Hans Zöberlein

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Hans Zöberlein (born September 1, 1895 in Nuremberg , † February 13, 1964 in Munich ) was a National Socialist German writer and SA brigad leader.

Life

Zöberlein was born the son of a shoemaker and learned the mason and stone carving trade. During the First World War , Zöberlein was promoted to Vice Sergeant and was awarded the Iron Cross II and I Class and the Bavarian Golden Medal of Bravery (the highest Bavarian war award for NCOs and men).

After the end of the war, Zöberlein joined the Freikorps Epp under Franz Ritter von Epp . It was involved in the suppression of the Soviet Republic in Bavaria . In 1921 he joined the NSDAP and the SA for the first time . In November 1923 he took part in the Munich Hitler-Ludendorff putsch .

After the re-establishment of the NSDAP in spring 1925 following the party's temporary ban after the failed coup, Zöberlein rejoined it (membership number 869). In January 1928 he was entrusted with the management of the Munich SA as the successor to Georg Seidenschwang . In 1929, together with Max Zankl , Zöberlein designed the SA badge, which was supposed to represent a combination of the so-called victory rune and the man rune .

Zöberlein qualified as an architect by attending secondary schools . He practiced this profession in Munich in the 1920s, obviously without much success. Originally, he was supposed to work with the architect Otto Schiedermaier to convert the Barlow Palais (later the " Brown House ") in Munich's Brienner Strasse, which the NSDAP had bought in July 1930 and was intended for its office and party headquarters . This did not happen, however, since Hitler preferred the more renowned architect Paul Ludwig Troost .

In the SA, which was disempowered after the “ Röhm Putsch ”, Zöberlein only advanced slowly. In 1943 he was appointed SA Brigade Leader. He was a member of the SA culture committee and president of the politically neutral order of the Bavarian Bravery Medal according to the statutes , which enjoyed great prestige.

In Munich he was an NSDAP city councilor and also made a name for himself as a cultural politician through his works in Munich. In the autumn of 1933 Zöberlein was already in discussion for the city's annual literary prize - at that time the alternative candidate was Georg Britting , for whom Zöberlein, among others, was a member of the committee. Britting received the award for 1935 in 1936. The decision was made unanimously in favor of Zöberlein in 1933 after a postponement in the same group.

In 1934 Zöberlein became head of the newly founded cultural office, responsible for the visual arts, literature and theater including all libraries as well as for music and film.

In the summer of 1935, the design of the bridgehead of the Munich Ludwigsbrücke by Karl Knappe was a point of contention, especially since Knappe was outlawed and had a professional ban. Zöberlein was responsible on paper for the design, which aroused Hitler's displeasure. Zöberlein was then informed of Hitler's request that he resign in favor of Ferdinand Liebermann , which also included the loss of the management of the cultural office. Zöberlein followed suit.

Murder night in Penzberg 1945 and legal appraisal

In Penzberg , a town south of Munich, shortly before the end of the war, a group of residents had deposed the Nazi mayor and wanted to bring about the surrender of the city to the approaching American troops to avoid bloodshed and destruction. Thereupon Zöberlein left on 28/29. April 1945 as the leader of a " werewolf " commando execute several citizens of this mining town as traitors. This massacre became known as the Penzberg Murder Night . Zöberlein was sent to the Kornwestheim internment camp on August 21, 1945 , but was transferred to the Regensburg internment camp on January 13, 1947, where he remained until June 24, 1948. Zöberlein was sentenced to death in 1948 for the night of the Penzberg murder and was in the Nuremberg-Langwasser internment camp from June 24, 1948 to February 2, 1949. The Munich Higher Regional Court rejected the appeal for appeal as unfounded, but changed the sentence to life imprisonment with a permanent loss of honor due to the change in the legal situation in the meantime . On February 2, 1949, he was transferred to the Munich Stadelheim correctional facility .

In 1952, the tribunal proceedings for denazification led to Zöberlein being classified as a “victim” and to a sentence of two years in a labor camp, deprivation of property and a ten-year professional ban. In 1958 Zöberlein was given exemption from prison for health reasons until his death on February 13, 1964 in Munich.

Author of war novels

In 1931 Zöberlein's first work, the world war novel The Faith in Germany, was published by Franz-Eher-Verlag in Munich. The cinematic implementation of this novel, directed by Zöberlein (and Ludwig Schmid-Wildy ), was realized in 1934 under the title Shock Troop 1917 . With a circulation of around 800,000 copies, the book is one of the most successful world war novels. In the preface to the novel with the subtitle A War Experience from Verdun to the Overthrow, Hitler wrote - which was very rare - Hitler himself: “This is where the legacy of the front is laid down! A simple soldier who did not intend to increase war literature has written a burden off his soul in years of arduous work alongside his job ”.

