Helmuth Unger

This article deals with SA leader Helmuth Unger. For the physician see Hellmuth Unger , for other people see Helmut Unger .

Helmuth Fritz August Unger (born July 11, 1906 in Friedenau, † probably on June 24, 1933 in Berlin) was a German SA leader . He became known as the victim of a murder in 1933.

Life and activity

Earlier career

Unger was the only child of the engineer Julius Unger (born October 17, 1869 in Essen) from Spandau. After attending school, he learned the commercial profession.

Unger was politically oriented early on to the extreme political right: in the years after the First World War, he was a member of the German national Bismarck Bund .

In 1924 Unger was recruited by his friend Karl Belding for the right-wing extremist military association Frontbann , in whose Berlin section ("Frontbann Nord") he was involved from 1924 to 1926. In this organization, which was led by the former captain Paul Röhrbein , he was assigned to the 4th company. In the Frontbann Nord Unger got to know a number of men who later took up leading positions in the SA and SS . a. the later head of the Berlin SA Karl Ernst and the later leader of the Berlin SS Kurt Daluege .

After the ban on the front was dissolved in 1926, Unger was still active in the völkisch movement: that year he was active in the Spandau SA and in the newly founded NSDAP (without officially joining it). In the following years he took a. a. participated in the Leipzig Warrior Day (1926) and the first party congress of the NSDAP in Weimar in 1927.

In the years 1927 to 1929 Unger, who during this time was staying in different places in Pomerania and southern Germany for reasons of gainful employment, was absent from Berlin.

Activity in the SA (1930 to 1932)

After his return to Berlin, Unger officially joined the NSDAP on May 1, 1930 (membership number 231.880) and began to work again in the Sturmabteilung . In this he was initially a member of Spandau Storms 10 and 107. In April 1931 he is said to have participated in the suppression of the Stennes revolt .

In the spring of 1931, at the instigation of his old friend Karl Ernst, who had meanwhile been promoted to adjutant of the Berlin SA leadership, the post of staff leader of the 1st Berlin SA Standard, which was led by Karl Belding, was transferred. He held the rank of SA-Sturmführer or Standarten-Stabsführer (in later years by the SA-Sturmbannführer rank).

In the summer of 1931, due to financial difficulties, Unger was recruited as an informant by the IA (Political Police) department of the Berlin police headquarters. As a result, he regularly wrote reports on internal processes and plans of the Berlin SA and NSDAP for the police.

In autumn 1931, the SA determined that Unger was a registered member of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). When asked about this, he justified this with the fact that he had joined the KPD in 1930 at the instigation of the then Berlin SA chief Walther Stennes in order to be able to spy on it in the interests of the NSDAP. Despite the distrust that was developing against him at that time, Unger was allowed to take part in a course at the Reichsführer-School of the NSDAP in Munich in September 1931 .

After his return from Munich, Unger was suspended from the SA in October 1931. b. V. post at the Staff of Staffel 1 and expelled four weeks later from the staff. In 1932 and in the spring of 1933 he tried in vain to get a post in the SA, but was rejected by the SA as not trustworthy.

Due to the benevolence of Karl Ernst, after the National Socialists came to power in the spring of 1933 , Unger was allowed to take part in the torchlight procession through the Brandenburg Gate held on the night of January 30 to 31, 1933, with which the SA celebrated Hitler's appointment as Reich Chancellor Mourning act for his murdered SA friend Hans Maikowski took part in the Berlin Cathedral, but soon afterwards his exclusion from the SA increased further.

Unger's Disappearance (June 1933)

Unger's fate was the fact that, in the wake of the National Socialists' rise to power in spring 1933, control of the political police across Germany also passed into the hands of the NSDAP. In the early summer of 1933, while looking through the papers of an SPD journalist who had fled abroad, the Bavarian Political Police discovered evidence that the suspicion that Unger had acted as an informant before 1933 had been correct: It was established that he was not only the Political police, but also the SPD had supplied information.

On the basis of the newly emerged incriminating material, Unger was summoned to the Horst-Wessel-Haus, a branch of the Secret State Police Office, for questioning on June 24, 1933. In the interrogation there by Detective Inspector Rudolf Braschwitz , he finally admitted, after initially denying it, that he had actually acted as an informant in 1931 and 1932 for payment. According to Braschwitz's later admission, he suffered a nervous breakdown after his confession, declared that he repented his behavior and described himself as a "pig". Since Unger was only guilty of misconduct from a party standpoint, but not criminally, he was allowed to leave the Braschwitz office after his confession.

At this point in time his trace is lost: In research it is assumed that Unger after his release from Braschwitz's office when leaving the Horst Wessel house was arrested by SA guards present and then by his former superior Belding and by Standartenführer Bernhard Fischer- Schweder was executed in an undisclosed location.

Unger's parents filed a missing person report with the police soon after his disappearance, without their son showing up again. A complaint to the Central Public Prosecutor's Office in the Prussian State Ministry also remained inconclusive. On the basis of numerous circumstantial evidence, it became known to them that Belding and Fischer-Schweder had probably killed their son, which is why they demanded the prosecution of the alleged perpetrators from official agencies. The Gestapo chief Rudolf Diels finally explained to the couple that if Belding and Fischer-Schweder actually committed the crime they were accused of, they - the parents - would have to come to terms with it. By order of the Reich Chancellery, however, Diels had to prepare a report on the process, which was probably one of the reasons why Belding - who has since been transferred to Breslau as a detective commissioner - was shot by the SS as a troublemaker in the course of the Nazi government's cleansing wave in the summer of 1934 .

According to a report by the Berlin SA group to the Supreme SA leadership of October 3, 1934, the then leader of the 1st Berlin SA Standard Fritz Hahn reported that Karl Ernst had informed him at the time that Unger was responding to his (i.e. Ernsts) Was shot on suspicion of espionage. Another argument in favor of Unger's execution as a traitor to the party or the SA is the fact that June 24, 1933, the day of his disappearance and a probable murder, had turned into a "day of the old guard" by the Berlin SA leadership shortly before unofficial holiday in honor of the achievements of the veteran "fighters" of the Berlin SA - those SA members who had fought for many years in the Berlin SA for the victory of National Socialism - and this day was symbolically charged for the Berlin SA , so that it was obvious on this special day of the Berlin section of the party army of the NSDAP to settle a "traitor" to this very same person.

estate

Personal documents about Unger have been preserved in the Federal Archives, particularly in connection with his exclusion from the SA (SA-P, microfilm D 277, photos 35ff.). Documents for the investigation of Unger's disappearance can be found in the Berlin State Archives (B.-Rep. 058, No. 10792).

An index card on Unger with photo is in the NSDAP central index (Bundesarchiv Berlin: BDC: 3100, index card "Unger, Helmut (July 11, 1906)", available as microfilm S 64, image 2454).

literature

• Benjamin Carter Hett: The Reichstag Fire Retrial , Reinbek 2016.
• Heinz Höhne: Mordache Röhm. Hitler's breakthrough to total power , Reinbek 1984.