Julius Uhl

Julius Uhl (born March 3, 1903 in Böbing ; † July 2, 1934 in Dachau concentration camp ) was a German politician ( NSDAP ) and SA leader. Uhl was best known as the long-time head of the SA staff guard, as a "body murderer" of the SA leadership and as one of those killed in the so-called Röhm putsch .

Live and act

Uhl was the son of a teacher. He had at least one older brother, Erhard Uhl (born March 29, 1900). He first joined the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) around 1922 . In 1923 he took part in the failed Hitler-Ludendorff putsch in Munich , which is why he was later awarded the so-called " Blood Order of the NSDAP ". In the official list of medal winners he originally had number 11, but after his expulsion from the NSDAP and shooting in 1934 he was deleted from the list.

Shortly after the re-establishment of the NSDAP, which was banned from November 1923 to February 1925, in the spring of 1925, Uhl was one of the first to join the party ( membership number 647). In the Nazi movement, he made a career in the following years as a member of the Sturmabteilung (SA), the street fighting organization of the NSDAP. Since 1931 at the latest he has been working in the Brown House in Munich. After Ernst Röhm took office as Chief of Staff of the SA at the beginning of 1931, he appointed Uhl as Chief of the SA Staff Guard in the Brown House (also known as the Staff Guard of the Supreme SA Leadership) and thus helped him achieve a rapid rise in the SA. In this position he was responsible for the protection of the NSDAP party headquarters and the leaders of the party housed there, especially Röhms, whose personal bodyguard was the staff guard. Since then, Uhl has also acted as Röhm's “body murderer”. The murderous activity of Uhl, an outstanding pistol shooter, consisted primarily in the implementation of internal party judgments against disgraced members of the NSDAP and the SA. He is considered to be the murderer of Andreas von Flotow, a Reichstag member who was expelled from the party at the beginning of 1933 as a “party traitor” . According to Ernst Klein, a close friend of Röhm's, the division of labor was as follows: "Uhl murdered, Röhm promoted." Uhl achieved his highest rank in the SA when he was appointed Standartenführer on November 9, 1933.

On October 1, 1933, Uhl gave up his position as head of the staff guard of the Supreme SA leadership to take over the leadership of SA Standard 10 in Ingolstadt. At that time, the management of the staff guard was passed on to Kurt Egger , although Uhl - who was still near Röhm and was still considered the unofficial head of the staff guard - was scheduled to return to his old position in the summer of 1934.

Plots by and against Uhl (1932)

In 1932 Uhl was involved in two conspiracies within the NSDAP: on the one hand, as a potential victim of a murder plot by a group around the highest party judge Walter Buch and, on the other hand, as an active co-conspirator in a murder plot against Adolf Hitler .

The plot by Buch and some other party functionaries aimed at removing the NSDAP from the "political ballast", i.e. H. to free the “homosexual clique” in the SA leadership, to which Uhl was counted. Fearing that the "unnatural excesses" of some SA leaders would let potential voters of the NSDAP in the Reich presidential election overflow into the opposing camp out of disgust, the circle around Buch, Röhm, Uhl, Röhm's adjutant Hans Joachim von Spreti-Weilbach and the boss intended of the SA secret service to assassinate Karl Leon Du Moulin-Eckart . However, the plan did not materialize.

At the same time as this undertaking, Uhl was involved in a murder plot: This time, however, not as a prospective murder victim, but as a conspirator to murder others. In particular, Uhl, the Munich SA Brigadefuhrer Schmid, the SA chief of Silesia, Edmund Heines , the engineer and SA foreign representative Georg Bell and three other SA functionaries, no longer known by name, forged plans to murder Hitler in the summer of 1932. The reason for this was the impression that Hitler was unsuccessful in his course of "strictly legal means" to gain power in the state through elections and would ultimately "be shipwrecked". After Hitler's failure in the election campaign for the office of Reich President and the failure of the NSDAP to come to power after the Reichstag elections in July and the state elections in Prussia, Württemberg and Baden, the group of seven considered a new one - in the final analysis to have to take a violently revolutionary course aimed at conquering state power through an overthrow. Hitler, as the main exponent of the apparently unsuccessful course, felt the group had to kill first in order to be able to enforce its new course in the party. At the drawing of lots, who should shoot the political "ballast man" Hitler, the lot fell, according to a statement by Röhm's close friend, Martin Schätzl, to Uhl, "who was also determined to act". When Hitler's course culminated in success in January 1933, at a point in time when this was hardly considered possible in many cases - in his appointment as Reich Chancellor by Reich President Hindenburg - the conspirators' plan was abandoned as "no longer relevant". The journalist Rudolf Augstein judged in retrospect in 1993: "So it is very doubtful whether Uhl actually wanted and should kill the Führer and Reich Chancellor when he had achieved his goal."

In his study of the murder of Georg Bell - who was shot by strangers in a hotel in Walchsee, Austria in the spring of 1933 - Dornheim comes to the conclusion that Bell subsequently got "cold feet" in the "Hitler murder". Bell's co-conspirators, who had noticed this, feared that "Bell would reveal the plan to shoot Hitler during [a possible] interrogation [by Reinhard Heydrich and the SD]." Fearing the consequences of a confession from Bell - and above all the naming of his co-conspirators - Uhl traveled to Austria and shot him. Ultimately valid proof of the correctness of his assumption, according to Dornheim, is no longer available, but speaks so much for his consideration that it is “very likely” to be correct.

