Hermann Esser

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Hermann Esser, 1933

Hermann Esser (born July 29, 1900 in Röhrmoos near Dachau ; † February 7, 1981 in Dietramszell ) was a National Socialist journalist and politician. As one of the earliest followers and friends of Adolf Hitler, he held influential positions in the NSDAP during the Weimar Republic , but increasingly lost influence during the Nazi era . In 1934/35 he was Bavarian Minister of Economic Affairs and from 1939 to 1945 State Secretary in the Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda .

Life

youth

Esser's father was a railway director in Kempten , where Hermann Esser also attended the Kempten Humanistic Gymnasium . In July 1917 he volunteered , fought at the front for a year in the First World War and then passed a secondary school diploma . After demobilization , he was a member of the USPD for a short time . In 1919 Esser began studying newspaper science and volunteered for the social democratic newspaper Allgäuer Volkswacht (Kempten). He became a member of the Danubia Munich fraternity . In May 1919 he took part in the suppression of the Munich Soviet Republic as a member of the Swabian Freikorps . He then worked as a consultant in the press department of the Munich military district command .

Nazi movement

In 1919, Esser joined the DAP , which was renamed the NSDAP shortly afterwards, but was not registered as a member until January 1920 and was given membership number 881. In 1920 the twenty-year-old editor ("Editor") of the Völkischer Beobachter . Here he published slippery scandal stories with an anti-Semitic tendency: it was always Jews whom he blamed for immoral behavior and other misconduct.

Esser played a major role in the creation of the 25-point program of the NSDAP and, alongside Ernst Röhm , Julius Streicher , Christian Weber and Dietrich Eckart, was one of only five followers of Hitler who were allowed to use his name. These men, who also included Max Amann , Rudolf Hess and Alfred Rosenberg - mostly unemployed or those who had failed in civil life - formed a clique around Hitler who unconditionally admired the " Führer ", made contact with Freikorps and nationalist groups and helped build them up supported the National Socialist movement. Esser repeatedly participated in violently breaking up meetings of other parties whose supporters he insulted as Jews or " Judenzer ".

On November 3, 1922, Esser, as editor of the Völkischer Beobachter , inspired by the march on Rome by the Italian fascists a few days earlier, declared that this was also possible in Germany: “ We also have the Mussolini of Italy in Bavaria. His name is Adolf Hitler . ”Or this is“ Germany's Mussolini ”. A month later, the Völkischer Beobachter declared Hitler - also based on the Italian "Duce" - the leader not only of the party, but of all of Germany. In 1923 Esser, who was considered a good speaker, was appointed the first propaganda leader of the NSDAP. He intensified his anti-Semitic polemics and publicly called for all Jews to be interned in camps and for some 10,000 to be shot until the French occupation of the Ruhr , which he attributed to Jewish activities, was over.

On July 5, 1923, Esser married; Hitler was the best man. The marriage resulted in two sons in 1925 and 1926. Despite illness, Esser took an active part in the Hitler putsch , gave a speech in the Löwenbräukeller on November 8, 1923 and drafted a "proclamation to the German people". After the coup failed, he fled to Austria , but returned to Germany in May 1924 and was sentenced to three months in prison for violating the peace . He then got involved in the Großdeutsche Volksgemeinschaft (GVG), one of the successor organizations to the banned NSDAP, and, together with Julius Streicher , was able to oust its founder Alfred Rosenberg from the party leadership. Esser polemicized against the competition of the GVG, the National Socialist Freedom Movement , in 1924, whose chairman Erich Ludendorff had failed both in the World War and in the putsch. The allegations, which had been published in the Frankfurter Zeitung , which was regarded as “ all-Jewish ” , caused considerable outrage in the Volkish camp.

After the re-establishment of the NSDAP in February 1925, Esser immediately rejoined and was given membership number 2. The GVG was dissolved. From August 4, 1925 to April 1926, he was Reich Propaganda Head of the NSDAP . In this office, according to the historian Detlef Mühlberger, he only developed a limited activity. His position within the party was also not unchallenged. The North German National Socialists Gregor and Otto Strasser as well as Joseph Goebbels defended themselves against regulations of the Munich headquarters and especially Essers, whom they accused of organizational weakness. Goebbels noted on August 20, 1925.

