Georg von Detten (SA member)

Georg von Detten (around 1932).

Georg Friedrich Philipp Maria von Detten (born September 9, 1887 in Hagen ; † July 1 or July 2, 1934 in Berlin -Lichterfelde) was a German officer, politician (NSDAP) and SA leader .

Life

Youth and First World War

Georg von Detten was the fourth and youngest child of the district judge Georg von Detten and his wife Maria (born April 19, 1853 in Osthof; November 10, 1923 in Paderborn ), born Freiin von Morsey. His eldest brother was the later Ministerial Director Hermann von Detten .

He attended high schools in Paderborn , Brilon and Soest and finally passed his school leaving examination in Duderstadt . This was followed by attending the Potsdam War School and joining the infantry regiment “Herwarth von Bittenfeld” (1st Westphalian) No. 13 of the Prussian Army in Münster . In March 1914 Detten was transferred to the Hussar Regiment "Emperor Nicholas II of Russia" (1st Westphalian) No. 8 stationed in Neuhaus near Paderborn . With this regiment Detten took part in World War I , in which he fought on the Western Front until 1918 . During the war, Detten trained as a fighter pilot and was Rittmeister at the end of the war .

Weimar Republic and the time of National Socialism

After his return from the war, Detten worked successively until 1928 as a farmer, bank clerk and head of a transport company. According to contradicting statements, he joined the NSDAP in 1922 or 1924 .

In the late 1920s, Detten, who was considered to be conservative, began a steep career in the SA , the private army of the NSDAP: In 1929 he was appointed SA leader in Dresden, where he initially served as staff leader of the SA group center and later in the SA Group Saxony worked. In 1932 he was promoted to SA group leader.

After the NSDAP came to power , Detten was appointed to the Saxon Ministry of the Interior by Reich Commissioner Manfred von Killinger on March 10, 1933, and on April 6, 1933, was appointed Chief President of the Police in Saxony. Later that year he was appointed head of the political office of the Supreme SA leadership in Berlin's Tiergartenstrasse and at the same time appointed head of all SA commissioners in Prussia . In the SA leadership he was primarily responsible for foreign policy issues.

On March 5, 1933, Detten was elected to the Reichstag for constituency 28 ( Dresden-Bautzen ) as a member of the NSDAP , to which he belonged until his death in 1934. After Detten's death his mandate was taken over by Ernst Ittameier . Some authors like Walther Hofer see Detten as one of the main participants in a possible arson caused by the National Socialists in connection with the Reichstag fire in February 1933. In this connection he is particularly often associated with Joseph Goebbels and Rudolf Diels .

Georg von Detten (far left) in the group of leading National Socialists in autumn 1933: In addition to him in the picture Heinrich Sahm (Lord Mayor of Berlin), August Wilhelm Prince of Prussia , Hermann Göring (Prussian Prime Minister), Julius Lippert , Karl Ernst (Leader of the Berlin SA -Gruppe) and Artur Görlitzer (deputy Gauleiter of Berlin).

assassination

On the morning of June 30, 1934, Detten was arrested in the course of the Röhm affair and shot by an SS firing squad on the night of July 2, 1934 in Berlin on the grounds of the SS barracks in Berlin-Lichterfelde .

Detten was probably shortly after his arrival at Munich Central Station on the morning of June 30, 1934, from where he wanted to travel to the spa town of Bad Wiessee outside Munich , where an SA leaders' meeting was scheduled for that day under Hitler's chairmanship. to which all higher SA leaders were invited, arrested by the Munich police. He was first taken to the Stadelheim prison and from there, along with his staff leader Hans-Joachim von Falkenhausen and two other senior SA leaders who had been arrested in Munich - Karl Schreyer and Fritz von Kraußer - on July 1, 1934 brought to Berlin on a special aircraft. There the four men were taken to the Columbia concentration camp near the Tempelhof airfield .

In the Columbiahaus, Detten and the other three SA leaders were told by SS members that they were sentenced to death and that they would be executed during the night. A stand trial was not carried out in these four cases - unlike some other SA members who were murdered in Berlin on July 1st. The SS limited themselves to telling them that they had been convicted of high treason.

Schreyer, who had attended a speech by Hitler in the Brown House in Munich before his arrest on June 30, later reported that Hitler had become "particularly abusive" against Detten in this speech and justified this with the fact that Detten had endangered the diplomacy of the Reich by "having negotiated with diplomats without knowledge of the Foreign Office and without his approval and that he had also" made contact with the party's mortal enemy, General von Schleicher , "with which he had already" taken the first steps towards high treason " Detten had told him, Schreyer, when he told him this on the night of July 1 to 2, 1934, that he had "just spoken to Schleicher at a private invitation on Hitler's behalf, who had asked Hitler in this regard "Schleicher only asked for a post of Hitler's own choice. A letter from Detten's widow to Franz Gürtner also states that Detten took about 10 days had a one-hour meeting with Hitler before his death, around June 20, 1934.

