Heinrich Vetter (politician)

Heinrich Vetter

Heinrich Vetter (born September 10, 1890 in Fulda , † December 30, 1969 in Wegerhof (Halver) ) was a German politician ( NSDAP ) and Lord Mayor of the South Westphalian city of Hagen from April 1933 to April 1945.

Live and act

The German Imperium

Heinrich Vetter was born in 1890 as the son of the shoemaker Nikolaus Vetter, who died just a year after the birth of his son, and his wife Maria, née Fährmann. When his mother moved to Hobräck ​​in the Sauerland near Hagen-Dahl , Vetter was given to an orphanage in Paderborn run by nuns at the age of five, where he stayed until he was twelve . He then lived with his mother and six siblings in Hohenlimburg .

Cousin learned not about visiting the elementary school beyond training and had claims to early to feed his family contribute. Accordingly, he worked as a factory worker until he joined the Emperor Alexander Guard Grenadier Regiment No. 1 , to which he belonged from 1911 to 1913. After his discharge from the army, Vetter earned his living as a quarry worker in the dolomite works in Hagen-Halden until the outbreak of the First World War .

During the war, Vetter was mainly used on the western front. At the beginning of 1917 he suffered serious injuries there, which led to the loss of his right foot and impairments to his left arm. After his recovery he was sent back home. From October 1st he took on a porter position at the Hagen company Funcke & Hueck , for which he remained active until 1930. Vetter's official discharge from the army took place in March 1919. At that time he held the rank of sergeant, held the Iron Cross 2nd Class and the Wound Badge in silver. As a 60% war disabled, he also received a small disability pension.

Weimar Republic

In 1919 Vetter began to be politically active: he joined the German People's Party (DVP), for which he became a member of the city council in Hagen in 1921. In 1923 he left the DVP again. Instead, from the spring of 1924 he began to get involved in the Völkisch-Sozialen-Block , the reservoir for the then banned NSDAP . After the re-establishment of the NSDAP in early 1925, Vetter joined it ( membership number 16,447) and almost immediately took over the leadership of the party's local branch in Hagen, which he was to exercise until 1933. In 1926, the Gauleiter of the Groß-Gaues Ruhr, Karl Kaufmann , appointed cousin as head of the Lenne-Volme district (urban and rural districts of Hagen, Altena, Iserlohn and Lüdenscheid).

Cousin Luise Bertram had already married in 1923, and she moved into her own home in Hagen-Emst in 1925. In November 1929 Vetter became a member of the city council of Hagen and a member of the Westphalian provincial parliament .

In September 1930 Vetter was elected to the Reichstag for the first time, to which he belonged from then on without interruption until May 1945 as a representative of constituency 18 (Westphalia South). On October 1, 1932, he was also appointed district leader of Hagen by the Gauleiter of Westphalia-South , Josef Wagner . In the same year he became Reich speaker of the NSDAP: in this capacity he agitated in numerous public meetings for the goals of the party in the context of the various elections of the year.

time of the nationalsocialism

On April 24, 1933 Vetter was appointed acting Lord Mayor of Hagen. In February 1934, Vetter was confirmed as permanent mayor by the Reich Ministry of the Interior . In the same year he was also entrusted with the office of district inspector of district inspection III.

At the suggestion of Gauleiter Josef Wagner, Vetter was appointed Deputy Gauleiter in Gau Westfalen-Süd and successor to Emil Stürtz on October 26, 1936 . At the same time, Vetter was promoted to chief service officer of the NSDAP. In October 1940 Vetter was also appointed to the newly formed budget committee for the province of Westphalia .

Vetter's involvement in the affair of the Hagen city councilor and police chief Alfred Müller, who was accused of participating in several "orgies and sexual excesses", caused quite a stir across the region. When the district president in Arnsberg then initiated criminal proceedings against Müller, Vetter and his head of personnel, Friedrich Feldtscher, tried to prevent this proceeding with all possible means (including illegal). Another criminal prosecution of Müller dragged Vetter away by requesting the investigation files for the alleged purpose of a "consultation" with Gauleiter Albert Hoffmann at the Harkortberg command post in Wetter. Inquiries in this matter were then answered by default with the fact that the alleged consultation had not yet taken place.

In the Nazi leadership, Vetter had the reputation of being completely unsuitable for leadership roles. In an assessment, the party chancellery of the NSDAP confirmed that he was unsuitable for the position of Gauleiter as well as for the tasks of managing Gauleiter. In November , Martin Bormann agreed in principle to Hoffmann's request to the party chancellery to dismiss Vetter from his offices ; however, he decided to postpone this until after the war. In the following year and a half, according to his biographer Ralf Blank , Vetter acted largely only as a figurehead of his Gaus. However, he was allowed to officially represent Hoffmann from January to March 1944 during his illness, which lasted several months, and to continue to hold public events.