“[Strasser] said a lot of sad things about Munich. From this pig and slut economy in the headquarters. Hitler is surrounded by the wrong people. I think Hermann Esser is his undoing. "

The North Germans demanded Esser's exclusion from the NSDAP because of “selfish and unvölkisch” behavior, Otto Strasser considered him “ sexually perverse ”, Alfred Rosenberg, Esser's successor in the management of the Völkischer Beobachter , only withdrew allegations against him when Esser gave him one action for defamation threatened. Streicher now also distanced himself from him. Hitler put an end to the antagonisms between Esser and the Munich National Socialists on the one hand and the Northwest Germans around the Strasser brothers and Goebbels, who were more oriented towards national socialism , on the other hand on February 14, 1926 at the Bamberg Führer Conference : he gave everyone National Bolshevik tendencies, but upgraded their representatives: Esser had to give up his post as Reich Propaganda Leader to Gregor Strasser, Goebbels was invited to Munich and was allowed to give an important speech. Nevertheless, Hitler did not completely drop his " factotum " Esser. Instead, he used him repeatedly as a speaker at Nazi party rallies and in 1926 made him the editor of the Illustrierte Beobachter , the NSDAP's magazines.

In 1927 Esser published his anti-Semitic inflammatory pamphlet The Jewish World Plague , which saw several new editions during the Nazi era . In it he asserted, including numerous anti-Semitic stereotypes , that the Jews had always exploited and subjugated all other peoples since ancient Egypt : the Jerusalem temple was in truth a banking house, the Old Testament called for the exploitation of all non-Jews. The alleged dangerousness of the "Jewish race" for mankind is shown in the Talmud , which the Jews tried in vain to keep secret, and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion . He quoted extensively from this forgery , which was first published in Russia in 1903 and contains alleged plans for world domination by the Jews, and concluded that the only appropriate punishment for it was "mass extermination". He did not accept any counter-arguments against this conspiracy theory: "What the foreign journalle, bribed and fattened by Jewish money, writes about internal German affairs leaves every German cold to the heart." Esser did not go into Hitler's recently published book Mein Kampf . Historian Othmar Plöckinger sees this as an indication of a reserve between the sidelined Esser and Hitler.

In 1928 Esser was elected to the Upper Bavarian district council. In 1929 he moved to the Munich city council , where he chaired the NSDAP parliamentary group together with Karl Fiehler . In 1932 he became a member of the Bavarian State Parliament and ended his work for the Illustrierte Beobachter .

time of the nationalsocialism

From 1933 until the repeal of the Bavarian State Parliament on January 30, 1934 by the law on the reconstruction of the Reich , Esser was its president. In 1933 he entered the Reichstag as a member of the Reichstag for Upper Bavaria / Swabia . From December 1933 to 1945 he was one of its vice-presidents. In March 1934 he succeeded in persuading the Bavarian Reich Governor Franz Ritter von Epp to first appoint him Minister for Special Use. In the cabinet of Prime Minister Ludwig Siebert (NSDAP) he held the office of Minister of Agriculture from April 1933, from March 1, 1934 that of Minister of Economics .

He held this office until 1935. The background to his resignation was a failed intrigue against the Bavarian Minister of the Interior and Gauleiter Adolf Wagner as well as financial irregularities: Esser had forced Bavarian industrialists to pay large amounts to the state treasury. There was also a dirty war of divorce: Esser had cultivated several extramarital relationships since 1926. He had three children with his lover Anna Bacherl. Since 1933, he filed for divorce twice , but both times it was rejected.

Hermann Esser as chairman of the Reich Tourism Group at the “Festival of German Travel” in Berlin, second half of the 1930s

In 1933, after Erhard Milch left the company, Esser was appointed to the Lufthansa Supervisory Board . In 1935 he was assigned tourism as a new field of activity. He was now chairman of the Reich Tourism Group, and in January 1939 he also took over the tourism department in the Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda with the rank of State Secretary . These positions had no political influence, but ensured him a respectable income. Because Esser continued to attract attention with sexual escapades, Hitler withdrew the you trusted in 1936. But Esser stayed in Hitler's circle of friends and visited him at the Berghof or met him for dinner in a Munich osteria . Two months after the November pogroms of 1938 , he presented a new edition of his Jewish World Plague , in which he claimed that the Jews only got what was due to them:

"Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist German Workers' Party created and led by him fought through the fight against the Jews and the Jewish spirit in all camps and thus made the people and the Reich free and happy again."

