Heinrich Pfeifer

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Heinrich Pfeifer (also: Heinrich Pfeiffer ; aliases: Heinz Stein , Heinrich Orb ; * March 21, 1905 in Frankfurt am Main ; † allegedly July 23, 1949 there ) was a German secret service agent.

Official death certificate for Heinrich Pfeifer at the Frankfurt registry office with the cause of death "Poisoning with cyankali (ampoule chewed)".

Life

Pfeifer was a son of the post office clerk Heinrich Pfeifer (born July 25, 1865 in Orb , Gelnhausen district , † January 3, 1916 in Frankfurt-Rödelheim ) and his wife Maria Therese Katharina, born. Schad (born November 10, 1865 in Hanau ; † January 15, 1941 in Frankfurt-Höchst ), who married on October 19, 1889 in Frankfurt (registry office II).

After attending secondary school in Frankfurt am Main, Pfeifer completed a commercial apprenticeship . He then worked alternately as a businessman, translator , clerk in the defense department of the Reichswehr Ministry and political trader . After four and a half years abroad, he returned to Germany in 1927. In 1928 he settled in Berlin, where he officially carried the professional title “writer”.

On July 23, 1931, Pfeifer was arrested in Berlin. The background to this was his involvement in an extensive complex of dubious financial transactions involving a group of men around the lawyer Erich Heynau, where he was specifically accused of embezzling the assets of the consul widow Amelie Du Vinage , with whom he had started an affair in 1931 despite the considerable age difference and who he had had been appointed as her asset manager.

On August 6, 1932, as part of the Heynau Trial , Pfeifer was sentenced to eight months' imprisonment by the Large Criminal Chamber IV of the Stuttgart Regional Court for a continued offense of fraud, which was deemed to have been served by remand. He was expressly acquitted of the allegation of embezzlement and instead accused that he had not deliberately but “wickedly recklessly” “got into” his client's debts and otherwise caused considerable damage in business life.

Activity in the Nazi state

In 1933, Heinrich Pfeifer was recruited as an agent for the SS security service by Werner Best .

In 1934 he headed the so-called special office Stein for a few months under the pseudonym Heinrich Stein , which from May 1934 was renamed the Security Service of the Reichsführer SS z. b. V. led. This was a secret office working for Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich as well as the Reichswehr Ministry, which was entrusted with the processing of special intelligence cases. After differences with Heydrich, Pfeifer was arrested in August 1934 and sent to the Columbia concentration camp as an "honorary prisoner" , where he was held until the summer of 1935. He then went to Magdeburg, from where he fled abroad via Danzig in 1936 .

In the following years Pfeifer worked for the Polish secret service before he went to Switzerland via several intermediate stops (including Great Britain), where he lived as an emigrant until 1947. He received support in exile from Alfred Kober , whose daughter Elsbeth he married.

Pfeifer was on the GB special wanted list

In 1945 Pfeifer published the book National Socialism - 13 Years of Power Rush at the Swiss Olten publishing house Otto Walter AG under the pseudonym Heinrich Orb , in which he reported on his experiences in the service of the Nazi leadership.

As late as 1976, Rönn von Uexküll, in his study Our Man in Berlin, was of the opinion that Günther Patschowsky was the author of the book under the pseudonym Heinrich Orb , and he also considered the name Heinrich Pfeifer to be another pseudonym of Patschowsky (details under: Günther Patschowsky, section : "Aftermath"). In his book Heinrich Pfeifer / Orb describes Johannes Schmidt as the murderer of Kurt von Schleicher ; In this context, the historian Rainer Orth examined in his master’s thesis The SD man Johannes Schmidt - The murderer of Chancellor Kurt von Schleicher? the trustworthiness of Pfeifer's book information and came to the conclusion for the period up to Pfeifer's emigration in 1936 that the information was largely trustworthy.

As early as 1940, the emigrant Walther Korodi had published the book Inside the Gestapo: Hitler's Shadow Over the World at Pallas Verlag in London , which had appeared there under the pseudonym Hansjürgen Koehler . This contained literal translations of some chapters of a manuscript by Pfeifer about his experiences in the service of Himmler and Heydrich, which he had offered the Pallas publishing house under the title Behind the Scenes of the Third Reich without receiving an answer. Pfeifer's manuscript had been translated into English by the publisher and by Korodi without his permission, and several chapters written by Korodi had been added to the book Inside the Gestapo: Hitler's Shadow Over the World . Outwardly, the book gave the impression that it was an experience report written by a single author.

After Heinrich Pfeifer stayed briefly in Innsbruck / Austria in 1947, he returned to Germany that same year, where he lived first in Frankfurt am Main and then in Untermünztal.

