Hermann Mattheiß

Hermann Mattheiß

Hermann Mattheiß (born July 18, 1893 in Ludwigstal ; † July 1, 1934 in Ellwangen ) was a German lawyer, SA leader and police officer.

Live and act

Empire and Weimar Republic

Mattheiss was the son of the secondary school teacher Hermann Mattheiß. In his youth he attended the Friedrich-Eugen-Realschule in Stuttgart, from which he graduated in 1911. He then did the one-year voluntary service in the Württemberg Field Artillery Regiment 65. From 1912 he studied law at the University of Tübingen .

From August 1914 on, Mattheiß took part in the First World War, in which he was promoted to lieutenant and awarded the Iron Cross of both classes. After his demobilization on March 1, 1919, he resumed his studies. He passed the First State Examination in 1919 and the Great State Examination in 1922. As early as 1921, with a thesis on the development of the land register in Württemberg, he was awarded a Dr. jur. PhD .

From June 1, 1922 to December 31, 1922 Mattheiß was deputy bailiff at the Schorndorf Oberamt . He then worked from January 24, 1923 to March 31, 1924 as a research assistant at the State Statistical Office. After a brief interlude as a legal reporter at the Stuttgart State Prize Office from April 1, 1924 to June 30, 1924, Mattheiß was appointed assistant judge in Ellwangen and Ravensburg on July 1, 1924 . On January 21, 1927, he moved to Oberndorf as a magistrate. From there he was transferred to Ellwangen as an assistant judge on September 18, 1929, before returning to Oberndorf as a district judge on October 17, 1930.

Around 1922 he married Anna Fanny Kossmann. The marriage, which was later divorced, gave birth to their son Hermann, who died in Stalingrad in 1943. In his second marriage, Mattheiß married Charlotte Egelhaaf. From this marriage three more children were born.

Mattheiß first made a name for himself politically in 1919 when he helped found the Württemberg State Association of the New German Order. In the same year he was a member of the Tübingen student corps.

In the late 1920s he joined the Nazi movement, in which his sympathies were with Gregor Strasser , with whose follower Fritz Kiehn he was personally friends. He also became a member of the SA , in which he was promoted to SA-Standartenführer , and the SS , in which he achieved the rank of SS-Oberscharführer . Mattheiß considered the party's main enemy to be "the politically located enemy from the left, verbalized old elites and the church."

Period of National Socialism (1933–1934)

A few weeks after the National Socialists came to power in January 1933, Mattheiß was appointed by Jagow on March 15, 1933 as sub-commissioner for the upper offices of Balingen , Horb , Oberndorf , Rottweil , Spaichingen , Sulz and Tuttlingen .

On April 19, 1933, the Württemberg interior minister Wilhelm Murr appointed Mattheiss as special commissioner for special use in the Württemberg interior ministry. When, as part of the reorganization of the Political Police in Württemberg on April 28, 1933, the Württemberg State Political Police Office was located directly at the Ministry of the Interior, Mattheiß was appointed its head. In this position he was appointed on June 20, 1933, retrospectively to May 12, 1933, to the regional court advisor and on October 5, 1933 to the senior government councilor in the Ministry of the Interior. November 4, 1933, he was also awarded the title of "President" for the duration of his use in this capacity.

In his position as head of the Political Police in Württemberg, Mattheiß played "the decisive role" (shoe store shopkeeper) in the persecution and elimination of political opponents of the Nazi regime in the transition phase from the Weimar Republic to the Nazi dictatorship in 1933/1934 State in Württemberg . In particular, as police chief, he was responsible for all matters relating to protective custody in the country: under Mattheiss's direction, numerous political opponents of the National Socialists were sent to the Heuberg concentration camp. After this camp was completely overcrowded, it was closed at the end of 1933 and replaced by Fort Oberer Kuhberg near Ulm . Measured in terms of population, the state of Württemberg, under the aegis of Mattheiß, to whom Wehling and Weber ascribed "persecution rage", had the largest number of prisoners in the whole empire.

At the beginning of May 1934, Mattheiß was given leave of absence from the post of head of the political police by the Gauleiter of Württemberg. The background were personal differences between Mattheiß and Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich , to whom the Württemberg police were subordinate to at the end of 1933. Walter Stahlecker was appointed to succeed Mattheiß as head of the state police .

In anticipation of his appointment as district court president, which is planned for July, Mattheiß then spent a few weeks in Friedrichshafen to relax and then travel to Ueberlingen to visit his parents .

assassination

Mattheiß was shot on July 1, 1934 in the course of the Röhm affair :

On the evening of June 29, 1934, Hans-Adolf Prützmann , the chief of the SS-Oberabschnitt Southwest, ordered SS-Standartenführer Beck and SS-Obersturmbannführer Glück (head of the SD in Württemberg) to arrest Mattheiß. In the early morning of June 30, 1934, these two, together with two other SS members, drove to Friedrichshafen in a company car to fulfill this assignment, where Mattheiß was suspected on the assumption that he would be spending his vacation there. After Mattheiß was not found either there or in the house of his friend Kiehn in Nussdorf, the men traveled to Überlingen to check whether Mattheiß might be staying with his parents, who lived there. In fact, Beck and his people were able to track down Mattheiß in an inn near his parents' house in Überlingen.

