Hans Georg Kütemeyer

Hans Georg Kütemeyer (born July 27, 1895 in Hanover ; † November 17, 1928 in Berlin ) was a German businessman and member of the SA. Kütemeyer, who drowned in Berlin's Landwehr Canal in November 1928, was shortly afterwards captured by Nazi propaganda and stylized as a “victim” of communist lust for murder and a martyr of the “national movement”. The police investigations into his death, however, came to the conclusion that he had died in an accident or by suicide without outside interference .

Life and activity

There is only sparse information in the published literature about Kütemeyer's life up to 1928: It is known that he went through commercial training and participated in the First World War as a soldier. After the war he is said to have initially worked as a businessman in his learned profession. Due to the great inflation of 1923, he is said to have lost his job, so that he subsequently worked as a farm laborer for a time before finally going to Berlin. There he worked again in the commercial profession, most recently in the Berlin-Schöneberg district.

In 1927 Kütemeyer joined the NSDAP and the Sturmabteilung (SA). In the latter he belonged to the Berlin SA Storm 15, in which he last held the rank of SA Scharführer. Allegedly Kütemeyer also worked as an assistant in the office of the Berlin Gauleitung, where he is said to have reorganized the disorganized NSDAP membership card index of the Gau over months of hard work.

Kütemeyer's death

On the evening of November 16, 1928, Kütemeyer took part in a major NSDAP event in the Berlin Sports Palace. At this, Adolf Hitler spoke for the first time ever in front of a large crowd - around 18,000 participants were present - in Berlin. Kütemeyer sat at the box office at this event. After the end of the meeting, Kütemeyer was caught in a fight with politically left-wing construction workers on his way home, in which he suffered serious injuries.

A little later that same night, Kütemeyer, who - as the later autopsy showed - was under the influence of alcohol at the time at the Bendler Bridge in Berlin's Landwehr Canal, fell and drowned.

The police investigating the incident quickly came to the conclusion that Kütemeyer's death was not related to the physical confrontation between him and the left-wing construction workers that had taken place a few hours earlier, but that his fall into the Landwehr Canal had taken place through no fault of others: Either it was there an accident under the influence of alcohol or a suicide. The criminal proceedings that were initiated against the construction workers with whom Kütemeyer had fought on the evening of November 17, 1928, ended accordingly with the accused being acquitted of the charge for Kütemeyer's death. Instead, in the judgment of June 19, 1929, they were found “only” guilty of dangerous bodily harm and sentenced to shorter suspended sentences.

Kütemeyer was buried on November 24, 1928 in the Twelve Apostles Cemetery on Tempelhofer Weg in Schöneberg.

Consumption by the National Socialist propaganda

The authorities' findings on the true circumstances of Kütemeyer's death did not prevent the Berlin Gauleiter and leading propagandist of the party Joseph Goebbels from accusing the Kütemeyer case, immediately after he had learned of the death of the SA man, for his rabid agitation against the existing state and to use against political opponents of the Nazis: in which he edited newspaper the attack Goebbels published in the weeks following Kütemeyers death numerous articles in which he dealt with Kütemeyers person and his death. The Gauleiter stubbornly insisted that Kütemeyer had by no means been killed in an accident, but that he had been maliciously murdered by the nefarious opponents of the NSDAP (“red blood mob”). According to the reading that Goebbels tried to give the events of November 17, 1928, Kütemeyer did not fall into the Landwehr Canal by himself, but bloodthirsty communists first severely abused him and then deliberately pushed him into the water, where he was helpless because of his helpless condition , in which he allegedly drowned due to the injuries inflicted on him.

In the pompous and pathetic diction of the propagandist, this sounded as follows: Kütemeyer was, as Goebbels wrote after his funeral, “a victim of his National Socialist convictions”, he was now resting “in German soil, but murdered, assassinated by misguided, agitated fellow citizens . - Tragic fate! ”. He again put a party meeting under the theme "Marxists, why did you murder the worker Kütemeyer?"

The Gauleiter tried to incite Nazi supporters and the wider public not only on a journalistic level, but also by other means, taking advantage of the incident: On November 26, 1928, he offered a reward in his newspaper for tips aimed at apprehending the allegedly existing ones and still being at large would lead Kütemeyer's “murderers”. On the occasion of the funeral of Kütemeyer, which took place two days earlier on November 24, 1928, Goebbels had planned a mass crowd in such a way that the National Socialists would transport the dead with a closed parade of their formations from the morgue on Hannoversche Strasse, where Kütemeyer had been autopsied was supposed to accompany them to the Twelve Apostles Cemetery . The Berlin police had forbidden this plan because they saw in such a march an "immediate danger to public safety" in view of the emotionally charged mood of the NSDAP supporters, which would only be further fueled by such a gathering. The reason stated:

“According to the impeccable police findings, the businessman Hans Kütemeyer drowned in an accident in the Landwehr Canal. Although the police chief officially announced this fact to the public, the NDAP continues to portray the accident in the press and on appeals as a murder committed by political opponents. It repeats this untrue assertion in a letter addressed to the police chief and sent to the press close to it submitted for publication. Without a doubt, these publications are intended to incite the political passions of supporters of the NDAP. In particular, the form and content of the letter addressed to the police chief and the manner in which it was published must have the unmistakably intended effect of further increasing the excitement that has already been evoked. All these facts suggest that participation in the train will pose an imminent threat to public safety. "

Undeterred by such measures and corrections by the authorities and the left-wing press, Goebbels continued to intensively hate the press through November 1928 due to the Kütemeyer case - he went so far as to accuse the police and the "Jewish press" of covering up a murder - led to the fact that the The mood in Berlin became so heated during these weeks that the authorities issued a complete ban on demonstrations in the capital in December 1928. A prohibition to advertise the reward of 1000 marks offered by the Gauleitung for naming the perpetrators by hanging up posters announcing this was circumvented by flooding Berlin at night with blood-red posters referring to this reward, and then simply publicly stated that these had been stuck on "from an unknown source" and that the NSDAP had nothing to do with it.

