Johannes Schmidt (SS member)

Johannes Schmidt (1935)

Johannes Schmidt (born March 11, 1908 in Gotha ; † December 23, 1976 in Offenbach am Main ) was a German SD and SS officer (last rank: Sturmbannführer) in Berlin at the time of the Roman murders in 1934 , who was allegedly involved in the murder of Kurt von Schleicher was involved. From 1936 on he was responsible for the control of the political and then the entire police in the Thuringian Ministry of the Interior . After 1945 he managed to hide his high position in the SD. From the 1950s onwards he worked at the Hessian Municipal Council - at the end as senior administrative director.

Life

education

Schmidt was the son of the coal merchant Johannes Schmidt (* 1876 in Hatterode) and his wife Olga Lina Anna Dill (* 1879 in Gotha). Through his mother he was a grandson of the organ builder Wilhelm Heerwagen . Schmidt had a younger brother, Herbert Heinrich Ernst Schmidt (* 1915), who disappeared during World War II .

At birth, Schmidt suffered permanent physical damage, which resulted in a. his right auricle was replaced by an artificial auricle. He attended the Arnoldi Realschule in Gotha and, after graduating from high school in 1927, studied law in Heidelberg and Jena . Also in Jena , he received his doctorate from Hellmuth von Weber on the concept of violence in 1933. jur. After the legal traineeship, which he passed in April 1931, he was accepted into the legal preparatory service and worked at various courts. In 1935 he passed the Great State Examination.

Political commitment to National Socialism

As a teenager, Schmidt was a member of the right-wing extremist German National Youth Association . In 1923 he disrupted a commemoration ceremony for the establishment of the Weimar Republic on November 9, 1918 in his school. In Heidelberg he belonged to a fraternity.

In the summer of 1929 he joined the NS student union , in which he became a student leader in Thuringia, and a little later the NSDAP . He was not publicly involved in the NSDAP. As a lawyer in training, Schmidt could not afford to stand up for her without jeopardizing his training and his aspired employment with the state. From 1931 he built an intelligence service in the area of ​​SS Standard XIV. Schmidt joined the SS on June 30, 1933 and became SS-Sturmführer in 1933 , SS-Obersturmführer in 1934 , SS-Hauptsturmführer in 1937 and SS-Sturmbannführer in 1939.

Activity for the security service

In 1933 Schmidt was assigned to the security service of the Reichsführer SS . He started his service in Munich for training purposes and lived in Munich until 1934. Then he was transferred to Berlin with his friend Hermann Behrends and took over a department of the SD Upper Section East in Berlin, which was under Behrend's direction. From February to August 1934 Schmidt was head of Department I (Information). Schmidt lived in the SD building in both Munich and Berlin. At that time the SD was about 200 strong in the whole of the Reich. The group in the SD Upper Section East, which was responsible for Berlin and resided in the villa on Eichenallee, consisted of about 30 people.

In 1934, Himmler took over the Secret State Police and Reinhard Heydrich became its head. Behrends and Schmidt took over functions in the secret state police office. Schmidt was employed in the main department III (espionage and counter-espionage) as head of the subdivision industrial espionage.

The murders of June 30, 1934 against Schleicher and his wife were carried out by SD men in plain clothes. The historian Orth, along with other scientists, believed that Schmidt's murder of Schleicher was possible. This assessment was based, among other things, on the contents of the book by Heinrich Orb ( Heinrich Pfeifer ): National Socialism: 13 Years of Power Rush , 1945. Orb described internals of the SD and also the events on June 30, 1934. But on the other hand, Pfeifer also made some mistakes, this kept some historians from trusting this source. Orth discussed the pros and cons of Pfeifer's book in great detail and came to the conclusion that Pfeifer was largely trustworthy until 1936, the year he emigrated. In 1945, Pfeifer / Orb described Schmidt as a Schleicher murderer in his book. This thesis could never be proven, since the people who could be murderers were able to cover up all traces after the murders. Hitler assigned Behrends a secret office in the Prussian House of Representatives from which Behrends could carry out his cover-up activities for the murder. Incidentally, Orth considers the murder to be more of an accidental killing, as the perpetrators are said to have been overwhelmed.

According to Orth and Orb's account, five of the following men from SD Section East and SD Section III were eligible to accompany Schmidt in the murder: SS-Obertruppführer Kurt Brunow , SS-Obersturmführer Werner Göttsch , SS-Untersturmführer Kurt Graaf , SS -Untersturmführer Richard Gutkaes, SS-Oberscharführer Alfred Naujocks , SS-Mann Josef Pospischil (SS-member) , SS-Obersturmführer Richard Pruchtnow and the following members of the SD-Section III SS-Obersturmführer Willy Falkenberg , SS-Untersturmführer Heinz Schildt , V- Ernst Werner and SS-Obersturmbannführer Walter Sohst .

Activity until 1945

From autumn 1934 Schmidt came to Thuringia, where he initially held the post of magistrate in Gotha. From 1936 he became head of the office of State Secretary Walter Ortlepp in the Thuringian Ministry of the Interior. In April 1938 he became a consultant for the political police in the local police department, which he took over shortly afterwards. Schmidt last held the rank of senior government councilor.