In 1938, Esser again filed for divorce proceedings against his wife Therese, which he accused, among other things, of having broken her marriage and undermined his position in the NSDAP with defamatory claims about the treasurer, Franz Xaver Schwarz . In fact, Therese Esser was sentenced to prison in 1939 for violating the treachery law and defamation . Esser also let his political connections play and managed to get the Reich Chancellery , Justice Minister Franz Gürtner and Hitler personally involved in his divorce proceedings in his favor. In March of that year, the marriage was divorced as "broken" in a review procedure , a possibility that had only been introduced a few months earlier by the National Socialist marriage law . Hitler declared that when making this decision he had Esser's marriage in mind.

A rather bizarre example of the typical polycratic conflicts that Esser repeatedly got into was his trip to Rome in April 1939: In doing so, he arranged an audience with the duce of the fascist regime Benito Mussolini at the same time as Hermann Göring . Such audiences were considered so prestigious among the leading Nazis that Hitler reserved the right to approve them individually. The double booking triggered hectic activity and was finally rectified to the satisfaction of both old fighters . During the Second World War , Esser rarely appeared. In 1941 he got into a conflict with Baldur von Schirach , the person in charge of the deportation to Kinderland . As more and more holiday lodgings and guest houses in summer resorts were children and their mothers is that before the bombing were evacuated from the cities, feared Esser deeper intervention in its responsibilities. He warned that, in the interests of public health , at least the spas should be spared, but could not prevail. In November 1941, he issued an ordinance that only members of the Wehrmacht, armaments workers and other persons important to the war effort were allowed to stay in holiday resorts. In 1943 Esser gave the speech in front of Alte Kämpfern on the twenty-three year anniversary of the founding of the NSDAP, and on February 24, 1945 he read Hitler's last public speech.

After the end of National Socialism

At the end of the war, Esser was arrested and interned by the American army . During interrogation on December 6, 1946, he claimed that he had not been politically active after his resignation as minister. The book The Jewish World Plague did not come from him, but from Rosenberg. He could no longer comment on this lie because he had already been executed. The American investigator noted that Esser was an opponent of the Nuremberg race laws and that his dissent with Hitler was sparked by the "Jewish question" . Esser was only classified as a follower . At the end of May 1948 he was released from internment by the Americans. Esser went into hiding in the months that followed and was searched for by the German authorities that had not been informed of his release . In 1949 he was taken into custody again by the German authorities, classified as the main culprit on August 8, 1949 as part of his judgments chamber proceedings by a Munich denazification chamber and sentenced to five years in a labor camp. In 1952 he was released early, taking into account the number of years in prison.

After that, Esser no longer appeared in public. He lived undisturbed in Munich and worked in a leading position in the Bavarian travel agency . In July 1980 he was congratulated, the “Minister of State a. D. “, the Bavarian Prime Minister Franz Josef Strauss ( CSU ) officially on his 80th birthday. He died on February 7, 1981.

Publications

  • The Jewish world plague. Can a Jew be a citizen? Rather , Munich 1927, 1st edition. The 2nd expanded edition appeared in 1939 under the slightly changed title Die Judenische Weltpest. Jewish twilight on the globe. After the end of the war in the Soviet occupation zone, it was placed on the list of literature to be segregated.
  • “Bavaria's savior is called Adolf Hitler.” Address by City Councilor Hermann Esser. National Record Service, Berlin.

