Josef Zauritz

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Hitler and Goering in front of the Berlin Cathedral at the funeral service for Hans Maikowski and Josef Zauritz on February 5, 1933

Josef Zauritz (born December 5, 1897 in Nitterwitz , Province of Silesia , † January 30, 1933 in Berlin ) was a German police officer. He became known as one of the first two deaths after the seizure of power by the Nazis in January 1933rd

Career in the police

Zauritz had served on foot in the 4th Guards Regiment during World War I , had been wounded at least once, and had joined the Prussian police in the 1920s .

In January 1933 Zauritz served as sergeant of the police station 131 in the Charlottenburg district allocated by Berlin. The Vossische Zeitung of February 4, 1933 reported on the occasion of his death that he was a "loyal republican" and had belonged to a "free trade union association". Zauritz was popular with the residents of his district and was considered a "friend of the workers". The KPD newspaper Welt am Abend reported on February 6, 1933 under the heading "Wallstrasse honors Zauritz" that "Members of revolutionary workers' organizations" on February 5, 1933 in front of the house at Wallstrasse 24, where Zauritz had been shot, two had laid large wreaths. The wreath bows bore the inscription “The revolutionary workers of Charlottenburg, their friend, the police officer Josef Zauritz, who was murdered by the NSDAP”.

assassination

After the torchlight procession through the government district , with which the Berlin SA celebrated the appointment of Adolf Hitler as Chancellor on the evening of January 30, 1933 , Zauritz accompanied the Charlottenburg SA Storm 33 as a supervising police officer on the march back to his storm bar in Hebbelstrasse .

The SA column moved provocatively through a stronghold of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) south of Berliner Strasse . At around 10.30 p.m. there was a shooting in Wallstrasse , in which Zauritz was fatally injured by a shot in the chest and SA leader Hans Maikowski was fatally injured by a shot in the stomach. Both died shortly afterwards in Westend Hospital . The two men were the first to die in a clash between the Nazis and the Communists after the Nazis came to power. The circumstances of the crime could never be finally clarified, although the investigating Gestapo had learned from witness statements in June 1933 that an SA man had shot.

The Nazi propaganda slaughtered the incident made by publishing the version in the newspapers heimwandernde SA had been fired on by Communists from the ambush, the two men had been mortally wounded. It subsequently stylized Maikowski a martyr of the national collection and tied the incident in the propaganda to foster our incipient terrorist measures against the KPD: For the two deaths took place in the Berlin Cathedral a funeral service held at which Adolf Hitler and Hermann Goering appeared. The Catholic Zauritz was buried in his Silesian homeland.

In 1965, an anonymous complaint directed to the Berlin public prosecutor named people from the ranks of the Charlottenburg SA Storm 33 as perpetrators in the Maikowski / Zauritz murders and in the case of the clairvoyant Hanussen . The public prosecutor then reopened both cases. In the course of the investigation, two former SA members who had witnessed the events in Wallstrasse were found. Both stated unanimously that they had seen that it was SA man Alfred Buske (1912–1934) who shot both Zauritz and Maikowski. A secret note, dated February 14, 1943, for Kurt Daluege , chief of the Ordnungspolizei, found by the public prosecutor in the Berlin Document Center , confirmed this course of events.

Zauritzweg

The district assembly of Charlottenburg decided on May 16, 1933 to name the connecting route between Wallstrasse and Bismarckstrasse “Zauritzweg”. While “Maikowski-Straße” was called “Zillestraße” after 1945, Zauritzweg kept its name. A review of various street renaming from 1933 to 1945, including Zauritzweg, initiated by the district council of Charlottenburg in 2009 , came to the conclusion in November 2010:

"According to the research, the people honored by the renaming are not suspected of having been active opponents of democracy and at the same time intellectual-political pioneers and advocates of National Socialist ideology and tyranny."

literature

  • Michael Stricker: Last deployment. Police officers killed on duty in Berlin from 1918 to 2010 , Verlag für Polizeiwissenschaft, Frankfurt 2010, ISBN 3866761414 , (= series of publications by the German Society for Police History, Volume 11), pp. 110–112.
  • Jay W. Baird: To Die for Germany. Heroes in the Nazi Pantheon , 1990.
  • Berliner Illustrierte night edition of May 17, 1933.
  • A.-K. Busch: Martyrs. A contribution to the practice of political conflicts in the Weimar Republic , Nordland-Verlag, Fretterode 2008, ISBN 978-3-9812409-0-0 .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Entry on Zauritz in the German list of losses from January 7, 1919
  2. ↑ Quotations from Wolfram Pyta : Expert opinion on the political stance and behavior of Wilhelm Prince of Prussia (1882–1951), last Crown Prince of the German Empire and of Prussia, in the years 1923 to 1945 , pp. 67 ff. PDF
  3. ↑ Bernhard Sauer: Goebbels "Rabauken". On the history of the SA in Berlin-Brandenburg ( PDF ; 1.7 MB), in: Klaus Dettmar / Werner Breunig (eds.): Berlin in history and present. Yearbook of the Landesarchiv Berlin 2006 , Gebr. Mann, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-7861-2537-2 , pp. 107-164. (there also a facsimile of the secret note from 1943)
  4. ^ Statement of the district office of Charlottenburg dated November 16, 2010, signed by the district mayor Thiemen.
personal data
SURNAME Zauritz, Josef
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German policeman and Nazi victim
DATE OF BIRTH December 5, 1897
PLACE OF BIRTH Nitterwitz
DATE OF DEATH January 30, 1933 or January 31, 1933
Place of death Berlin