In addition, Detten's chief of staff, Falkenhausen, met Schleicher once in the second half of June 1934 in the apartment of the banker Wilhelm Regendanz : The background was that Schleicher Regendanz had asked Regendanz to arrange a conversation with a man of the National Socialist movement close to the government in order to share his views discuss the political situation and the relationship between the Reichswehr and the SA. An offer by Falkenhausen to forward his communications about Ernst Röhm to Hitler was rejected by Schleicher on the grounds that he would rather communicate them to Hitler himself in a personal discussion.

In the early morning hours of July 2, 1934, Detten was taken from the Columbiahaus to the SS barracks in Lichterfelde and shot there.

Mostly Goebbels is seen as the person primarily responsible for the murder of Detten. It is reported that in June 1934, Detten handed Hitler a "Goebbels incriminating file", which is why the word got around that Goebbels was the initiator of their (Dettens and Falkenhausens) shooting because he "thinks about those files, obviously worry." would have had. The former Nazi functionary and right-wing extremist author Erich Kern and Robert Melvin Spector also point to Detten's closeness to the conservative resistance. He is associated with the group around Edgar Jung and the former minister Gottfried Treviranus (1891–1971). Spector even sees him as a co-author of Franz von Papen's speech in Marburg .

Partial rehabilitation

Heinrich Bennecke , a senior SA functionary who survived the Röhm affair, reported after the Second World War that Detten's widow was visited by Hitler's deputy Rudolf Hess on July 9, 1934 : Hess had assured the woman that he had been shot of hers Husband knew nothing and at the same time promised her to try to save the honor of the dead. This was shortly afterwards - albeit in a form that was hardly comprehensible for outsiders - in Hitler's speech to the Reichstag on July 13, 1934, in which Hitler commented on the events of the Röhm affair. According to Bennecke, the decisive passage with regard to Detten was Hitler's statement:

“[...] The necessity of the SA's own action [= a violent SA putsch] was justified with the reference to my inability to make up my mind, which would only be remedied when facts were created. Presumably under these untrue pretexts, the foreign policy action was entrusted to Mr. Detten. "

Bennecke explained that this was a rehabilitation of Detten - only recognizable as such to the initiated - because Hitler was the only one who was singled out from the group of generally accused SA leaders: Detten was the only man among those at the time killed SA leaders who had been given the opportunity by Hitler with the words "probably under these untrue pretexts to transfer the action to Mr. Detten" that he was not intentionally and with the conscious will to participate in a highly treasonable action, but out of an error into which the SA leadership around Ernst Röhm supposedly implicated highly treasonable machinations. For the context of the speech, according to Bennecke, the respectful naming of Detten as " Herr von Detten" was unusual - in contrast to this, Hitler usually did not grant other people whom he mentioned in his speech the attribute "Herr", but rather them referred to in a brusquely short form by the surname or with their SA rank.

Detten's widow, who left Berlin in May 1935 and settled in Osnabrück with her children, received a lifelong monthly pension of 500 RM from Reich funds after his death for reasons of "equity". In addition, with the support of her brother-in-law Hermann von Detten, she undertook the rehabilitation of her dead husband: In 1935, at the encouragement of the Reich Minister of Justice, she asked him to obtain a declaration of honor from Hitler / the Reich government in favor of Georg von Detten: In doing so, she established that Hitler was "lost his most loyal man with my husband". "Never" had a thought of unfaithfulness approached him, never a touch clouded his honor. "Despite the benevolent gestures of Gürtner and Rudolf Buttmann , however, there was no public rehabilitation.

personality

The traditional judgments about Detten's personality are much more positive than about most of the high SA leaders:

The first head of the Gestapo, Rudolf Diels , characterizes Detten and his staff leader Falkenhausen as well as the Silesian SA leader Eberhard von Wechmar in his memoirs as "righteous SA leaders" who "did not only act against the atrocities in their own ranks", but "also condemned the course of violence in general".

