Hermann Berchtold

Hermann Friedrich Richard Berchtold (born July 5, 1899 in Weilheim in Upper Bavaria , † after 1945 ) was a German officer and SA leader, most recently with the rank of SA group leader .

Life

Berchtold was a son of the Munich lawyer Karl Berchtold and his wife Johanna, geb. Fahrig. In his youth he attended a humanistic grammar school . Information on the question of a close relationship between Hermann Berchtold and the later SS chief Joseph Berchtold , who like him grew up in Munich, cannot be found in the available literature.

Berchtold took off in 1917 as a cadet in the Bavarian Army in the First World War in part. In 1919 he passed the secondary school diploma and then joined a volunteer battalion with which he participated in the suppression of communist uprisings in southern Bavaria. In May 1919 Berchtold was taken over as a temporary volunteer by the Reichswehr Brigade 21 with the 41st Rifle Regiment, where he worked as a platoon leader until November 1919. After spending a few more months in the settlement center in Bad Kissingen , he was dismissed as a lieutenant in May 1920 .

In the early 1920s, Berchtold was involved in the Bavarian Resident Defense . He was also active in right-wing extremist secret organizations dominated by former officers. In this context he was involved in numerous female murders: In the autumn of 1920 he hid his friend Hans Schweighart , who was wanted by the authorities for a political murder, from the police and supported him in his escape abroad. While Schweighart hid himself from the stalking of the German authorities in Austria in the months that followed, Berchtold kept him informed of developments in matters affecting him. He also provided him with money and false ID.

In the course of 1921, the Bavarian authorities suspected that Berchtold had been involved in the Fememicide of the maid Maria Sandmayr and the waiter Hans Hartung. There is evidence that he at least took part in the car ride of several members of the resident army, during which Hartung was murdered. However, Berchtold could no longer be arrested and interrogated, as Berchtold had previously gone to Silesia , around May 1921, to participate in the border battles of German volunteer organizations against Polish irregulars there as a member of the Upper Silesian self-protection . Berchtold came from Silesia to Austria in September 1921 , where he visited Schweighart. After Schweighart was arrested by the authorities in Innsbruck on October 12, 1921 , Berchtold suspected a certain Wilhelm Hörnlein - an alleged political friend with whom Berchtold and Schweighart had met in Austria - of informing the authorities of Schweighart's whereabouts as an informant. Together with Hörnlein, Berchtold flew through Austria for a few days, fleeing the police, before they finally quartered in an inn near Judenburg . Hörnlein's body was finally found on October 31 in a forest near Judenburg. The investigating judiciary came to the conclusion that Berchtold shot the unsuspecting horny while taking a walk in the forest while relieving himself and finally shot the fleeing man lying on the ground in the head from close range after he fell. By the end of 1921, Berchtold had completely disappeared from the scene. He was probably in Spain .

In November 1930, the Munich District Court I dropped the proceedings against Berchtold for the murder of Hans Hartung, as a political motive was assumed, so that the act fell under the Amnesty Act of 1928. Shortly afterwards, the lawyers Karl Kohl and Walter Luetgebrune applied for Berchtold to discontinue the ongoing proceedings against them, invoking the Amnesty Act of 1928. In the subsequent correspondence, the lawyers also passed on some details about the murder of Maria Sandmayr and the Hörnlein to the authorities that their client had given them. Berchtold even expressly stated that he was the perpetrator in these two cases. However, research has indicated that these self-accusations do not necessarily have to apply, but that they could also have been of a tactical nature: Since Berchtold was abroad at the time, he was before the authorities could intervene in the event that his application for amnesty was not approved pretty sure, so that he could take responsibility for things he might not have done. His former colleague Schweighart, on the other hand, was in Bavaria, so that he was exposed to the risk of being arrested immediately in the event that the amnesty against Berchtold was not granted, if he had indicated in his descriptions that Schweighart was a possible perpetrator and of himself only as an accomplice would have spoken. In 1931 Berchtold finally returned to Germany.

On December 1, 1931, Berchtold joined the NSDAP (membership number 754.024). The Sturmabteilung (SA) had already joined on November 1, 1931. A short time later he switched to the SS, where he worked in the Security Service (SD) until 1933, before returning to the SA in the summer of 1933 after friction with Reinhard Heydrich.

In 1933 Berchtold was entrusted with the office of special representative of the Supreme SA Leader for Württemberg and Hohenzollern. In the summer of 1934, at Heydrich's instigation, he was taken into protective custody for a few weeks, which he spent in various concentration camps before he was released again in September 1934.

In the SA Berchtold reached the rank of SA Brigade Leader in 1937 and on November 9, 1942 the rank of SA Group Leader. In addition, he took on leading positions in a leather company and in the Vienna cooperative central bank for the Ostmark .

literature

• Ulrike Claudia Hofmann: traitors fall into the distance! Fememorde in Bavaria in the twenties , 2000, passim and in particular pp. 150–156.