The version of Kütemeyer's death constructed by Goebbels was then adopted by all Nazi propaganda and reproduced in essentially the same way until 1945. The public announcement of the knowledge that the authorities had gained through their investigations into Kütemeyer's death soon after the first inflammatory articles by Goebbels on the matter remained irrelevant, so that the Nazi press continued with its - the information available on the case distorted - To continue promoting the opinion of the Kütemeyer case. For example, Julius Karl von Engelbrechten wrote in his work A brown army is born , the official history of the Berlin SA published in 1937, about the Kütemeyer case that he had been assassinated by a “gang of communists”: The “red beasts” had the unfortunate SA At that time, Führer unscrupulously pushed into the Landwehr Canal and drowned there. The inconvenient autopsy report, which stated that there was no connection between Kütemeyer's death and the brawl that took place a few hours earlier, as well as other information about the incident that did not fit into the concept, the National Socialists mostly completely or did not conceal in their publications and statements on the case if they did mention it, dismiss it as a lie of the anti-Nazi “system” authorities and the “Marxist-democratic-Jewish press”.

Goebbels did not stop at denouncing the Kütemeyer case as a case or proof of the communist lust for murder, instead he also tried to glorify the dead as martyrs of the National Socialist cause in general, especially the NSDAP in the capital in the “fight for Berlin” .

The attempts by Goebbels to stylize Kütemeyer into the ideal figure of a National Socialist martyr were only partially successful: Both the biography and the personality of the deceased offered only an insufficient basis for making Kütemeyer a martyr: as a person, Kütemeyer corresponded to the as a rather shy and calm man is portrayed, not the image of the daring, virile SA man propaganda propaganda. This could also be achieved by cheating - for example, Kütemeyer, whose bourgeois occupation as a commercial clerk was not suitable for stylizing a worker hero, was simply declared a “German worker” by Goebbels due to his brief activity as a farm worker - posthumously through the Kütemeyer to a better one Heroic form should not change much.

Accordingly, Goebbels largely abandoned his attempts to instrumentalize the dead for his propaganda after he had taken up the case again on the occasion of the trial of Kütemeyer's death in June 1929, in the course of 1929. Carin Kesselmeier summed up this in her study of the lead article Goebbels: “The 'hero' did not seem to have proven itself.” Goebbels finally found an object that was far more suitable than Kütemeyer for the goal of systematically turning a dead man into a fallen hero of the National Socialist movement At the beginning of 1930 in the Charlottenburg storm leader Horst Wessel , who died in hospital in February 1930 after being gunned down by a political opponent (albeit for private reasons) in January 1930. This young man, already well-known in the party because of his bravado and also visually extremely dashing, was virtually tailor-made for Goebbels' efforts. As a result, the Propaganda Minister actually succeeded within a short time in making the dead into by far the most important "martyr figure" in the cult that they carried out in their propaganda for their "fight" against the system of the Weimar Republic.

Even if this proved to be only a conditionally effective propaganda vehicle for the National Socialist agitation, he was considered by the National Socialists to be a hero of their movement and the German's “freedom struggle” throughout the “fighting time” and until the end of the Nazi dictatorship in 1945 Honored by the people: a. in various names: On August 4, 1929, the Berlin SA Standard II was given the nickname "Kütemeyer". And from February 1, 1933, SA-Sturm 15, to which Kütemeyer had belonged, bore the honorary name "Hans-Georg Kütemeyer".

literature

• Helmut Heiber : Joseph Goebbels , Berlin 1962, p. 74f.
• Bärbel Dusik / Klaus A. Lankheit (arr.): Adolf Hitler. Reden Schriften, Anordnung , Vol. III / 1, Munich 1994, passim, especially pp. 249-251 (Doc. 52), note 19
• Christian Hartmann (arr.): Hitler. Speeches, Writings, Arrangements , Vol. IV / 2, Munich 1996, p. 97, note 8.
• Sven Felix Kellerhoff : Hitler's Berlin: History of a love-hate relationship , 2005, p. 66f.
• Carin Kessemeier: The editorialist Goebbels in the Nazi organs "The attack" and "Das Reich." , 1967, pp. 82, 93, 102, 120, 129f., 244 and 292.
• Peter Longerich : Goebbels. Biography , 2010, pp. 116 and 727.
• Oliver Reschke: The struggle for power in a Berlin workers' district: National Socialists on Prenzlauer Berg 1925–1933 , 2008, p. 143.
• Bernhard Sauer: "'Goebbels Rabauken'. On the history of the SA in Berlin-Brandenburg", in: Yearbook of the Landesarchiv Berlin 2006 , Berlin 2006, pp. 120 and 154. ( digitized version )
• Martin Schuster: The SA in the National Socialist "seizure of power" in Berlin and Brandenburg 1926–1934 , Berlin 2005, p. 115f.
• Daniel Siemens : Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler's Brownshirts 2017, p.