Family and offspring

On September 2, 1919, he married Renata Krug von Nidda and Falkenstein (born December 22, 1897 in Dresden ), the daughter of the then District Chief of Dresden and later German national Saxony Economics Minister Friedrich Krug von Nidda and Falkenstein . The marriage had three children: The sons Georg-Friedrich Clemens Johann Hermann Constanz (born June 22, 1920 in Dresden, † December 19, 1997 in Konstanz) and Lothar Otto Wilhelm Ludwig Erich Georg (born April 14, 1927 in Osnabrück; † January 6, 1953 in Bad Rothenfelde) and the daughter Gesa-Maria Elisabeth Margrit Johanna Ulrike (born December 11, 1923 in Osnabrück; † February 22, 1997 there).

literature

Non-scientific literature :

• Baldur von Schirach : Georg von Detten , in: Ders .: The pioneers of the Third Reich . Central Office for the German Struggle for Freedom, Essen 1933, p. 41 ff.

Secondary literature

• Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich . Who was what before and after 1945 (= Fischer 16048). Updated edition. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 3-596-16048-0 .
• Joachim Lilla : extras in uniform. The members of the Reichstag 1933–1945. A biographical manual. Including the ethnic and National Socialist members of the Reichstag from May 1924. Droste, Düsseldorf 2004, ISBN 3-7700-5254-4 , p. 97.
• Christine Pieper: Georg von Detten and Hans Hayn. The Saxon SA group leaders and the "Röhm Putsch". In: Dies., Mike Schmeitzner, Gerhard Naser (Hrsg.): Braune Karrieren. Dresden perpetrators and actors in National Socialism. Sandstein, Dresden 2012, ISBN 978-3-942422-85-7 , pp. 60-65.

Web links

• Georg von Detten in the database of members of the Reichstag

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Baldur von Schirach : The Pioneers of the Third Reich , 1933, p. 41f.
2. ^ Matthias Schmettow: Memorial book of the German nobility. 1967, p. 70.
3. ^ Gerhard Schulz: Between Democracy and Dictatorship. Constitutional Policy and Reich Reform in the Weimar Republic , 1992, p. 132.
4. ↑ Baldur von Schirach: The Pioneers of the Third Reich , p. 41, biography in the manual of the Reichstag
5. ^ Andreas Wagner : "Seizure of power" in Saxony. NSDAP and state administration 1930–1935. Böhlau Verlag, Cologne 2004, ISBN 978-3-412-14404-3 , pp. 170, 266.
6. ^ Edouard Calic: Reinhard Heydrich. Key figure of the Third Reich , p. 147.
7. ↑ Walther Hofer: The Reichstag fire. A scientific documentation , 1978, p. 329.
8. ↑ Schreyer's report.
9. ^ Letter from Renata von Detten to Franz Gürtner dated May 1935, printed by: Helmut Heiber: Files of the Party Chancellery of the NSDAP , 1983, process 124 01320-27.
10. ^ Report by Wilhelm Regendanz dated July 2, 1936, written in London and addressed to the Secret State Police in Berlin. Photocopy in the private estate of Schleicher. On this report, cf. Friedrich-Karl von Plehwe: Reich Chancellor Kurt von Schleicher , 1983, p. 337; also the mention of the meeting between Falkenhausen and Schleicher, ibid., p. 298. By mid-June 1934, however, Schleicher had consistently refused any contact with SA leaders. On June 15 or 16, 1934 , he informed Arno von Moyzischewitz that Röhm had tried to establish a connection with him, Schleicher, through an intermediary a few weeks earlier. He, Schleicher, had "clearly rejected this middleman from the start" without even having a discussion (cf. Kunrat von Hammerstein: Spähtrupp , 1963, p. 74).
11. ↑ Heinz Höhne provides the most precise information about Detten's shooting: The Order under the Skull. Die Geschichte der SS. 1967, p. 121, who, citing Schreyer's eyewitness testimony, declares that Detten was brought to the execution around 2.30 a.m. on July 2, 1934. His official death certificate (Zehlendorf death register 1934/139 of July 10, 1934, issued on notification from the Secret State Police Office) states that the time of death on July 2 is 4:00 a.m.
12. ↑ The Month , 1979, p. 82.
13. ↑ Erich Kern : Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich. The statesman. Preußisch Oldendorf 1981, p. 118.
14. ^ ^{A b} Robert Melvin Spector: World Without Civilization. Mass Murder and the Holocaust, History and Analysis. 2005, p. 235.
15. ^ Heinrich Bennecke: Reichswehr , p. 72.
16. ↑ Rudolf Diels: Lucifer ante Portas. Between Severing and Heydrich , 1949, p. 301.
17. ^ Gothaisches Genealogisches Taschenbuch der Briefadeligen houses. 1914. Eighth year, Justus Perthes, Gotha 1913, p. 575.