literature

Web links

Commons : Hermann Esser  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Esser, Hermann . In: Administrative Handbook of the Bavarian State Library, accessed on February 23, 2012.
  2. ↑ Gerhard Schulz: Rise of National Socialism. Crisis and Revolution in Germany. Propylaea Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1975, p. 199.
  3. ^ Helge Dvorak: Biographical Lexicon of the German Burschenschaft. Volume I: Politicians. Sub-Volume 1: A-E. Winter, Heidelberg 1996, ISBN 3-8253-0339-X , p. 265.
  4. ↑ Robert Wistrich : Who was who in the Third Reich. Supporters, followers, opponents from politics, business, military, art and science. Harnack, Munich 1983, p. 66 f.
  5. ↑ Albrecht Tyrell (ed.): Führer befiehl ... self-testimonies from the "fighting time" of the NSDAP. Grondrom Verlag, Bindlach 1991, p. 22.
  6. ↑ Wolfgang Benz, Hermann Graml, Hermann Weiß (eds.): Encyclopedia of National Socialism. Munich 1997, p. 833; Ernst Klee: The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. Augsburg 2008, p. 140.
  7. ↑ Robert Wistrich: Who was who in the Third Reich. Supporters, followers, opponents from politics, business, military, art and science. Harnack, Munich 1983, p. 68.
  8. ^ Andreas Dornheim: Röhm's husband for abroad. Politics and assassination of the SA agent Georg Bell. LIT, Münter 1998, p. 65 f.
  9. ↑ Hans-Ulrich Thamer : Seduction and violence. Germany 1933–1945. Siedler Verlag, Berlin 1994, p. 66 ff.
  10. ↑ Wolfram Selig: Esser, Hermann . In: Wolfgang Benz (Hrsg.): Handbuch des Antisemitismus . Vol. 2: People . De Gruyter Saur, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-598-44159-2 , p. 217.
  11. ^ Kurt Pätzold and Manfred Weißbecker: History of the NSDAP 1920–1945. Cologne 1981, p. 66 f.
  12. ^ Gerhard L. Weinberg (Ed.): Hitler's Second Book . A document from 1928. Stuttgart 1961, cited above. after: Kurt Pätzold and Manfred Weißbecker: History of the NSDAP 1920–1945. Cologne 1981, p. 66.
  13. ↑ Hans-Ulrich Thamer: Seduction and violence. Germany 1933–1945 . Siedler Verlag, Berlin 1994, p. 95.
  14. ^ Mathias Rösch: The Munich NSDAP 1925-1933. An investigation into the internal structure of the NSDAP in the Weimar Republic. Oldenbourg, Munich 2001, p. 411.
  15. ↑ Heike B. Görtemaker: Eva Braun. Life with Hitler. C. H. Beck, Munich 2010, p. 15.
  16. ↑ Hans Peter Bleuel: The clean realm. The hidden truth. Eros and Sexuality in the Third Reich. Gustav Lübbe, Bergisch Gladbach 1981, p. 189.
  17. ↑ Albrecht Tyrell (ed.): Führer befiehl ... self-testimonies from the "fighting time" of the NSDAP . Grondrom Verlag, Bindlach 1991, p. 70.
  18. ↑ Othmar Plöckinger: History of a book. Adolf Hitler's “Mein Kampf” 1922–1945. Oldenbourg, Munich 2011, p. 63.
  19. ↑ Wolfram Selig: Esser, Hermann . In: Wolfgang Benz (Hrsg.): Handbuch des Antisemitismus. Vol. 2: People . De Gruyter Saur, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-598-44159-2 , p. 217.
  20. ↑ Paul Hoser: National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP), 1920–1923 / 1925–1945. In: Historical Lexicon of Bavaria . January 8, 2013, accessed June 2, 2013 .
  21. ^ Detlef Mühlberger: Central Control versus Regional Autonomy. A Case Study in Nazi Propaganda in Westphalia, 1925–1932. In: Thomas Childers (Ed.): The Formation of the Nazi Constituency 1919-1933 . Routledge, New York 1986, p. 70.
  22. ↑ Quoted from Sven Felix Kellerhoff : The NSDAP. A party and its members. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 2017, p. 125.
  23. ↑ Hans-Ulrich Thamer: Seduction and violence. Germany 1933–1945. Siedler Verlag, Berlin 1994, p. 139.
  24. ↑ So the formulation in Albrecht Tyrell (ed.): Führer befiehl ... self-testimonies from the "fighting time" of the NSDAP . Gondrom Verlag, Bindlach 1991, p. 16.