Title page of "Command of Conscience" in the 7th edition from 1938

His second novel The Command of Conscience from 1937 (subtitle: A novel about the turmoil of the post-war period and the first uprising ) depicts the struggle of the Freikorps in the post-war period and the National Socialist movement as a continuation of the war effort of the front-line soldiers. In this work, one With a circulation of over 400,000 copies, Zöberlein described the career of the shoemaker's son and soldier at the front, Hans Krafft, as an ardent supporter of National Socialism. According to Tobias Schneider, this "novel, both in terms of content and language, is primitive [...] with the worst anti-Semitic work of all Nazi fiction" and the "road to Auschwitz " is already clearly mapped out. Jews are explicitly compared with “vermin” and defamed as “Jewish pigs”. At the same time, radical countermeasures are called for: “The tree that bears poisonous fruits must be cut down and thrown into the fire. There can be no pity here. Compassion is weakness. "

Klaus Theweleit analyzed Zöberlein's novel "Command of Conscience" in detail in his 1978 study Male Fantasies . Zöberlein gave Judaism the form of a sexually attractive banker's wife Mirjam, who tries to seduce the "war hero" Krafft, and reveals to him her inner despair when that fails.

Awards

Zöberlein received the following awards, among others:

Works

  • Belief in Germany - A war experience from Verdun to the coup , Franz Eher Nachf. GmbH, Munich 1931, 889 pp.
  • The command of conscience. A novel about the turmoil of the post-war period and the first uprising. Munich 1937.
  • The printing post , 1940.
  • The shrapnel tree , 1940.
  • Poet under arms. A war almanac of German poetry portrait photographs with short bibliographies, short biographies and samples of the most famous poets of the time: Zöberlein. Leipzig: Poeschel and Trepte, 1940, [ed. v. Dr. Heinz Riecke].

Selected literature

  • Walter Delabar: "Stop it, stop it, hey, stop it - stop it!" Hans Zöberlein: "Belief in Germany (1931)". In: Thomas F. Schneider / Hans Wagener (eds.): From Richthofen to Remarque. German-language prose on World War I (= Amsterdam contributions to more recent German studies. Vol. 53). Rodopi, Amsterdam / New York 2003, ISBN 978-9042009554 , pp. 399-421.
  • Ernst Klee : "Hans Zöberlein". In: Ernst Klee: The cultural lexicon for the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945 . S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-10-039326-5 .
  • Georg Lorenz: The Penzberg murder night of April 28, 1945 before the judge. Compiled from the press reports of the “Hochland-Boten”. Hochland-Verlag, Garmisch-Partenkirchen 1948.
  • Patrick Wagner: The last battle of the "old fighters". Isolation, communalization and violence of National Socialist activists in the last months of the war in 1945. In: Mittelweg 36. Journal of the Hamburg Institute for Social Research. Volume 24, volume 4, 2015, pp. 25–50.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The SA man . No. 15 , 1936. Quoted from: How the SA civil badge came about . In: Uniforms Market . May 1, 1936, p. 86 .
  2. ↑ a b c see: biography on polunbi , accessed on August 26, 2012.
  3. ^ Died: Hans Zöberlein . In: Der Spiegel . No. 09 , 1964, p. 96 .
  4. ↑ Zöberlein, Hans: Der Glaube an Deutschland: Free Download & Streaming: Internet Archive , accessed on: May 27, 2014.
  5. ↑ Walter Delabar: Stop it, stop it, hey stop it - stop it! In: Thomas F. Schneider (Ed.): From Richthofen to Remarque . Amsterdam / New York 2003.
  6. ↑ Tobias Schneider: Bestseller in the Third Reich. In: VfZ , 2004, no. 1, pp. 77-98, pp. 88 f. ( PDF; 8 MB )
  7. ↑ Also Loewy: Literatur unterm Hakenkreuz, Fischer 1969 p. 315 shares the dictum of the "worst concoctions of Nazi literature".
  8. ^ The command of conscience, Zentralverlag der NSDAP 1937, p. 298 f.
  9. ^ Klaus Theweleit: Male fantasies. 2. Men's body - for the psychoanalysis of white terror. Reinbek edition 1987, p. 18f and p. 415-417
personal data
SURNAME Zöberlein, Hans
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German National Socialist writer
DATE OF BIRTH September 1, 1895
PLACE OF BIRTH Nuremberg
DATE OF DEATH February 13, 1964
Place of death Munich