Helmuth Klotz (publicist)

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Stolperstein, Manfred-von-Richthofen-Straße 221, in Berlin-Tempelhof

Helmuth Paul Gustav Adolf Klotz (born October 30, 1894 in Freiburg im Breisgau ; † February 3, 1943 in Berlin-Plötzensee ) was a German naval officer and publicist. As an early member of the NSDAP, Klotz was involved in the Hitler putsch in Munich. He later became a committed opponent of National Socialism. He joined the SPD in 1929 and had to flee into exile after the National Socialist " seizure of power " in 1933. After the German occupation of France , he was arrested by the Gestapo in Paris in 1940 , sentenced to death by the People's Court and executed in Berlin-Plötzensee .

Life

Klotz's father was a lawyer in the Baden civil service. Due to relocations, the family moved within the Grand Duchy of Baden several times before moving to Karlsruhe from 1909 . There, on March 22, 1912, Klotz took his matriculation examination prematurely at the Helmholtz secondary school .

Klotz was assigned to the Imperial Navy and the Mürwik Naval School . With the school cruiser SMS Victoria Louise he undertook an eight-month training trip to North America and the Caribbean from May 1912. In April 1914, Klotz passed the main naval officer examination. He was then sent to an artillery course on the battleship SMS Thuringia .

Promoted to lieutenant at sea on March 22, 1915 during the First World War , Klotz moved in June 1915 to the staff of the 1st Sailor Artillery Regiment , which was stationed on the coast of Flanders . In December 1915 he was transferred to the naval aviators at the Flanders I naval air station in Zeebrugge , where he was used as an observer in an FF 33E floatplane . The award of the Iron Cross 2nd class in March 1916 had previously been justified with "Has shown prudence and cutting edge on numerous attack and reconnaissance flights to the English and French coasts". According to the information in the proposal for the Iron Cross 1st Class in July 1916, Klotz was involved in bombing raids on the English cities of Ramsgate and Deal and showed a special ability in dealing with the new radio telegraphy . Promoted to lieutenant at sea on December 25, 1917 , Klotz was involved in drawing up an aircraft signal book in the same year. He officially took his leave of the Navy on November 24, 1919.

From the winter semester 1918/1919 Klotz studied law at the Universities of Rostock , Freiburg and Frankfurt am Main . There he did his doctorate on January 13, 1921 in political science on the subject of frequencies and operating income of the urban tram to Frankfurt / M during the war years, taking into account the conditions for tariff changes .

On July 28, 1918, Klotz married the daughter of a lieutenant colonel. The marriage resulted in two sons. The first marriage was divorced, and later Klotz remarried.

Participants in the Hitler putsch

While studying in Frankfurt, Klotz joined the German People's Freedom Party (DVFP). Klotz acted as a speaker and was temporarily vice chairman of the Frankfurt local group. According to his own later information from 1934, he met Hitler in December 1922. Hitler made “a very favorable impression on Klotz, if by no means, as I expected and hoped, an impressive impression; rather, I, who had been looking for something huge and found something left, was disappointed. "

Briefly arrested in February 1923 in Frankfurt for his political activities, Klotz fled to Bavaria on March 23, 1923 after the DVFP was banned in Prussia. There he joined the NSDAP and initially appeared as a speaker for the party. At the end of June, Klotz was sent to Nuremberg by the then SA leader, Hermann Göring . Together with the later party judge Walter Buch , Klotz was supposed to act as a counterweight to Julius Streicher and thus end the ongoing internal party disputes between Streicher and local SA leaders. Klotz appeared as a speaker on September 1st and 2nd at the German Day in Nuremberg, a mass rally with 100,000 participants from ethnic and patriotic associations. His activity as editor of the Nuremberg NSDAP newspaper Die Weiße Fahne led to a conviction for insult in October 1924, combined with a fine of 500 marks .

