Karl Franz Wendt

Franz Willi Otto Karl Hermann Wendt (born October 14, 1904 in Stade ; † March or April 1933 , officially March 24, 1933 in Penzing ) was a German newsman.

Life and activity

Wendt worked as a news agent since the 1920s. In 1929 he was indicted , together with agent Georg Bell , in a trial before the Bavarian Supreme Court. According to Andreas Dornheim's research, almost nothing is known about the underlying processes , as the relevant files are lost (they were probably confiscated by the SS security service after 1933 ). From other sources, however, again according to Dornheim, at least it emerges that Wendt and Bell had tried to uncover a French spy, in which they had "acted so clumsily" that they used military secrets to uncover this spy with the result that they were charged with divulging military secrets.

In the fall of 1930 Wendt joined the NSDAP together with Bell on September 1, 1930 ( membership number 290.054). Wendt also became a member of the SS . After Bell in spring 1931 by the recently chief of staff of the SA appointed Ernst Roehm was recruited as his personal news agent, he also took Wendt in the intelligence service of the Supreme SA Leadership : 1931 and 1932 supported Wendt, Bell during his intelligence work for the NSDAP .

After Bell fell out with the Nazi leadership in the summer of 1932 and officially left the party in October 1932, Wendt also secretly turned against them: in the last months of 1932 and in the first months of 1933 he supplied the party critical journalist Fritz Gerlich, at Bell's instigation, with inside knowledge of the NSDAP and its subsidiary organizations, especially the SA and the SS.

After the National Socialists came to power in the spring of 1933, Wendt's activities against the party leadership were also exposed: According to a diary note of Prince von Waldburg-Zeil found by Dornheim, Wendt was summoned to the Braune Haus in Munich in March 1933 and has never been seen again since then. In an internal document of Department VI (Political Department) of the Munich Police Department, which was then under the direction of Reinhard Heydrich , it is said that Wendt was taken into protective custody “on suspicion of spying against the NSDAP”. His wife was later told that he had been shot "while trying to escape". A note from the Reich Ministry of the Interior from 1936 states that the motives for the determination of Wendt and the course of the crime could no longer have been ascertained without any problem. The Ministry of the Interior identified Ernst Röhm's chief bodyguard and “body murderer” Julius Uhl as the likely murderer of Wendt .

The second volume of the Brown Book , published in the summer of 1934 by exiled communist circles in Paris , an educational pamphlet intended to inform the world about crimes committed by the Nazis since 1933, claimed that Wendt - who is identified here as a first lieutenant and a member of the Otto Strasser group - was shot near fortress Landsberg am Lech without giving details of the source of this information.

Also in March 1933, Wendt was expelled from the NSDAP and put on the “black list” of the party administration with the names of those people who could never be accepted again.

Wendt's widow Bella received a monthly pension of RM 90 for a period of 10 years from June 1, 1936, “for reasons of equity”.

literature

• Andreas Dornheim: Röhm's man for abroad: Politics and the murder of SA agent Georg Bell , Münster 1998.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Marginal note on Wendt's death in Wendt's birth register entry in the Stade birth register, Stade registry office.
2. ↑ See “747 Names Accuse. A list of seven hundred and forty-seven documented murders of the defenseless in Hitler's Germany ”in: Braunbuch II. Dimitroff contra Göring , Paris 1934, pp. 405–461, entry under“ End of April 1933 ”.