Hans Hustert

Hans Hustert (born February 1, 1900 in Elberfeld , † August 14, 1970 in Hamburg ) (also called Prima Hustert) was a German activist of the extreme right. He became known as one of the two perpetrators of the 1922 assassination attempt on the former Reich Chancellor Philipp Scheidemann , as temporary adjutant to Heinrich Himmler in the SS and as the successor to the National Socialist "martyr" Horst Wessel as leader of the Berlin SA Standard 5.

Live and act

In the late phase of the First World War , Hustert took part in it as a war volunteer. After the war he was briefly a member of the security police in the Elberfeld .

After the war, Hustert began to get involved in circles of the extreme political right: He became a member of the Deutschvölkischer Schutz- und Trutzbund and participated in the Upper Silesian Self-Protection , which was supposed to defend this eastern German province against attempts at annexation in the post-war period. In 1920 he joined the "assault company Killinger," one of the naval officer Manfred von Killinger controlled entity that to that of the former Lieutenant Commander Hermann Ehrhardt founded volunteer corps , called the Marine Brigade Ehrhardt belonged. The Ehrhardt Brigade was a paramilitary association that violently fought against the Weimar Republic and, among other things, was one of the main sponsors of the Kapp Putsch of 1920.

In the wake of the dissolution of the Ehrhardt Brigade, Hustert joined its successor organization, the so-called Organization Consul (OC), a secret society that tried to join the Weimar state after the provisional impossibility of eliminating the republic through a military coup became clear to destabilize terrorist means, in particular through assassinations of leading figures of the democratic camp, in order to create the basis for a later liquidation of the political system established in 1919. In this context, Hustert and a man named Karl Oehlschläger were commissioned in the spring of 1922 to carry out an assassination attempt on the social democratic politician Philipp Scheidemann.

The Scheidemann assassination attempt (1922)

The assassination attempt carried out by Hustert and Oehschläger on Philipp Scheidemann (so-called "prussic acid assassination" or "assassination with an enema syringe"), who had served as Chancellor for several months in 1919 and meanwhile held the office of Lord Mayor of Kassel , took place on June 4, 1922 (Pentecost Sunday) near Scheidemann's house in Kassel-Wilhelmshöhe.

The background to the fact was that Scheidemann was seen by the assassins, as in general by many members of the Volkisch-national circles of the time, as one of the main responsible for the German defeat in the First World War: Specifically, Scheidemann was accused by the radical right that he shared with other leading Social Democrats caused the military collapse of the German army and the internal revolutionization of the German state that marked the end of the war in November 1918. They had this through their defeatist policy aimed at ending the war without a victory in 1917 and 1918 (including support for the peace resolution of the Reichstag in 1917 and the Berlin munitions workers' strike in January 1918) and, in particular, through their - after their inclusion in the Berlin government in October 1918 - decision to petition the Entente Powers for an armistice made. Scheidemann and other leading left-wing politicians were accused in this connection of having committed high treason through these acts and working against the military opponents of the German Reich : pictorially, this was summed up in the formula that with the political liquidation of the war on conditions that the Recognition amounted to a defeat and which the German Reich would have handed over to its enemies, the "undefeated" German field army - which, in the opinion of the nationalists, would have been able to successfully survive the war militarily and win a victory - to a certain extent "in fell their backs ”(see: stab in the back legend ). The consequence of this interpretation of the events of 1918 was that the leading SPD politicians (like the masses of supporters of their policies who supported the November Revolution that followed the end of the war ) were vilified as “ November criminals” in legal circles . Scheidemann took on a particularly exposed role in the perception of the enemy by the right, since he was not only involved in the decision to ask for and conclude an armistice with the Western powers, but also in a particularly exposed manner on November 9, 1918 in the The connection with the "shameful" end of the war and the consequences that it brought about came out publicly when he proclaimed the republic from the Reichstag building in Berlin , symbolically celebrating the departure from the "glorious" old Germany that Otto von Bismarck had created would have.