On November 8th and 9th, 1923, Klotz was involved in the Hitler putsch in Munich. According to his own - in order not to incriminate himself, probably incomplete - he stayed in the Bürgerbräukeller on November 8th . On the night of November 9th, he belonged to a group around Max Amann who, on Hitler's behalf, occupied a bank building in order to set up offices for the putsch government. Hitler is said to have previously refused to occupy government buildings with the words “you can't go to official posts at night”, Amann said in a later statement. In the office there, Klotz edited an appeal by the putschists. Then he wanted to have the public notice of the announcement of the putschists approved by the Munich police headquarters. The draft of the announcement was retained because the police did not consider Gustav von Kahr's signature to be authentic. On November 9th, Klotz called on a crowd in front of the Munich City Hall to storm the building. In the building, Mayor Eduard Schmid and other social democratic city councilors were the target of abuse and abuse.

Leading candidate Helmuth Klotz: Anti-Semitic leaflet from Bretten on the Reichstag election in May 1924

It is not known whether Klotz stayed until his arrest on November 15, in particular whether he took part in the march on the Feldherrnhalle . Regardless of his arrest, an "order" from the high command of the banned SA on November 16, 1923 named Klotz as a member of the leadership of the illegal party alongside Anton Drexler and Gottfried Feder . Klotz remained in protective custody until February 29, 1924 ; most recently he was held in Landsberg Prison.

In the Reichstag election in May 1924 , Klotz ran as the top candidate of the Völkisch-Soziale bloc - an association of the NSDAP and DVFP, among others - in Baden . With 45,049 votes, Klotz did not receive a seat in the Reichstag. Accompanied by internal disputes and based on the consent of Hitler, whom he visited on June 4th in his Landsberg custody, Klotz exercised party functions at the state level. On July 20, 1924, he took part in the "National Socialist Representative Assembly" in Weimar, where there was a dispute over the National Socialist Freedom Party (NSFP) under Erich Ludendorff . Like most of the North German delegates, Klotz refused to join the NSFP and resigned from his position in Baden. In a letter to Ludolf Haase from September 1924, Klotz criticized Hitler's close ties to Ludendorff: “This solution by Hitler from Ludendorff, behind which the Berlin gentlemen stand, is inevitable if the movement is not to be ultra-national, reactionary, national-capitalist The waters ruled by the Jew are silting up. ”For himself, so Klotz at the same time, the“ idea of ​​völkisch socialism ”stood above Hitler.

Joined the SPD

Only fragments are known about Klotz's life in the 1920s: In 1925, on behalf of an association of the electrical industry, he published a brochure on questions of income tax law. In 1926 another pamphlet appeared under the title The Struggle Against Capitalism , in which Klotz referred positively to the role of the trade unions. The publication was based on a lecture he had given on behalf of the "Deutsche Bau- und Siedelungsgemeinschaft" in Darmstadt. This cooperative was dissolved in 1934 due to financial irregularities, Klotz's role in the company is unknown. In March 1927, Klotz was a witness in a fememord trial before the Gießen Regional Court , in which, among others, Ernst von Salomon and Friedrich Wilhelm Heinz were tried for an attempted murder in March 1922. In court, Klotz weakened his incriminating statements, presumably out of fear of an attempt at revenge.

According to his own statements, Klotz met the SPD Reichstag member Wilhelm Sollmann while on a train ride. Klotz presented his thoughts on the formation of a people's militia to the former Reich Minister of the Interior ; Sollmann referred him to Karl Höltermann , the deputy chairman of the Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold . At the beginning of 1929, Klotz first joined the Reichsbanner and shortly afterwards the SPD. For the Iron Front founded in December 1931 - an amalgamation of the SPD, Reichsbanner, the ADGB trade union and the Arbeiter-Turn- und Sportbund - Klotz appeared as a speaker; membership cannot be proven with certainty.

In December 1929, Klotz campaigned for increased counter-propaganda by the SPD in the SPD discussion magazine Das Freie Wort under the title The National Socialist Epidemic . The reluctance towards the NSDAP "does not work as it was intended, as a sign of disgust for the National Socialist swamp, but, often enough, as a sign of alleged weakness, as a sign of alleged fear of the confrontation with the National Socialists!"