The detachment initially had Mattheiß return to his parents' house to say goodbye to his family. He was then taken via Friedrichshafen and Ravensburg - where he briefly managed to run away from the commando in a crowd before they could put him back in a bar - to the SS barracks in Ellwangen, where he arrived early in the morning of July 1st . An hour later, around 6:00 a.m., he was fusiled by firing squad. On July 2, 1934, Mattheiß's wife received the news that her husband had been shot in Ellwangen and then cremated in Stuttgart. Mattheiß's brothers-in-law, the Egelhaaf brothers, reported in a letter to the Minister of Justice that they had been informed that Mattheiß had refused to be blindfolded when he was shot and with his arm stretched out in the Hitler salute and the words “I am innocent, Heil Hitler! ”died on the lips. Mattheiß left a pregnant wife and three children.

The background and sponsor of the assassination of Mattheiß have not yet been fully clarified: In the literature it is mostly assumed that the shooting was based on orders from Himmler and / or Heydrich. Hans Bernd Gisevius , a senior official in the Ministry of the Interior in 1934, later wrote about Mattheiß's fate during the Röhm putsch:

“Actually he [Mattheiß] should feel particularly safe [as an SS man] today. But there are some differences in the black camp, which Heydrich believes are conveniently settled. The hunt goes through half of Württemberg. After all, they have him. Neither Stadelheim nor Lichterfelde shot, nor while trying to escape. Quite plain and simple: perished. "

It is also conceivable, however, that the initiative for the murder of Mattheiß went back to SS leader Prützmann, who was personally at odds with Mattheiß since he refused to integrate Prützmann's SS men into the political police.

After 1945 Mattheiss' widow tried to get her husband recognized as a "victim of National Socialism", a request that the shoe store shopkeeper described as "grotesque", which he justified with the execution:

"Such a classification would have been a mockery of the victims in the first phase of the NSDAP's settlement with their domestic enemies, for which Mattheiß was jointly responsible with his whole person."

It is not yet clear whether Mattheiß was recognized as a Nazi victim. The files of the public prosecutor's office in Ellwangen from proceedings after 1945 due to the murder of Mattheiß (file number Js 4739/48) are considered lost.

Promotions

Promotions in government service :

• June 20, 1933: District judge
• November 1, 1933: Upper Government Council
• November 4, 1933: Title of "President" in the state police administration

Fonts

• The development of the land register in Württemberg , s. l. 1921. (dissertation)
• Nazi courier dated January 30, 1934, special supplement on the first anniversary of the seizure of power.

Archival material

• State Archives Ludwigsburg: EL 902/2 Bü. 7588–7590 (Chamber files against Beck, Glück and Prützmann)

literature

• Roland Maier: Hermann Mattheiß . In: Hermann G. Abmayr (Ed.): Stuttgarter NS-Täter. From fellow travelers to mass murderers, Stuttgart 2009, pp. 114–119.
• Robert Allmendinger: The rise and fall of Dr. Hermann Mattheiss . In: City of Tuttlingen: National Socialism in Tuttlingen , Tuttlingen 1986, pp. 57–67.
• Hartmut Berghoff , Cornelia Rauh- Kühne: Fritz K. A German Life in the 20th Century , Stuttgart, Munich 2000.
• Paul Sauer : Württemberg in the time of National Socialism , Ulm 1975.
• Jürgen Schuhladen-Krämer: The executors of terror. Hermann Mattheiß, Walter Stahlecker, Friedrich Mußgay. Head of the secret state police headquarters in Stuttgart . In: Michael Kißener , Joachim Scholtyseck (ed.): Die Führer der Provinz , Konstanz 1999, pp. 405–443.
• Ingrid Bauz, Sigrid Brüggemann, Roland Maier (eds.): The Secret State Police in Württemberg and Hohenzollern . Stuttgart 2013, ISBN 3-89657-138-9 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Shoe store shopkeeper: The executors of terror ; P. 408.
2. ↑ Wolfgang Benz: Terror ohne System , 2001, p. 47.
3. ↑ Hans-Georg Wehling / Reinhold Weber: History of Baden-Württemberg , p. 96.
4. ↑ Federal Archives: R 3001/164138.
5. ↑ Hans Bernd Gisevius: Bis zum bitteren Ende , Vol. 1, 1960, p. 177. At the same point Gisevius notes that Mattheis as police chief “distinguished himself through wildness”.
6. ↑ Shoe store shopkeeper: The executors of terror , p. 416.
7. ↑ Shoe store shopkeeper: The executors of terror , p. 416.
8. ↑ Shoe store shopkeeper: The executors of terror , p. 416.