Heinrich Schulz (assassin)

Heinrich Schulz as a witness at the Nuremberg trials

Heinrich Ernst Walter Schulz (born July 21, 1893 in Saalfeld , † June 5, 1979 in Eltville am Rhein ) was a German officer and political assassin . He became known as an accomplice of Heinrich Tillessen in the murder of the German politician Matthias Erzberger on August 26, 1921 .

Life

Youth, World War I and Freikorpszeit

In his youth, Schulz attended the Bürgerschule for four years, then the Real-Gymnasium in Saalfeld for four years and the Oberrealschule in Jena for three years. After passing the one-year examination, he started a commercial apprenticeship in a machine factory and iron foundry in Saalfeld.

At the beginning of the First World War he volunteered for military service. In the war, which he went through to the end, he was wounded three times and received several awards. At the end of the war he was dismissed from military service with the rank of lieutenant. His demobilization took place in December 1918 in Rudolstadt .

Schulz then returned to his parents' house and worked again at his old workplace at the Saalfeld machine factory and iron foundry. However, the internal political unrest in post-war Germany prompted him to give up this position again and in April 1919 to join the Ehrhardt Marine Brigade , one of the so-called Freikorps organized at the time to fight the left-wing revolutionary efforts. With the naval brigade he was deployed in succession in Munich, Hof and Berlin. In March 1920 he also took part in the occupation of the Berlin government district in the wake of the so-called Kapp Putsch .

After the Erhardt Marine Brigade was dissolved, from April 1921 Schulz belonged to the Consul Organization , a nationalist secret society which in many ways represented the successor organization to the Marine Brigade and which attempted to destabilize the Weimar state with terrorist means such as assassinations.

The assassination attempt on Erzberger

On behalf of the Organization Consul murdered Schulz on 26 August 1921 along with Henry Tillessen in Bad Griesbach in the Black Forest the Center Party politician and former Finance Minister Matthias Erzberger. For right-wing extremist and German national groups, Erzberger fulfilled the image of the enemy of the “ November criminal ”, as he had signed the Compiègne Armistice Agreement on November 11, 1918 as head of the German Armistice Commission .

Flight and emigration

Shortly after the attack, Schulz fled to Hungary together with Tillesen and Hermann Berchtold, who was being persecuted for murder . There he was recognized and arrested in 1924. As the Hungarian government refused to extradite him, he was released but expelled from the country. As a result, he came to South West Africa via Italy and later to Spanish Guinea , where he lived from 1926 to 1932 as a plant manager. Due to malaria , he traveled to Barcelona to recover in 1932 or 1933 , from where he returned to Germany in March or April 1933 after being cured.

Life in the Nazi State (1933 to 1945)

Shortly before or shortly after his return to Germany, Schulz was given an amnesty by the impunity ordinance of March 21, 1933 , signed by President Paul von Hindenburg .

In May or June 1933, Schulz joined the SS (membership number 36,060). He was then employed for a few months as an SS man as a clerk for the Bavarian Political Police in Munich. According to his own statements, he had a collision with Reinhard Heydrich during this time because he refused to join the SS security service.

From the end of 1933 until 1934 Schulz was SS-Untersturmführer staff leader in SS-Section XXX in Kassel for half a year. He left this position after clashes with his superior Unger. Instead he was transferred to the SS Upper Rhine Section in Koblenz , where he worked in the administration. In the course of the reorganization of the upper sections he came in January 1936 to the SS upper section Fulda-Werra in Arolsen . There he was initially employed in administration before he was appointed welfare officer in 1938. He joined the NSDAP (membership number 4.071.605) in June 1937. In the General SS he was promoted to SS-Sturmbannführer and SS-Obersturmbannführer one after the other .

On April 15, 1940 Schulz was accepted into the Waffen SS . In this he was used as a welfare officer of the Waffen-SS and police in Wehrkreis II (Kassel). In this position, in which he was subordinate to the main welfare and supply office of the Waffen-SS or, after its dissolution in 1944, to the race and settlement main office, he was responsible for looking after wounded members of the Waffen-SS as well as for the survivors of those killed in the war Members of the Waffen-SS. He was also responsible for looking after women, children and parents whose relatives were SS men and at the front. As part of his work as a welfare officer of the Waffen SS, which he carried out until the end of the war, Schulz was promoted to Obersturmbannführer of the Waffen SS in 1943. In regional terms he was subordinate to the SS group leader Josias Hereditary Prince of Waldeck-Pyrmont .

post war period

At the end of the war, Schulz fell into American captivity in May 1945. As a result, he was interrogated as a witness at the Nuremberg Trials, and his involvement in Erzberger's murder came to light. In November 1946, the Baden Public Prosecutor applied for transfer to the responsible criminal prosecution authorities in Baden. This did not take place immediately, however, as they had to wait until the court proceedings, in which Heinrich Schulz was sentenced to eight years in a labor camp. In December 1949 Schulz was handed over to the German authorities and arrested in Offenburg .

The main trial for the murder of Erzberger took place from July 17 to 19, 1950 before the Offenburg Regional Court . The accomplice Heinrich Tillessen was heard as a witness and exonerated Schulz by presenting himself as the main perpetrator, although he had presented exactly the opposite representation of the crime in his own main hearing. However, it is considered certain that at least one of the fatal headshots came from Schulz's gun. As a consequence, Heinrich Schulz was convicted of manslaughter and not murder. The sentence was twelve years in prison.

On December 22, 1952, the sentence was suspended. Heinrich Schulz then lived in Frankfurt am Main .

literature

• Cord Gebhardt: The case of the Erzberger murderer Heinrich Tillessen. A contribution to the history of justice after 1945. Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 1995, ISBN 3-16-146490-7 ( contributions to the legal history of the 20th century . No. 14).
• Reiner Haehling von Lanzenauer : The murder of Matthias Erzberger. Publishing house of the Society for Cultural History Documentation, Karlsruhe 2008, ISBN 3-922596-75-4 ( series of publications of the Legal History Museum Karlsruhe . Issue 14).

Individual evidence

1. ^ The Ordinance on Exemption from Punishment of March 21, 1933: [1]
2. ^ Opinion by the court chemist Popp from Frankfurt from September 19, 1921 (Freiburg State Archives).