From January 1931 Klotz published various brochures, a propaganda tool that the SPD regarded as very effective at the time. In Hitler's Socialism (January 1931), Klotz went into Hitler's ties to industry and confessed to social democratic ideas. In The Foreign Policy of the National Socialists (1931), Klotz analyzed statements by NSDAP politicians and came to the conclusion that "a Germany of Hitler would mean the downfall of the new Germany, the catastrophe of Europe and the world". In the honorary ranking of the NSDAP (July 1931) he followed up the statements of National Socialist politicians about their participation in the First World War and came across various inconsistencies: "In addition to the group of conscientious objectors, the National Socialist parliamentary group in the Reichstag can open up a group of swindlers", was his later conclusion .

At the turn of the year 1931/1932, Klotz received from Wilhelm Abegg , State Secretary in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior, knowledge of letters that the SA Chief of Staff Ernst Röhm had written to the Berlin doctor Karl-Günther Heimsoth and that confirmed Röhm's homosexuality . Shortly before the presidential election in 1932 , Klotz decided to publish the letters. In his opinion, the "Röhm case" had become a "German disgrace":

"To a shame above all of the National Socialist Party - a party that dares to demand the most draconian" punishments "against homosexuals through to compulsory castration in its programmatic declarations, but still has a captain Röhm in his position as leader of young people tolerates and supports. "

300,000 copies of the publication Der Case Röhm were sent by post to multipliers such as senior officials, officers, pastors, teachers, doctors, lawyers and journalists. Attempts by the Röhm to prohibit the distribution of the letters by means of temporary injunctions failed. The publication of the letters was controversial within the Left: Kurt Tucholsky spoke out in the Weltbühne under the pseudonym Ignaz Wrobel against ostracizing Röhm because he was homosexual: “His disposition does not refute the man at all. He can certainly be decent as long as he does not abuse his position to draw people who are dependent on him to the sofa, and there is not the slightest evidence of this. "

Reichstag members of the NSDAP hit Klotz on May 12, 1932, when he was sitting with Otto Wels in the Reichstag restaurant. Log was injured; four of the attackers were excluded from the meetings for 30 days. When they refused to leave the plenary session, the President of the Reichstag, Paul Löbe , broke off the session. Three of the excluded, Edmund Heines , Wilhelm Stegmann and Fritz Weitzel , were sentenced by a rapid lay judge on May 14 to three months in prison each.

In June 1932, Klotz, in his memorandum on combating the NSDAP, called for more efficient counter-propaganda: the SPD, the ADGB trade union and the Reichsbanner should join forces, systematically collect and evaluate material, which should then be available for providing information and as a press and intelligence service . Probably from 1930 Klotz published the weekly anti-fascist press correspondence ; the last edition appeared shortly after the National Socialist " seizure of power " on February 22, 1933. Klotz was invited to speak at the protest rally, The Free Word, on February 18 and 19, 1933.

Exile in Paris

“We raise our voices to thwart the development that has almost become inevitable in the last hour. And we want to prevent - once again at a turning point in history - the German army from running blindly and ignorantly into perdition and shame, that it, as an obedient tool in the hands of criminals, does the executioner's service on its own nation and in the West humiliated and abused. "

- Helmuth Klotz : Military Lessons of the Civil War in Spain (1938)

On March 15, 1933, Klotz fled to Prague. Shortly before, an SA commando raided Klotz's apartment, threatened his wife and secretary with pistols and vandalized the furnishings. In Prague, Klotz temporarily published the daily press service 99 on the situation in Germany.

On May 1, 1933, Klotz moved to Paris. He was initially on the board of the local SPD group, but was expelled on March 4, 1934, as he was a member of the world committee against the imperialist war and fascism . This committee, whose representatives also included Willi Munzenberg and Henri Barbusse , was assigned to the Third International by the SPD . In 1938 Klotz was involved in the preparation committee for the German Popular Front around Heinrich Mann . According to his own later statements, Klotz was always in financial need in exile, after the outbreak of war he also financed his living by selling jewelry. On March 29, 1934, Klotz's German citizenship was revoked , citing the law on the revocation of naturalizations and the revocation of German citizenship . The Frankfurt University revoked his doctorate on March 25, 1937.