Activity after 1945

On April 28, 1945, Schmidt was arrested by the American army. He spent the next three years in various American denazification camps. Schmidt tried to use the time wisely and took classes for prisoners at the camp university. He also acted as a barrack legal advisor and participated in the camp labor service. In 1946/47 Schmidt had relatives and friends issue a number of good repute certificates. These certificates of exoneration, in which he was consistently attested to a morally great, humane attitude, served him as proof of his innocence in his trial chamber proceedings in 1948/49. Many of his witnesses, including his second wife, did not know anything about his work for the SD and in the Gestapo in 1933/34. In June 1948, Schmidt was classified in the group of the minor offenders by the Darmstadt-Lager ruling chamber (III) and released on probation against a fine of 300 Reichsmarks. He moved to his wife in Epterode near Kassel. In 1949, Schmidt was included in the group of followers in a follow-up procedure by the Kassel Chamber of Justice and was considered denazified . At the time he was working as a typist at the United Grossalmeroder Thonwerke.

Little is known of Schmidt's further life. In 1953 he moved to Mühlheim am Main. There he was employed in the 1950s and 1960s as a member of the board of directors, administrative director and most recently as senior administrative director at the Hessischer Gemeindetag (in some cases he also operated as director of administrative law and senior administrative law director ). In 1966 he submitted an extensive commentary on development law, which has seen numerous updated editions to this day and is aimed as an aid at municipalities, cities, districts, building authorities, administrative courts and specialist lawyers for administrative law . He took care of the processing of this work up to the 4th edition from 1976.

In 1969, Schmidt was questioned in an informal questioning by the Mühlheim police about the accusation of being the murderer of Schleicher. This questionnaire came about at the suggestion of the Lower Saxony ministerial advisor Fritz Tobias , who knew Orb's book and considered it reliable in relation to the portrayals of the June 30th murder. The main topic of the survey was the structure of the SD. Schmidt claimed in this questioning that he had only been to the SD on a visit in 1934 and had not headed the information department of the Upper Section East. He denied ever seeing Schleicher. In no case did he murder him. The historian Orth criticized the fact that the investigative authorities accepted Schmidt's information without checking the information against the entries in the SD and SS documents, which were then in the Berlin Document Center . In any case, Orth easily found the documents about Schmidt's SS and SD activities in the documents that have been administered by the Federal Archives (Germany) since 1994 .

Works

• The concept of violence according to the jurisprudence of the German Reichsgericht and the Austrian Supreme Court, taking into account the draft of a General German Criminal Code , Erfurt 1934. (Dissertation)
• Handbook of development law. Monographic representation of the development law and development contribution law , Deutscher Gemeindeverlag / Kohlhammer, Cologne a. a. 1966. (The work has seen numerous new editions up to the present; Schmidt procured these up to and including the 4th edition: 2nd expanded edition, Cologne et al. 1967; 3rd completely revised and expanded edition, Cologne 1972; 4th completely revised and expanded edition Edition, Cologne et al. 1976; after Schmidt's death the work of Walter Bogner and Reimer Steenbock was continued: 5th completely revised and expanded edition, Cologne et al. 1981; 6th completely revised and expanded edition, Köl et al. 1998; last expanded as a loose-leaf collection in 2007)
• Development contributions. Explanations of the model statutes of the German Municipal Assembly (February 1967 version) , (= Kommunale Schriften für Hessen, Vol. 32), 2nd revised and expanded edition, Cologne a. a. 1967.
• The city councilor. Community representatives and the Hessian law on contributions and charges for water and sewers , (= series of publications by the Freiherr vom Stein Institute, Vol. 14), Community Day, Mühlheim am Main 1975.

family

Schmidt was engaged to the secretary Gerda Küttner (* 1913) since 1933 and married since 1937; both had five children. After the divorce of his first marriage, he married Elli Oetzel in 1948.

literature

• Shlomo Aronson : Heydrich and the early history of the Gestapo and SD , 1971.
• Mario Dederichs: Heydrich. The face of evil , Piper, Hamburg 2005.
• Rainer Orth: The SD man Johannes Schmidt. The murderer of Chancellor Kurt von Schleicher? Tectum, Marburg 2012, ISBN 978-3-8288-2872-8 . (Master's thesis, Humboldt University Berlin).

Web links

• Literature by and about Johannes Schmidt in the catalog of the German National Library
• Aronson collection at the Institute for Contemporary History with a curriculum vitae from Schmidt's personal file (PDF; 8.5 MB)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Standesamt Offenbach: Death register for the year 1976: Death certificate No. 1976/1842 (digitized version of the list of names for the death register at LAGIS online) .
2. ↑ see Generation of the Unconditional. The leadership corps of the Reich Security Main Office . Hamburger Edition, Hamburg 2002, ISBN 3-930908-75-1 , p. 247.
3. ↑ The book appeared under the pseudonym Heinrich Orb. Verlag Walter, Olten 1945; Orb was the pseudonym of the former SS and SD member Heinrich Pfeifer, who had insider knowledge from the time the SD and the Gestapo were founded.
4. ^ Thuringian research: Festschrift for Hans Eberhardt on his 85th birthday on September 25, 1993 , p. 536.
5. ^ Rainer Orth: The SD man Johannes Schmidt. The murderer of Chancellor Kurt von Schleicher? Tectum, Münster 2012, ISBN 978-3-8288-2872-8 . Pp. 74-78.