he was also supposed to report the suicide of his niece Geli Raubal to Hitler in September 1931 and to fetch him back to Munich from Nuremberg to have.

Alleged plans to assassinate Adolf Hitler (1931/1932)

According to a document that was controversial in specialist research - a testimony allegedly from Röhm's confidante Martin Schätzl from the 1930s, which was anonymously sent to the Traunstein district court in 1948 on the occasion of the trial of Bell's murder - Bell belonged to a group of seven in 1931/1932 “ in the immediate vicinity of Röhm ”, which at that time behind Röhm's back was“ seriously ”considering the murder of Adolf Hitler. The background to this plan was allegedly the opinion of the members of this group that Hitler's strategy to take over political power in the German Reich by the Nazi movement was a mistake. Since 1924/1925, Hitler's political conception stipulated that, after the failure of the Hitler putsch in 1923, the NSDAP had to strictly refrain from attempting to gain possession of state power through a violent overthrow and instead had to rely on a strictly ( formal) legal procedure for obtaining state power, as the only method to be pursued, by convincing the Reich President by winning victories in democratic elections on the basis of their strength in parliament and their support in the population to delegate the leadership of the government voluntarily.

In contrast, the group to which Bell allegedly belonged was, according to the "Schätzl Document", convinced that Hitler's plan would not work, as the Reich President and the other relevant persons who decided to whom the leadership of the government would be entrusted in spite of it overwhelming electoral successes of the NSDAP would never be willing to hand over the leadership of the government to the NSDAP voluntarily. From this these men allegedly drew the conclusion that in order to achieve its goal (control of the state) the Nazi movement would have to attempt another violent overthrow, because otherwise it would conquer itself to death without achieving anything, and consequently in the long term would fall apart again. Hitler, who stood in the way of initiating such a coup attempt with his insistence on a legal course, should therefore, in the opinion of these men, be eliminated by an assassination as a prerequisite for being able to take the course of violence they supposedly wanted. According to the “Schätzl Document” this group of conspirators belonged to “Engineer Bell, Standartenführer Uhl , Brigadefuehrer Schmid , Lieutenant Heines and three other people.” Further, among the members of this group “the lot has already been drawn” as to “who is to murder Hitler ", Whereby the lot fell on" Standartenführer Uhl "," who was also determined to act ". However, after his visit to the pilgrimage town of Konnersreuth , Bell had a remorse “and no longer wanted to participate”. After Hitler finally managed to come to power with his legality course, contrary to the group's expectations, the remaining conspirators also quietly rejected their plans.

While Andreas Dornheim take the information from the Schätzl document in his study on the life and murder of Bell and Hans Günther Richardi and Martin Schumacher in their work on Röhm's alleged plans for a "Reich without Hitler" as likely to be true, Eleanor takes In her Röhm biography, Hancock takes a skeptical attitude towards this source, which is why, as she explains in a consideration in the appendix, she has refrained from relying on it.

Resignation from the NSDAP

In the spring of 1932 Georg Bell broke with Röhm and National Socialism: The reason was an assassination plan that a group in the Reich leadership of the NSDAP led by Walter Buch , the head of the Supreme Party Court of the NSDAP , against Röhm's closest colleague (although not against this himself) forged. The background was that the members of this group, as self-appointed guardians of the cleanliness of the Nazi movement, the influence of Röhm's closest employees - about whom they had come to destructive judgments - on the chief of staff of the SA and thus on the leadership of the SA as a whole through the wanted to turn off physical elimination of these men. They saw the influence of these men on Röhm (and thus on the course of the party army he directed) as a considerable threat to the reputation and chances of success of the NSDAP at the ballot boxes. Buch and his confidants specifically rated three men as fatal personalities in Röhm's entourage who should be eliminated: Du Moulin-Eckart (Röhm's adjutant), Julius Uhl (the head of Röhm's staff guard) and Bell.

After the plan was made to remove these "doomed figures", Buch commissioned his friend Emil Danzeisen to organize and carry out an assassination attempt on the three men. The plan, however, flew when one of the men targeted as an assassin, an engineer named Karl Horn, got remorse and went to Du Moulin-Eckart in his office and informed him about Buch's murder plans against him, Bell and Uhl. Shortly afterwards, the social democratic newspaper Münchener Post was informed of the matter by a person who had not been identified with absolute certainty - Hitler later suspected that Du Moulin-Eckart himself was this. She insisted on presenting the party-internal murder plans of high-ranking Nazi officials against other high-ranking Nazi officials in sensational articles to the public. In April, for example, newspaper readers found out about a “murder plot in the Brown House”, while the group around Danzeisen was presented to the public as “Cell G”, the party-internal femoral department of the NSDAP. The treasurer of the NSDAP, Franz Xaver Schwarz , and the deputy head of the organization, Paul Schulz , who were also accused of involvement in the assassination plans, then sued - successfully - against the Munich Post. Danzeisen was sentenced to six months' imprisonment for preparing several murders, Horn was acquitted for active repentance.