In exile, Klotz continued his journalistic activities. An article by Klotz appeared in the New York exile newspaper Neue Volks-Zeitung on July 15, 1933, in which he dealt with Heines' homosexuality under the heading "Edmund Heines - The SA's boots". This led to the most serious differences within the SA, said Klotz. Also in 1933 he published Von Weimar via Potsdam to… Political diary of an apolitical Reichswehr general 1932–1933 . According to the preface, with the publication of the diary, Klotz wanted to show the background to the change of government from Brüning to von Papen to von Schleicher . The author of the diary must have been close to Schleicher; the authorship of Major General Ferdinand von Bredow , who fell victim to the Röhm murders in 1934 , is considered likely . Together with Otto Katz , Klotz took part in the publication of a white book in which the "Röhm murders" were documented.

The new German war , self-published in 1937, dealt with the armament of the Wehrmacht . Klotz regretted that the Versailles Treaty and the unilateral disarmament of Germany that it stipulated had not led to general disarmament in Europe. Hitler, according to Klotz, wanted war and was carrying out a planned armament: “The march for the New German War began on January 30, 1933. Today this march is nearing completion. [...] The machine is running. Nobody and nothing will stop them. Your number of tours has reached a critical stage. ”As in newspaper publications from the previous year, Klotz referred to German plans to disregard the neutrality of the Netherlands in an attack in the West . Such plans were developed by Franz von Epp . In view of the publications on the EPP plan, the Völkischer Beobachter spoke of fantasies of the “notorious emigrant Klotz”, with which “the peaceful coexistence of two peoples should be disturbed.”

Klotz's four-week stay in Spain during the civil war led to the publication of Military Lessons from the Civil War in Spain , which was also self-published in 1938. Klotz had traveled to Spain as a war correspondent at the invitation of the Republican government. He expressed his appreciation for the military achievements of General José Miaja , who organized the defense of the besieged Madrid on the Republican side . For Klotz, the Spanish civil war was the prelude to an approaching European war, and the German intervention troops were in Spain to “study”. Excerpts from the military lessons of the civil war in Spain appeared in Deutsche Freiheit , a weekly magazine published in Paris by the Saarland SPD politician Max Braun . Klotz and Braun worked together for almost two years. Klotz's reports in the German Freedom were mostly concerned with German military planning.

According to his own later information, Klotz offered to serve in the French army after the beginning of the Second World War . According to him, he was informed on May 2, 1940 that his appointment to the British General Staff was definitely confirmed. In mid-May he delivered an expert opinion commissioned by the British military attaché about the chances of success of a German operation against England and Ireland.

People's Court: "Conceived as a model for the new style"

A few days after the Compiègne armistice , which ended the German attack on France , Klotz was arrested on July 8, 1940 in Suresnes near Paris by the secret field police. It is likely that Klotz was held partly in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp , partly in the Moabit remand prison and in cells at the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA). According to a summary of interrogation protocols from January 1941, Klotz wanted to “finally draw the line under a past that one must have lived through oneself in order to appreciate its hardness and conflict. I wanted and needed my peace with the old fatherland and with its state system, for which I marched to the Feldherrnhalle in November 1923. "

From September 1941 the preliminary investigation against Klotz was conducted at the People's Court. The Oberreichsanwalt had, among other things, the Wehrmacht High Command prepare expert opinions on Klotz's publications. According to the expert opinion, the information provided by Klotz was essentially correct, even if the figures were excessive. On September 8, 1942, the Oberreichsanwalt brought charges against Klotz for high treason and treason . On November 27, Klotz was sentenced to death by the People's Court . The presiding judge was Roland Freisler ; the other judges included the Ministerialrat Eberhard Taubert and the SA group leader Hans von Helms . In the grounds for the death sentence, Freisler explained, among other things, to Klotz:

