Karl Belding
Karl Belding (born April 12, 1897 in Fahrland ; † July 1, 1934 in Breslau ) was a German police officer and SA leader, most recently with the rank of SA standard leader.
Live and act
Early life
In 1912 Belding joined the Imperial Navy as a cabin boy. He left this at the end of the First World War as a chief mate. He then reported to the Border Guard, a makeshift organization from the post-war period, where he served until it was dissolved. From around 1920 he worked for the police, in which he reached at least the rank of sergeant and from which he was released in 1923.
From 1923 to 1928 Belding worked as a porter and controller for a private company. After being unemployed from 1928 to August 1929, Belding then worked as a chauffeur for a private company from September 1929 to 1933.
Career in the NSDAP and SA until 1934
Karl Belding began to get involved in circles of the extreme political right in the 1920s.
In 1925 Belding belonged to the Berlin branch of the völkisch military association Frontbann , the Frontbann Nord under Paul Röhrbein .
In 1927 at the latest, Belding joined the Nazi movement. He also became a member of the Sturmabteilung (SA), the party's street fighting association. In 1931 he led a Berlin SA standard and reached the rank of SA standard leader by 1932 at the latest .
At the beginning of 1933 Belding was placed at the special disposal of the SA Motor Brigade Berlin-Brandenburg. In April or June 1933, Belding, who was considered a bad bully and murderer, was made available by the group leader of the SA Berlin-Brandenburg Karl Ernst to the SS leader of Berlin Kurt Daluege , who at the time was a special commissioner in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior.
In the summer of 1933 Belding got a job as a detective with the Gestapo in Berlin.
At the beginning of June 1934 Belding was transferred to the Gestapo in Breslau as a detective. In the SA he was transferred at the same time with effect from June 1, 1934 from the Berlin-Brandenburg Motor Brigade to the staff of SA Upper Group VIII.
The SS suspected him - with great probability wrongly - of having carried out the alleged " Schorfheide assassination attempt " on Heinrich Himmler on June 19, 1934 .
Belding's role in the murder of Helmuth Unger
On June 26, 1933 ("Day of the Old Guard"), Belding and his friend Bernhard Fischer-Schweder brought the former staff leader of Belding's SA standard Helmuth Unger into their power and probably murdered him: They arrested Unger and first brought him for questioning by Gestapo officer Rudolf Braschwitz to the former Karl Liebknecht House used by the SA and the Gestapo as an interrogation center .
After the end of Unger's interrogation, he was probably taken over again by Belding and Fischer-Schweder, taken to an unknown location and shot there. The background was that before 1933 Unger had informed the political police of the Weimar Republic - which was housed as Department IA at the Berlin Police Headquarters - as an informant with information about illegal activities of the Berlin SA, which is why he had been expelled from the SA in 1932.
assassination
On June 30, 1934, in the course of the Röhm affair , Belding and Fischer-Schweder were arrested on Himmler's orders in Breslau: When they appeared on duty at the Breslau police headquarters on that day - the SS had on the night of June 29-30, 1934 On orders from Berlin, the executive power in Breslau was transferred and the police headquarters were then occupied and control was taken over - they were taken into custody by SS men and locked in the house prison of the police headquarters, where several dozen SA members as Prisoners were admitted.
On the night of July 1, 1934, Belding was taken out of his cell on orders from Berlin and taken in together with half a dozen other SA members (including the police chief of Gleiwitz Hans Ramshorn and the adjutant of the Silesian SA chief Heines Reinhard Nixdorf ) Brought to a forest outside of Breslau and shot there together with the other six men by an SS commando under the orders of SS-Obersturmführer Heinz Schlumps in the early hours of the morning. Fischer-Schweder escaped this fate by luck, because an SS man he knew vouched for him, so that he was left in his cell and did not have to take part in the death trip to the Wroclaw Forest with Belding and the others.
The corpses were first buried on the spot and later exhumed and cremated on orders from Berlin.
A few weeks later, Belding's widow Gertrud Belding and the children received some keys and an empty wallet from the Gestapo.
After his death, until 1935, Belding and his colleague Othmar Toifl were investigated for assaulting a foreign consul.
estate
Some personal documents on Belding have been preserved in the Federal Archives. In particular, the holdings of the former Berlin Document Center contain an SA personnel file (SA microfilm 36, photos 101 to 111) and a file of the Supreme Party Court (OPG-NA microfilm, photos 2422 to 2426).
literature
- Erich Stockhorst : 5000 people. Who was what in the 3rd Reich . 2nd Edition. Arndt, Kiel 2000, ISBN 3-88741-116-1 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Caterina Abbati: I, Carmen Mory. The life of a Bern doctor's daughter and Gestapo agent. 1999, p. 65.
- ^ Karl Martin Grass: Edgar Jung, Papenkreis and Röhm crisis. Volume 2. 1966, p. 83.
- ^ Benjamin Cart Hett: Burning the Reichstag: An Investigation into the Third Reich's Enduring Mystery , p. 204; Heinz Höhne: Mordache Röhm. 1984, p. 287; Christian Goeschel: Suicide in Nazi Germany. P. 83.
- ↑ David Irving: Hess. The missing Years 1941-1945. 1987, p. 23.
- ↑ Kurt Schilde: Columbia House. Berlin concentration camp 1933–1936. 1990, p. 30.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Belding, Karl |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German SA leader and policeman |
| DATE OF BIRTH | April 12, 1897 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Fahrland |
| DATE OF DEATH | July 1, 1934 |
| Place of death | Wroclaw |