  25. ↑ Robert Wistrich: Who was who in the Third Reich. Supporters, followers, opponents from politics, business, military, art and science. Harnack, Munich 1983, p. 67.
  26. ↑ Also on the following Angelika Benz: The Jewish World Plague (Hermann Esser, 1927) . In: Wolfgang Benz (Hrsg.): Handbuch des Antisemitismus . Volume 6: Writings and Periodicals . De Gruyter Saur, Berlin 2013, p. 380 f., ISBN 978-3-11-025872-1 (accessed via De Gruyter Online).
  27. ↑ Hermann Esser: The Jewish World Plague. Jewish twilight on the globe. Franz Eher Verlag, Munich 1943, p. 132
  28. ↑ Othmar Plöckinger: History of a book. Adolf Hitler's “Mein Kampf” 1922–1945. Oldenbourg, Munich 2011, p. 347.
  29. ↑ Wolfram Selig: Esser, Hermann . In: Wolfgang Benz (Hrsg.): Handbuch des Antisemitismus. Vol. 2: People. De Gruyter Saur, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-598-44159-2 , p. 217.
  30. ↑ Wolfram Selig: Esser, Hermann . In: Wolfgang Benz (Hrsg.): Handbuch des Antisemitismus. Vol. 2: People. De Gruyter Saur, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-598-44159-2 , p. 217.
  31. ↑ Hans Peter Bleuel: The clean realm. The hidden truth. Eros and Sexuality in the Third Reich. Gustav Lübbe, Bergisch Gladbach 1981, p. 190.
  32. ^ Lothar Gall : The Deutsche Bank 1870-1995 . CH Beck, Munich 1995, p. 358.
  33. ^ Died: Hermann Esser. In: Der Spiegel from February 16, 1981 ( online , accessed February 18, 2012).
  34. ↑ Heike B. Görtemaker: Eva Braun. Life with Hitler. C. H. Beck, Munich 2010, p. 182 and ö.
  35. ^ Henry Picker : Hitler's table talks in the Führer Headquarters . Ullstein, Berlin 1993, p. 247: Record from April 27, 1942.
  36. ↑ Angelika Benz: The Jewish World Plague (Hermann Esser, 1927) . In: Wolfgang Benz (Hrsg.): Handbuch des Antisemitismus. Volume 6: Writings and Periodicals . De Gruyter Saur, Berlin 2013, p. 381, ISBN 978-3-11-025872-1 (accessed via De Gruyter Online).
  37. ^ Dirk Blasius : Divorce in Germany 1794-1945. Divorce and divorce law from a historical perspective. Vandenhoeck and Rupprecht, Göttingen 1987, p. 215 ff.
  38. ↑ Hans Peter Bleuel: The clean realm. The hidden truth. Eros and Sexuality in the Third Reich. Gustav Lübbe, Bergisch Gladbach 1981, pp. 190-193.
  39. ↑ Wolfgang Schieder : Myth Mussolini. Germans in audience with the Duce. Oldenbourg, Munich 2013, ISBN 978-3-486-70937-7 , p. 182 (accessed from De Gruyter Online).
  40. ↑ Katja Klee: In the "air raid shelter of the Reich". Evacuated in Bavaria 1939–1953. Politics, social situation, experiences. Oldenbourg, Munich 1999, p. 111 f.
  41. ^ Hans-Ulrich Wehler: German history of society. Vol. 4: From the beginning of the First World War to the founding of the two German states 1914–1949. C. H. Beck Verlag, Munich 2003, p. 907.
  42. ↑ Heike B. Görtemaker: Eva Braun. Life with Hitler. C. H. Beck, Munich 2010, p. 182 f.
  43. ↑ Esser, Hermann . In: Munzinger Online / Personen - Internationales Biographisches Archiv , accessed on September 16, 2018.
  44. ↑ Robert Wistrich: Who was who in the Third Reich. Supporters, followers, opponents from politics, business, military, art and science. Harnack, Munich 1983, p. 68.
  45. ↑ Claus-Ekkehard Bärsch : The political religion of National Socialism. The religious dimensions of the Nazi ideology in the writings of Dietrich Eckart, Joseph Goebbels, Alfred Rosenberg and Adolf Hitler. Fink, Munich 2002, p. 292.
  46. ^ Died: Hermann Esser. In: Der Spiegel from February 16, 1981 ( online , accessed February 18, 2012).
  47. ^ German Administration for National Education in the Soviet Zone of Occupation, List of Literature to be Separated, E.
personal data
SURNAME Esser, Hermann
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician (USPD, NSDAP), MdR
DATE OF BIRTH July 29, 1900
PLACE OF BIRTH Röhrmoos near Dachau
DATE OF DEATH 7th February 1981
Place of death Dietramszell