“His hate-eaten brain was busy thinking about how to reduce the Fuehrer's influence on the German people. So he suggested to the frigate captain Bonneau of the French General Staff that the next Fiihrer speech should be disrupted by the fact that as many French planes as possible crossed in the vicinity of the German radio stations for the Fiihrer's speech, or that speeches by the Fiihrer were interfering on records on the same waves as those of the German broadcasters should be sent against communism in a time of the non-aggression pact between Germany and Soviet Russia. "

Such considerations by Klotz cannot be proven in the interrogation protocols, the expert reports or in his letters. Walter Renken , responsible for the investigation against Klotz at the RSHA, made an internal note on January 5, 1943, according to which the verdict “apparently from the new President of the People's Court, Dr. Freisler, personally written and intended as a model for the new style ”.

As of November 28, 1942 held at the detention center Plotzensee Klotz turned down an appeal for clemency from: "The fact that I could even not submit a plea for clemency, you will understand and approve, because of the earthly judges, I wanted justice, not mercy," said Klotz a letter to his wife the night before his execution . Two requests for clemency submitted by relatives were rejected; Klotz was executed in Plötzensee on February 3, 1943.

The death sentence against Klotz was overturned by the law passed by the German Bundestag in 1998 to repeal unjust judgments in the criminal justice system .

Honors

The Stolpersteine ​​initiative on the B 96 laid a stumbling block in front of Klotz's former home in Hohenzollernkorso 38a (today Manfred-von-Richthofen-Straße 221) in Berlin-Tempelhof .

The House of History Baden-Württemberg commemorates the exhibition “Decently traded. Resistance and Volksgemeinschaft 1933–1945 “2012/2013 to Helmuth Klotz.

Fonts

  • The fight against capitalism - According to e. Lecturer written down . Publishing house "Die Neue Zeit" Dr. H. Klotz, Hanover, Lange Laube 14A, 1929
  • Hitler's socialism. Trommler-Verlag, Berlin 1930 ( online , PDF, 1.2 MB)
  • The Foreign Policy of the National Socialists. AP correspondence, Berlin 1931 ( online , PDF, 1.1 MB)
  • National Socialism and Civil Service. AP correspondence, Berlin 1931 ( online , PDF, 1.7 MB)
  • Honor ranking for the Third Reich. AP correspondence, Berlin 1931. ( online , PDF, 1.6 MB)
  • The Röhm case . Ed. Helmut Klotz, self-published by the editor, B.-Tempelhof, Hohenzollernkorso 38a, Berlin 1932 ( online , PDF, 690 kB)
  • Germany's secret armaments . Transl. by HJ Stenning, Jarrolds Publishing, London 1934
  • The Berlin diaries - Vol. I: May 30, 1932 - January 30, 1933. With a foreword by Edgard Ansel Mowrer. (Diary of a Reichswehr General) Ed. Helmuth Klotz, Morrow Verlag, New York 1934
  • The Berlin diaries - Vol. II: the private journals of a General in the German War Ministry revealing the secrets of Hitler's seizure of power . Jarrods Publisher, London 1935
  • The new German war - with 5 sketches, 6 schemes, 7 diagrams, all by the author . Author, Paris 1937
  • Military lessons of the civil war in Spain - with 9 sketches a. Schemas from author u. 26 original photographs . Self-rel. d. Author, Paris 1938