In December 1944 the dispute over the former police department head in Hagen escalated again: Vetter had the district court president von Hagen and his wife imprisoned on pretended grounds. An investigation of the incidents by the Reich Ministry of the Interior suggested corruption and abuse of power. An investigation by the Reich Security Main Office confirmed this impression.

The decision by Gauleiter Hoffmann to replace Vetter with the Gaustabsamtsleiter Hans Strube , who was to be appointed Deputy Gauleiter on April 21, 1945, was no longer due to the US Army occupying the Westphalia-South Gau area on April 17, 1945 conditions.

The dissolution of the local NSDAP and the Volkssturm by Gauleiter Albert Hoffmann condemned Vetter in sharp words as treason. However, he did not take part in the defense of Hagens “down to the last cartridge”, which he himself called for. Instead, he went into hiding on a farm near Breckerfeld shortly before the city was occupied by American troops in April 1945.

Arrest and trial

On April 24, 1945, Vetter was tracked down and arrested by the US Army. He was temporarily housed in the city's remand prison and in a provisional internment center in Lüdenscheid.

Due to his membership in the political leadership corps of the NSDAP, Vetter was detained from May 4, 1945 until 1948 in the British internment camp CIC 5 (Civil Internment Camp No 5) in Staumühle . On November 6, 1948 there was a two-day hearing against Vetter before the main denazification committee in Hagen. Although Vetter appeared as an undisguised supporter of "his Führer", he was classified in category III (minor offender), since no war crimes or knowledge of them could be proven. A classification in the - factually more accurate - Category II (activists and beneficiaries) proved to be impossible, since this category could only be assigned by the British military government, but not by German administrative bodies. Probably to compensate for Vetter's unsatisfactory rating, the chairman of the denazification committee stated that Vetter understood democracy to be the form of government of the Nazi state and that he must therefore be viewed as an incorrigible opponent of a new democratic state; it is to be feared that he would fight and sabotage them wherever the opportunity arose. Vetter must therefore be regarded as "a threat to the smooth development of a new German state".

On November 30, 1948, Vetter was tried in a second arbitration chamber procedure , this time in Hiddesen. The court sentenced Vetter on December 3, 1948 to a total of four years and two months. Since his internship was fully credited, he was able to leave the court as a free man.

Last years of life

After his release from the internment camp, Vetter made old contacts from his time in the NSDAP. Through his attempts to convince his fellow citizens of Hagen in numerous small-scale conversations in shops, in the tram or on the street that the war defeat was only a temporary condition and that the NSDAP would rise again, he dated from 1947 British military intelligence was observed. With his attempt to reinterpret the post-war period into a transitional era, a second period of struggle, and with his efforts to revive the NSDAP, Vetter differed significantly from most former Nazi leaders who avoided such a confrontation with the new system sought by either withdrawing from the public eye or by finding themselves willing (or apathetic) to adapt to the new circumstances.

From 1948 Vetter took part in the development of a right-wing extremist organization, which from 1949 referred to itself as the " Reich Movement ". Until the 1950s, the group appeared by distributing leaflets and punched swastikas . Other prominent activists in the group were the fighter pilot Hans-Ulrich Rudel and Ernst Remer , who led the crackdown on the attempted coup on July 20 in Berlin in 1944 . Vetter was arrested in November 1952 as the political head of the "Reich Movement". In April 1953 he was sentenced to two years' imprisonment, of which he only had to serve a few weeks.

Until his death in 1969, Vetter appeared repeatedly as a contributor to right-wing extremist publications, which were edited by his second wife, among others. According to Blanks, his war injury, the timid German post-war justice system and, last but not least, his provocative and brazen demeanor protected him from consistent persecution .

Vetter's memoirs was published posthumously in 1992. In them, he encounters the reader as a man who was still convinced of National Socialist ideas in old age, who negates historical facts, pays homage to his “Führer” and describes the Nazi years as the best years of his life.

literature

• Ralf Blank: "... a fanatical supporter of National Socialist teaching". Heinrich Vetter and coming to terms with the past in Hagen ”, in: Hagener Jahrbuch 4, 1999, pp. 149–172.
• On the other hand: "On the biography of the mayor of Hagen and deputy Gauleiter in Westphalia-Süd, Heinrich Vetter (1890-1969)", in: Westfälische Zeitschrift 151/152, 2001/2002, pp. 414–447.
• Joachim Lilla , Martin Döring, Andreas Schulz: extras in uniform: the members of the Reichstag 1933–1945. A biographical manual. Including the Volkish and National Socialist members of the Reichstag from May 1924 . Droste, Düsseldorf 2004, ISBN 3-7700-5254-4 .
• Erich Stockhorst: 5000 people. Who was what in the 3rd Reich . Arndt, Kiel 2000, ISBN 3-88741-116-1 (unchanged reprint of the first edition from 1967).

Web links

• Heinrich Vetter in the database of members of the Reichstag