According to the investigations of the author Rainer Orth, the death of Heinrich Pfeifer was mysterious and possibly only fictitious. Accordingly, on July 23, 1949, Pfeifer was asked by two criminal police officers to pay a brief visit to the Frankfurt police headquarters because of a minor matter (acknowledgment of financial debt). There he suddenly bit into a cyanide capsule in the stairwell . On July 28, 1949, they were cremated in the main cemetery. The urn was buried on August 4 or 6, 1949 in the Hausener cemetery (row of urns 8, no. 3). The grave was routinely leveled after twenty years.

According to Orth, Pfeifer's death entry at the Frankfurt registry office actually says “poisoning with potassium cyanide (ampoule chewed)”. However, relatives did not identify the body and when the sister of the deceased wanted to speak to the two officers at police headquarters a few weeks after his death who had picked up her brother, they were allegedly not known, as was allegedly no one else with the case had to do.

Several people claim to have seen Heinrich Pfeifer after his alleged death in Switzerland; Pfeifer's wife refused to talk about the matter until her own death. Pfeifer's son Johannes-Heinrich did not believe that his father died in 1949, but that “some sort of exit was arranged”.

Marriages and offspring

Pfeifer married Helene Wolf, divorced Lichte, on September 16, 1932. From this connection, which was divorced on May 16, 1947, came the son Johannes-Heinrich "Hans" Pfeifer (born December 19, 1931 in Berlin). From his wife's earlier marriage to the photographer Arthur Lichte, he also had the stepdaughter Ursula Lichte (born November 11, 1919 in Berlin) and the stepson Helmut Wilhelm Lichte (born September 20, 1924 in Langenberg; † October 21, 1944), the died in World War II.

On May 23, 1947, he married Elsbeth Kober (born July 18, 1911 in Basel / Switzerland; † 1990) in Bern. From this marriage, the two sons Michael Pfeifer (born September 30, 1947 in Innsbruck) and Tadeus Pfeifer (born April 5, 1949 in Freiburg im Breisgau; † September 11, 2010 in Basel) emerged, of whom the first became a lawyer during the second gained fame as a poet.

Fonts

  • Under the pseudonym Heinrich Orb : National Socialism - 13 Years of Power Intoxication . Walter, Olten 1945.

literature

  • Shlomo Aronson : Heydrich and the early history of the security service and the Gestapo: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, Stuttgart 1971.
  • Rainer Orth: The SD man Johannes Schmidt - the murderer of Reich Chancellor Kurt von Schleicher? Tectum, Marburg 2012, ISBN 978-3-8288-2872-8 . (Master's thesis Humboldt University Berlin) Here in particular the chapter The news man Heinrich Pfeifer, alias Heinz Stein, alias Hansjürgen Koehler, alias Heinrich Orb. Page 27f.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Roth: The Security Service of the SS and June 30, 1934. P. 28.
  2. ↑ in the article Special wanted list GB see under P 62 and P 63
  3. ^ Rainer Orth: The news man Heinrich Pfeifer, alias Heinz Stein, alias Hansjürgen Koehler, alias Heinrich Orb. In: Ders .: The SD man Johannes Schmidt - The murderer of Reich Chancellor Kurt von Schleicher? Marburg 2012, p. 26.
  4. ^ Rönn von Uexküll: Our man in Berlin , 1976.
  5. ^ Rainer Orth: The SD man Johannes Schmidt. The murderer of Chancellor Kurt von Schleicher? Tectum, Marburg 2012, ISBN 978-3-8288-2872-8 . (Master's thesis, Humboldt University Berlin)
  6. ↑ detail in the article Johannes Schmidt (SS Member) represented
  7. ↑ See DNB 992545307
  8. ^ Rainer Orth: The news man Heinrich Pfeifer, alias Heinz Stein, alias Hansjürgen Koehler, alias Heinrich Orb. In: Ders .: The SD man Johannes Schmidt - The murderer of Reich Chancellor Kurt von Schleicher? Marburg 2012, p. 36.
  9. ^ Rainer Orth: The news man Heinrich Pfeifer, alias Heinz Stein, alias Hansjürgen Koehler, alias Heinrich Orb. In: Ders .: The SD man Johannes Schmidt - The murderer of Reich Chancellor Kurt von Schleicher? Marburg 2012, p. 37 u. 38
personal data
SURNAME Pfeifer, Heinrich
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Pfeiffer, Heinrich; Stein, Heinz (alias); Koehler, Hansjürgen (code name); Orb, Heinrich (code name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German newsman
DATE OF BIRTH March 21, 1905
PLACE OF BIRTH Frankfurt am Main
DATE OF DEATH uncertain: July 23, 1949
Place of death Frankfurt am Main