Georg Seidenschwang

Georg Seidenschwang.

Georg Seidenschwang (born September 13, 1891 in Munich , † 1971 ) was a German paramilitary activist . Seidenschwang served as the leader of the Munich Sturmabteilung (SA) from 1926 to 1928 .

Life and activity

Seidenschwang, who was a merchant by profession, took part in the First World War with the Bavarian army . In 1920 he joined the NSDAP for the first time . In 1923 Seidenschwang became company commander of the 4th company of the Munich SA regiment. In this position he took part in the Hitler putsch in November 1923. For this he later received the NSDAP Blood Order (No. 826).

After the NSDAP was re-established in 1925, Seidenschwang joined it again (membership number 65).

In 1926 Seidenschwang was selected by Adolf Hitler as the commander of the SA in Munich. The course of unconditional legality steered by Seidenschwang as SA leader led to large parts of the strongly activist Munich SA, which preferred direct actions that defied the limits of legality as a means of political struggle, against his in the spring of 1927 Leadership rebelled. As the ringleader of the Munich SA revolt that developed from this, Edmund Heine, the leader of the 9th Munich SA storm (Radfahrabteilung Roßbach), appeared, who accused Seidenschwang of lax and impetuous administration. In March 1927, Heines, supported by other Munich SA leaders, tried to overthrow Seidenschwang, which ultimately led to the crisis escalating. In his attacks against the weak leadership, Heines finally even went over to attacking Hitler himself, whom he accused of being surrounded by "brakes" and "bigwigs", primarily Seidenschwang, the SA in Heines' opinion with his narrow-minded leadership drive out the fighting spirit was meant. At the end of May 1927, Hitler finally saw himself forced to carry out a comprehensive "purge" of the Munich SA by having Heines and more than 100 of his supporters expelled from it by the party's investigative and arbitration committee (USchlA).

In the autumn of 1927 there were clashes between the SA and the civil party organization of the NSDAP, which affected the relationship between the two organizations. Seidenschwang, who had opposed the radicalism of the SA in the spring, also joined the allegations of his SA people that the party organization was bureaucratic and corrupt. He openly speculated that “various things were rotten” in political leadership. The result was above all conflicts with the then propaganda functionary Heinrich Himmler , who insinuated that Seidenschwang was deliberately keeping his SA people away from attending the central evenings of the party groups in order to weaken the party organization.

At the beginning of 1928 Seidenschwang finally resigned as SA leader. Seidenschwang's resignation was officially justified with “health reasons”, but the actual reason, according to research by Mathias Rösch, was his “noticeable weakness in leadership” in containing the SA crisis in spring 1927 and the dispute with Heinrich Himmler in autumn 1927. Seidenschwang's successor became Hans Zöberlein .

family

Seidenschwang was married and had a son, Geog Seidenschwang (* 1919), who had also been a member of the NSDAP since May 1, 1937 (membership number 5,774,651).

literature

• Mathias Rösch: The Munich NSDAP 1925–1933. An investigation into the internal structure of the NSDAP in the Weimar Republic , Berlin 2002.
• Adolf Hitler. Speeches, writings, arrangements, February 1925 to January 1933 , Vol. II / 1, published by the Institute for Contemporary History, Munich 1992, p. 429. (Short biography)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Klaus D. Patzwall: Der Blutorden der NSDAP , p. 37.
2. ↑ Rösch p. 160.
3. ↑ Rösch, p. 161.
4. ↑ Rösch p. 162.