The resulting internal disputes between the group around Röhm and the group around Buch finally ended with a word of power from Hitler, who continued to support Röhm, but at the same time demanded the removal of Du Moulin-Eckart from the NSDAP headquarters. In the course of the subsequent reorganization of Röhm's staff, the chief of staff also gradually distanced himself from Bell. An alienation between the two had already been initiated a few weeks earlier due to Bell's severe criticism of the way in which Du Moulin-Eckart had organized the SA intelligence service - which Bell considered amateurish. Bell and Röhm's last personal meeting took place on April 19, 1932. The ban on the SA (which lasted until July 1932) by the Brüning government shortly beforehand in April 1932 also meant that Röhm's budget was severely cut, so that there was no longer any material basis for financing Bell's activities. All this led to Röhms turning away from Bell quite abruptly. Bell's biographers Richardi and Schumacher state that Röhms also did this in an abusive manner, “without informing Bell about the reasons for his attitude”, which “hurt” him.

Out of grief at Röhm's treatment, but also out of horror at the conditions in the leadership circle of the NSDAP, which he had become aware of while working for Röhm, Bell took a sharp opposition to the NSDAP in the summer of 1932. For this reason Bell entered into close relationships with the Munich journalist Fritz Gerlich , the publisher and editor-in-chief of the newspaper Der Straight Weg , a staunch Nazi opponent. He emphatically supported his journalistic campaign against the NSDAP in the second half of 1932 and in the spring of 1933 by providing it with inside information about the NS leadership and its activities and plans, which he had become aware of during his time at Röhm and also began to work in political news dealer circles instead of acting as an agent of the NSDAP / SA as an agent of the Nazi opponent Gerlich and in these circles to collect information that could be useful for Gerlich in his activities against the NSDAP. So he made a 180-degree turn from an agent for the Nazi movement to an agent working against National Socialism.

Finally, on October 8, 1932, Bell publicly announced his resignation from the NSDAP: In an open letter that he sent to various newspaper editors, he justified this, among other things. a. with the broken relationship of trust between him and Röhm as well as with differences between him and the chief of the SA intelligence service Du Moulin-Eckart regarding the appropriate organization of an intelligence service. He also indicated that his relationship with Röhm had been strained by his homosexuality and that he had to make Röhm aware that he was not also homosexual. He addressed Adolf Hitler's address, referring to the publication of the so-called Heimsoth letters (some of Röhm's letters to the neurologist Karl-Günther Heimsoth from 1929 and 1930, in which he was in a for the scandal about the homosexual disposition of Ernst Röhm and some of his employees, the broadside: "How could Hitler save Germany if he can't even create order and cleanliness in his own house?"

Escape abroad and murder

When the National Socialists came to power, Bell immediately took a prominent place on the “black lists” of the new rulers. The reason for this was, on the one hand, his collaboration with the Catholic press in 1932 - in particular with the programmatically anti-Nazi newspaper Der Straight Weg by the Munich journalist Fritz Gerlich - and his intimate knowledge of delicate internal issues of the Nazi leadership and in particular of the circle around Ernst Röhm. When the editorial office of Gerlich Weg was occupied by the SA in March 1933, with Gerlich and others being arrested, Bell was able to flee through a daring maneuver - he escaped over the roof. SA commands sent by Röhm then repeatedly went to Bell's fiancé's house in Krottenmühl on the Simssee, where they searched the house and - after they did not find Bell there - took his fiancée and her mother into protective custody in order to use pressure against him to get. At that time, Bell moved abroad under circumstances that were not entirely clear. According to the memoirs of Hans von Lehndorff , he went to the conservative private scholar and Nazi opponent Carl von Jordans in March 1933 with the request to help him escape abroad, which Jordans responded to.

After successfully crossing the border, Bell went to Austria , where he tried to cover up his track by changing his whereabouts several times. In the following weeks he tried to get out of the impasse he found himself in by establishing new relationships. So he met u. a. between March 10 and 26, 1933 on the Voralberg / Swiss border - probably on March 25, 1933 in Romanshorn - together with the head of the KPD's intelligence service, Willi Münzenberg , to whom he communicated, which he later (partly in distorted Form) in the Brown Book about the Reichstag fire and Hitler terror . In the first edition of this work, the communists spread the rumor that at the time of the Reichstag fire on the evening of February 27, 1933, Bell was still in league with the National Socialists and, as a confidante of the imminent arson in the Reichstag building, was involved in the propaganda staging of this process By telephoning various foreign press representatives that evening on behalf of the Nazi leadership that the Reichstag was on fire and that the communists were responsible for it. Due to a voting error, however, he made these calls at a time when the fire had not yet broken out ("A small mistake in the director; he should have phoned half an hour later."). In fact, Bell was not in Berlin on February 27, 1933, but in Munich.