literature

  • Herbert Linder: From the NSDAP to the SPD. The political life of Dr. Helmuth Klotz (1894-1943). (= Karlsruhe contributions to the history of National Socialism. Volume 3) Universitätsverlag Konstanz, Konstanz 1998, ISBN 3-87940-607-3 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Orders and decorations. Proposals by the Zeebrugge sea flight station of January 4, 1916. Quoted in Linder, NSDAP , p. 39.
  2. ↑ Helmuth Klotz: Hitler wants war. Our first meeting. In the Wiener Wochenblatt Der Morgen of February 5, 1934, quoted in Linder, NSDAP , p. 46.
  3. ↑ Linder, NSDAP , p. 60ff. On the German Day, see also Siegfried Zelnhofer: German Day, Nuremberg, 1./2. September 1923 in Historisches Lexikon Bayern, as of May 28, 2008.
  4. ^ Information from Klotz in later police interrogations, see Linder, NSDAP , p. 93.
  5. ^ Statement by Max Amann from November 19, 1923, quoted in Linder, NSDAP , p. 94.
  6. ^ The "command" quoted in Linder, NSDAP , pp. 101f.
  7. ^ Letter from Klotz to Ludolf Haase dated September 29, 1924, quoted in Linder, NSDAP , p. 128.
  8. ↑ Files of the judicial authorities were destroyed in the Second World War. See Linder, NSDAP , p. 131.
  9. ↑ This assessment by Susanne Meinl: National Socialists against Hitler. The national revolutionary opposition around Friedrich Wilhelm Heinz. Siedler, Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-88680-613-8 , p. 111ff.
  10. ↑ a b c In the interrogations after his arrest in 1940, see Linder, NSDAP , pp. 135, 314f, 327.
  11. ↑ Helmuth Klotz: The National Socialist Epidemic. In: The free word. 1 (1929), issue 13, p. 14, quoted from Linder, NSDAP , p. 136.
  12. ↑ Helmuth Klotz: The foreign policy of the National Socialists. Berlin 1931, p. 31; quoted in Linder, NSDAP , p. 143.
  13. ↑ Helmut Klotz in The Free Word. 4 (1932), No. 16 (April 17, 1932), p. 29; quoted in Linder, NSDAP , p. 143.
  14. ↑ Excerpt from the foreword by Helmuth Klotz to “Der Fall Röhm” from September 12, 1932 at www.historisches-lexikon-bayerns.de.
  15. ↑ Ignaz Wrobel: Röhm . In: The world stage. 17 (April 26, 1932), p. 641. See also Alexander Zinn: The social construction of the homosexual National Socialists. On the genesis and establishment of a stereotype. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1997, ISBN 3-631-30776-4 , p. 47.
  16. ↑ Linder, NSDAP , p. 174ff. Communication in the Reichstag session by Reichstag President Paul Löbe , see minutes of the Reichstag session of May 12, 1932 .
  17. ^ Helmuth Klotz: Military lessons of the civil war in Spain. , Paris 1938, pp. 166f; quoted in Linder, NSDAP , p. 245.
  18. ↑ Michael Hepp (ed.): The expatriation of German citizens 1933-45 according to the lists published in the Reichsanzeiger. Volume 1, KG Saur, Munich 1985, ISBN 3-598-10538-X , p. 4.
  19. ↑ Zinn, construction , p. 88ff.
  20. ↑ On the question of the author of the diary see Linder, NSDAP , p. 193ff. In interrogations after his arrest, Klotz named Bredow as the author.
  21. ↑ Helmuth Klotz: The New German War. Self-published, Paris 1937, p. 17; quoted in Linder, NSDAP , p. 248.
  22. ^ Völkischer Beobachter of February 16, 1936, quoted in Linder, NSDAP , p. 254.
  23. ↑ Interrogation Protocols, Volume 1, Page 55, quoted in Linder, From the NSDAP to the SPD. [...] , p. 302.
  24. ^ Grounds for the judgment, p. 13; quoted in Linder, NSDAP , p. 327.
  25. ↑ Linder, NSDAP , p. 327.
  26. ↑ note Renkens of January 5, 1943 cited by Linder, NSDAP , S. 319th
  27. ^ Letter from Klotz dated February 3, 1943, quoted in Linder, NSDAP , p. 333.
  28. ↑ Stolpersteine ​​initiative on the B96 (PDF) .
personal data
SURNAME Klotz, Helmuth
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Klotz, Helmuth Paul Gustav Adolf (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German naval officer and publicist
DATE OF BIRTH October 30, 1894
PLACE OF BIRTH Freiburg in Breisgau
DATE OF DEATH February 3, 1943
Place of death Berlin-Plötzensee