The attack took place in such a way that the two Scheidemann ambushed when he went for a walk with his daughter and grandson in a park in the Wilhelmshöhe district. They approached him from behind, with Hustert injecting hydrogen cyanide in his face with an enema syringe while overtaking . Before Scheidemann passed out, he managed to put Hustert and Oehlschläger to flight with a weapon he was carrying. A doctor who happened to be passing by managed to correctly identify the substance used and to revive Scheidemann. Since Scheidemann, fortunately for him, hadn't taken a breath at the moment when the poison struck him, he suffered no lasting consequences.

After going underground for a few weeks, Hustert and Oehlschläger were arrested at the beginning of August 1922 on a forest estate in Upper Silesia and taken to prison. On December 4, 1922, they were charged with attempted murder before the State Court for the German Reich in Leipzig. The trial ended with a sentence of ten years (Hustert) or ten years and one month (Oehlschlaeger) imprisonment .

Imprisonment and work in the NSDAP

During his imprisonment, Hustert acquired the reputation of a martyr in nationalist circles, who would suffer behind prison walls because of his “selfless” commitment to the “German cause”. The transfiguration of his person, his deed and his situation through the propaganda of German national and especially ethnic groups contributed to this. For example, the young Joseph Goebbels , then managing director of the Gaues Westfalen-Nord of the NSDAP, discovered in Hustert in 1925 a strong reference person and symbolic figure, to whom he was able to refer in his propaganda directed against the Weimar state and its "excesses" that he could build his propaganda. In the words of Goebbels biographer Ralf Georg Reuth , Goebbels recognized the “special emotional effect that the individual fate” of a specific person in need evokes in the audience, so that he thoroughly dealt with such individual cases in his speeches and newspaper articles especially exploited the Hustert case for himself. In this connection Goebbels entered into correspondence with Hustert and visited him several times in prison.

In 1928, Hustert was released as a result of an amnesty . He joined the NSDAP (membership number 85.001), where he initially served briefly as the first SS adjutant to Heinrich Himmler , who was appointed head of the SS at the end of 1929 . He then moved to Berlin , where he became a special protégé of Joseph Goebbels until 1931 - who had led the National Socialists there as Gauleiter since 1926. Goebbels made him the leader of the SA-Sturm 5 of the SA-Gruppe Berlin-Brandenburg , which was particularly prestigious within the Nazi movement , the unit that had previously been led by Horst Wessel, who had become the most prominent martyr within National Socialist propaganda through his murder by communists .

In April 1931, Hustert took part in the so-called Stennes revolt . This was a revolt by the Berlin SA chief Walther Stennes and his supporters against the political course of Adolf Hitler and the Munich party leadership of the NSDAP and especially against the strategy of conquering power of the so-called legality course, i.e. the principle propagated by Hitler since 1925 to strive for political power in the state only with (formally) legal means. In contrast, Stennes and his supporters pleaded for an activist-revolutionary confrontation or elimination of the Weimar system in a direct violent confrontation. After the conflict over these different ideas had simmered in secret for a long time, in April 1931 there was an open break between Stenne and his followers with Hitler and the party leadership, to whom they terminated their allegiance. In the course of the crisis that struck the Berlin NSDAP and SA for a few weeks during this month, in which both sides fought to win the majority of the Berlin SA, Stennes and his supporters from the NSDAP and the SA were excluded or left this (depending on the reading) of their own accord. Hustert, who took the side of Stennes, was also expelled from the party according to a decision of the investigation and arbitration committee of the Reich leadership of the NSDAP on April 4, 1931 (his NSDAP membership card led to the justification of "Stennes supporters").

After 1933, Hustert must have been largely rehabilitated, at least he can be traced back to 1938 as a member of the NSDAP in Munich.

literature

• Norbert Frei : January 30, 1933. A date and its consequences. Current research on National Socialism in Wuppertal , 2004, p. 18.
• Ralf Georg Reuth . Goebbels. A biography , 2013.
• Martin Sabrow : The suppressed conspiracy: The Rathenau murder and the German counter-revolution , 1999.