At the beginning of April 1933, the National Socialists finally managed to track down Bell in the Gasthof Blattlwirt near Durchholzen near Kufstein . On April 3, 1933, he was visited there by a task force made up of members of the Bavarian Political Police , the SA and the SS. In negotiations with two members of the task force in his room, he finally agreed to accompany them back to Germany. While he was still getting ready to travel, he was killed by another member of the commando - who unexpectedly entered his room and shot him. According to the examining medical examiner's report, he suffered five gunshot wounds in the back (four bullets and one bullet), one of which pierced the aorta was fatal (the rest two hit the heart and two hit the lungs). In his study on Bell's Politics and Death, Andreas Dornheim tends to the thesis that the fatal shots at Bell were fired by Julius Uhl: When he found out that Bell was to be returned to Germany, he was inconspicuous and apparently without the arrest squad any ulterior motive attached to prevent this by killing Bell. The motive for this course of action was that Uhl feared that after returning to Munich, Bell would inform Röhm or the political police "in a fit of remorse [...] of the conspiracy to murder Hitler", which could potentially affect him, Uhl could cost the head. In order to get rid of this danger for himself and the other six confidants, Uhl shot Bell. The assumption expressed by other parties that Reinhard Heydrich was responsible for the murder (as the client) is, however, considered extremely unlikely by Dornheim, since Heydrich was more interested in an interrogation of Bell in order to obtain valuable information about the SA chief Röhm to obtain. Accordingly, from Heydrich's point of view, killing Bell was not desirable (at least for the time being). Richardi and Schumacher take the same view in their book Secret Files Gerlich / Bell and argue that Heydrich would have wanted Bell to be alive in order to get Röhm in hand through him, while Uhl had the goal of preventing Bell from being made to speak . Materially, both Dornheim and Richardi / Schumann rely on first-hand and second-hand witnesses who testified that Uhl was a perpetrator: Kuchler, who was part of the detachment sent to Durchholzen, stated that he knew this from his own experience, while a certain Hans Rauscher announced that Röhm's adjutant Hans-Erwin von Spreti-Weilbach had named Uhl as the perpetrator. Erich Sparmann, who is also part of the Kommando in Durchholzen, also explained that the day after Bell's death in the Brown House, the name Uhl was given to him as that of the shooter. Some sources claim that Uhl's going it alone - the background of which, of course, was not fully understood - so angered the Nazi leadership that the party judge Buch initiated investigative proceedings against Bell in 1933, the results of which contributed to making Röhm's environment further in the eyes of Hitler and the party leadership to discredit, which was one of the reasons for the decision of Hitler and the party leaders in 1934 to overthrow the SA leadership.

Richardi and Schumann summarized the motives that, in their opinion, determined Uhl's actions as follows:

“The persecutors probably did not expect the fatal outcome of their company, which initially only concerned the arrest of Bell - with the exception of Uhl, who had a valid reason for his act. He took up his gun after he found out in the hall of the inn that Bell was ready to hand himself over to the Bavarian Political Police. He had to fear that Heydrich in the Munich police headquarters would learn from Bell that the SA-Sturmbannführer was ready to carry out an attack on Hitler. So he decided to liquidate Bell, who refused to travel with the SA, that is, with him, on the spot in Durchholzen and not first, as planned, on the way in the car. "

The members of the commando that Bell visited in Durchholzen fled immediately after his shooting in their cars back across the German border in order to evade the advancing Austrian police. During their escape, they broke through the closed barrier at the Oberaudorf border crossing and caught fire from a German border post.

In 1947, the Traunstein public prosecutor's office initiated an investigation into Bell's murder: These were directed against SS members Ludwig Kuchler and Erich Sparmann , who had belonged to the command that Bell visited in Durchholzen. Neither of them stated that they participated in the killing and that they had no intention of killing Bell beforehand: In the subsequent trial (known as the “Kuchler trial”), Kuchler was sentenced to seven years in prison, while the proceedings against Sparmann were discontinued was because he was exonerated by the eyewitness Josef Hell, who testified that Sparmann was not the shooter, but had conversed unsuspectingly with Bell in his room when he - the shooter - entered the room. But because Kuchler could not prove the act either, the Munich Higher Regional Court changed the judgment of the Traunstein Regional Court on December 7, 1948, so that both defendants, Sparmann and Kuchler, were found guilty of "a complicity in a crime of deprivation of liberty resulting in death" . After the proceedings were referred back to the Traunstein Regional Court, both defendants were sentenced on March 30, 1949 to three years in prison.