The murder of Uhl

At the beginning of June 1934 Uhl traveled to the Bavarian spa town of Bad Wiessee to relax there and to attend a meeting of the SA leadership at the end of the month. On the night of June 29th to 30th, 1934, Hitler appeared in the hotel in which Röhm, Uhl and the other SA leaders were staying and arrested them on the pretext that they had planned a putsch against him and the Reich government. The action, which became known under the veiled propaganda label " Röhm Putsch ", actually served primarily Hitler's goal of eliminating his actual and / or supposed opponents from within his own ranks. Uhl was arrested in the early hours of June 30th in the presence of Hitler. The German public later claimed that Uhl had "pulled out the revolver" when he was "arrested by the Führer" and that Hitler had knocked it out of his hand "with a whip with a whip". A few hours before his shooting on July 2 in the Dachau concentration camp, Uhl confessed to the old plans to murder Hitler under interrogation.

In his Reichstag speech on July 13, Hitler justified the murders of the “Röhm Putsch” by referring to Uhl's murder plans, which he learned about through interrogation of Uhl after his arrest. In his speech in parliament, which was broadcast nationwide on the radio, Hitler stated:

"[...] that meanwhile, as a precautionary measure, the man who had to carry out my later removal was already hired: Standartenführer Uhl confessed his willingness to carry out such an order just a few hours before his death."

Hitler did not mention that Uhl's murder plans originated in 1932 and had become obsolete when Hitler's strategy to gain power with his appointment as Chancellor in early 1933 was successful. Whether Hitler concealed the fact that Uhl had long since rejected his intentions, because he did not know this, or whether he brought this claim into his speech against his better judgment (i.e. lied), for example in the hope of capitalizing on the alleged murder plot with rhetorical and argumentative capital to beat remains unclear.

In the wake of Hitler's speech, Uhl was repeatedly made the subject of attacks by Nazi propaganda aimed at making him appear to the public as a despicable subject and an unscrupulous villain. For example, an article written by Hans Schwarz van Berk appeared in the daily newspaper The Attack on July 16, 1934 , in which the claim was made that Uhl had found a photograph of him, grinning in the pose of the murderer, bent over the corpse of an SA member who was shot by him.

In detail, the Uhl defamatory passage that shaped the image of him during the rest of the Nazi period read:

"And then the monstrous happens, about which only few knew up to this minute. The Fuehrer says that his murderer was also hired! That one sentence jumps at everyone's throat. The MPs move back from their seats and stare in disbelief Leader on, and then the hall is like boiling water with a swirling surface. It is as if the horror shook everyone back and forth. The horror shook everyone back and forth. The horror has passed among us. The incomprehensible has become a fact . The nefariousness has taken shape. There was one among us who was willing to kill the Führer. His name is Uhl. A photo was found under his papers that showed him in the pose of the murderer. He was with one Have a previous crime photographed, put his foot on the chest of a shot SA leader, pistol in his fist, grinning derisively. Without knowing about it, the whole nation knew at the moment that in this murderer unnature itself had come into the world. Certainly a revolver was raised against Bismarck too, but it was an individual who did so. Here, however, lived a person who was kept in reserve by a clique of conspirators, who was paid and privy to the closest circle of all plans, kept like a bloodhound ready to rush off at a whistle and carry out his agitation. It was this thought of a well-considered lust for murder, always kept ready, that gave the whole people an insight into the depth of the wickedness that lived in the conspirators. "

Through the Fuehrer's Order No. 26 of the Supreme SA Leadership, Uhl was posthumously expelled from the SA with effect from July 1, 1934, and his position was removed.

literature

• Ingolstadt City Archives : Ingolstadt under National Socialism. A study , Ingolstadt 1995.

Promotions

In the SA :

• SA storm leader
• June 24, 1932: SA-Sturmbannführer
• 1933: SA standard leader
• April 1, 1933: Group leader

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Place of birth according to: Ingolstadt under National Socialism. A study. Documentation on contemporary history , Ingolstadt, 1995, p. 126. In other works, Böbingen is sometimes mistakenly given as the place of birth.
2. ↑ Martin Broszat / Elke Fröhlich / Falk Wiesemann: Bavaria in the Nazi era , 1977, p. 365.
3. ^ Andreas Dornheim: Röhm's husband for abroad. Politics and murder of the SA agent Georg Bell , 1998, p. 179. On p. 177, Dornheim characterizes Uhl as the “type of the extremely violent SA man”.
4. ^ Hans-Günter Richardi / Klaus Schumann: Secret files Gerlich / Bell , Munich 1993.
5. ↑ Andreas Dornheim: Röhms Mann für Ausland , 1998, p. 179. According to Schätzl, Röhm himself knew nothing of the plot against Hitler and never wanted his murder.
6. ↑ Rudolf Augstein : Why did Röhm have to disappear? In: Der Spiegel . No. 12 , 1993, pp. 105 ( online ).
7. ↑ Andreas Dornheim: Röhm's man for abroad , p. 201.
8. ↑ For example, handed down on the back of a photo in the Rese Collection, today in the Bavarian Main State Archives .
9. ↑ Ernst Niekisch : The realm of the lower demons , 1953, p. 166.
10. ^ Protocol to the Reichstag of July 13, 1934 , in facsimile at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek.
11. ↑ See "The traitors and the murderer. 100 minutes in the face of the Führer", in: The attack. The National Socialist Evening Newspaper , July 16, 1934 (= 8 years / no. 164), pp. 1–2.
12. ↑ Leader Order of the Supreme SA Leadership No. 26, p. 5.
13. ↑ Fuehrer order of the Supreme SA Leadership No. II of September 9, 1932, p. 3
14. ↑ Leader Order of the Supreme SA Leadership No. 13 of April 30, 1933, p. 4.