According to the historian Bernd-Ulrich Hergemöller , the order for the murder of Bell came from the NSDAP party judge Walter Buch , who was also Martin Bormann's father-in-law . Afterwards, Buch feared that Bell was too dangerous as a confidante of the sexual internals of the SA and as a potential blackmailer.

Aftermath

The communist propaganda surrounding Munzenberg stylized Bell posthumously as a National Socialist super agent, a type of "fascist adventurer" who was "a spy, gun dealer, blackmailer, national hero rolled into one".

literature

Published original sources:

• Alexander Dimitrios: Weimar and the fight against the «right». A political biography , Vol. 3 (Documents), Ulm 2009, pp. 271–280. (Collection of letters from Georg Bell to Ernst Röhm, Karl-Leon DuMoulin-Eckart and others from 1932)

Contemporary publications :

• Anonymous: from arson to femicide! Happiness and the end of the National Socialist Bell , Saarbrücken o. J. [1933 or 1934]. (Rarum)

Non-scientific literature :

• Winfried Martini : “The story of a taxi command. Hitler was supposed to be murdered by the SA as early as 1932 ”, in: Süddeutsche Zeitung , Munich edition of July 31, 1948, p. 4
• Albert Norden : Forger. On the history of German-Soviet relations . Dietz, Berlin 1959.

Secondary literature:

• Andreas Dornheim : Röhm's man for abroad. Politics and murder of SA agent Georg Bell , Lit, Münster 1998.
• Burkhard Jellonnek: homosexuals under the swastika. The persecution of homosexuals in the Third Reich , Schöningh, Paderborn 1990, pp. 70–71.
• Hans-Günter Richardi / Klaus Schumann: Secret files Gerlich / Bell: Röhm's plans for a Reich without Hitler , Munich 1993.

Web links

• Literature by and about Georg Bell in the catalog of the German National Library
• Materials on Georg Bell at Wiki Commons

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Dornheim: Bell, p. 16.
2. ↑ Dornheim: Bell , p. 19 f.
3. ↑ Dornheim: Bell, pp. 19-21.
4. ↑ Dornheim: Bell, p. 19 f. and 24.
5. ↑ Dornheim: Bell, pp. 25-27.
6. ↑ Dornheim: Bell , p. 35.
7. ↑ Dornheim: Bell , pp. 28-30.
8. ↑ Dornheim: Bell, p. 27.
9. ↑ Dornheim: Bell , p. 47.
10. ↑ Dornheim: Bell, pp. 194–196.
11. ^ Richardi / Schumacher: Secret files , p. 53.
12. ^ Andreas Dornheim: Röhm's husband for abroad. Politics and assassination of the SA agent Georg Bell. Münster 1998. pp. 16-20; 49; 207, note 24.
13. ↑ Dornheim: Bell, p. 50; Richardi / Schumann: Secret files, p. 60 f .; Richardi / Schumacher: Secret files , p. 67.
14. ^ Richardi / Schumann: Secret Files , p. 61.
15. ^ Andreas Dornheim: Röhm's husband for abroad. Politics and murder of the SA agent Georg Bell , p. 179 f. and p. 285; Richardi / Schumann: Secret Files, p. 202.
16. ↑ Eleanor Hancock: Ernst Röhm: Hitler's SA Chief of Staff .
17. ↑ Dornheim: Bell, p. 132.
18. ↑ Dornheim: Bell , p. 135; City archive Rosenheim . As of February 17, 2016.
19. ↑ Dornheim: Bell p. 99; Richardi / Schumacher: Secret files, p. 76.
20. ↑ Hans von Lehndorff: People, Horses, Weites Land , 2001, p. 158.
21. ↑ Dornheim: Bell , p. 185.
22. ↑ Dornheim: Bell , pp. 177-180.
23. ^ Richardi / Schumacher: Secret files , p. 129 and 144 f.
24. ^ Richardi / Schumacher: Secret files , p. 145.
25. ^ Richardi / Schumacher: Secret files , p. 145.
26. ^ Richardi / Schumacher: Secret files , p. 144.
27. ↑ Dornheim: Bell , p. 176 f.
28. ↑ Bernd-Ulrich Hergemöller (Hrsg.): Mann für Mann - biographical encyclopedia on the history of love for friends and male-male sexuality in the German-speaking area , Volume 1. Verlag LIT, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-643-10693-3 , p. 118 .
29. ↑ Dornheim: Bell, p. 21.