Karl Mayr (politician, 1883)

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Karl Mayr (born January 5, 1883 in Mindelheim ; † February 9, 1945 in Buchenwald concentration camp ) was a German officer and political activist. After the November Revolution in 1918, Mayr worked for the Reichswehr as an intelligence service in Bavaria . Because he recruited Adolf Hitler as an undercover agent and is said to have sent him to meetings of the DAP , later the NSDAP , as an observer , he is considered one of Hitler's political “midwives”. After a fundamental change in political attitudes, Mayr helped to build the pro-republican black-red-gold banner .

Life

Youth and First World War

He was the son of the higher regional judge Albert Mayr (1848-1938).

After attending school, which he completed in 1901 with the Abitur at the Wilhelmsgymnasium in Munich , Mayr joined the 1st Infantry Regiment "König" of the Bavarian Army in Munich on July 14, 1901 as a flag junior . After his assignment to the war school Mayr was promoted to lieutenant in 1903 . In 1909 he was promoted to regimental adjutant. His training at the War Academy , which began in 1913 , he had to prematurely break off in 1914 as a first lieutenant after the end of the first course because of the outbreak of the First World War .

With the mobilization , Mayr was briefly assigned as an observer to the aviation department of the II Army Corps , but then returned to the 1st Infantry Regiment "König" and took part in the fighting in Lorraine and France . With the formation of the 1st Jäger Brigade , Mayr was transferred to the brigade staff at the end of May 1915 and promoted to captain on June 1, 1915 . From September 1916 to January 1918 he was a general staff officer in the Alpine Corps . Subsequently entrusted with the command of the 2nd Jäger Battalion, Mayr was appointed commander of the 1st Jäger Battalion "König" on March 13, 1918 . In July 1918 he was posted to the German military mission in Turkey . From July 20 to October 15, 1918, he was there with the Army Group East and the Army of Islam .

Weimar Republic

Shortly after the end of the war, from December 1, 1918, Mayr acted briefly for the Bavarian Ministry of War and as a company commander in the 1st Bavarian Infantry Regiment in Munich. On 15 February 1919 he was on leave from the military and was about mid-April to early May 1919 during the Munich Soviet Republic for the Thule Society operates military - recruitment of volunteer corps -Freiwilligen - such as intelligence-- transfer of political and military information on the location in the Munich of the Soviet Republic. From May 30, he headed the Propaganda Department Ib / P in the Department of Intelligence and Liaison Service Ib of Group Command 4 - under Major General Arnold von Möhl - of the "provisional Reichswehr in Bavaria" formed on May 10, 1919.

In his capacity as head of the Propaganda Department Ib / P, Mayr maintained a wide variety of contacts with anti-Bolshevik , anti-Semitic and separatist groups and people in Bavaria, to whom he was also politically close. One of his tasks was to organize awareness courses for education officers and stewards of the troops in order to train them in propaganda. Whether Hitler was actually recruited as an undercover agent by the propaganda department at the end of May or beginning of June 1919 , as previously shown in the research, does not seem to be certain according to a recent study, especially not the propaganda department. Ib / P under Mayr, but the news department. Ib / N under Captain Passavant for secret intelligence and customer services such as agent services etc. was responsible.

Mayr made it possible for Hitler to take part in the third course of the “anti-Bolshevik reconnaissance courses” in Munich from July 10th to 19th, on the recommendation of the settlement agency of the 2nd Infantry Regiment ( the “old army” ).

On July 22nd, Hitler was delegated by Mayr to a "reconnaissance command" in order to re-educate the soldiers who were allegedly "contaminated" by Bolshevism and Spartacism in Lechfeld , including many former prisoners of war, from August 20th to 24th.

In addition, Hitler was sent as an observer to meetings of the numerous political parties newly founded in Munich at the time. However, no reports of party visits to Mayr have come down to us. In this context, at Mayr's instigation, on September 12, 1919, he took part in a meeting of the German Workers' Party founded by Anton Drexler . Hitler probably became a member of the DAP "a week" after his visit to the DAP meeting on September 12, 1919. In this context, Mayr is therefore seen as one of the decisive political "midwives" of Hitler.

In March 1920 Mayr sent Hitler, Dietrich Eckart and Robert Ritter von Greim to Berlin to observe the events of the Kapp Putsch at close quarters on his behalf . A few months later, on July 8, 1920, Mayr was released from military service as a major from the General Staff of Military District Command VII at his own request . Without any final security, there are some indications that Mayr was involved in the separatist plans of the influential BVP politician Georg Heim and his confidante Karl Graf von Bothmer . In the course of 1920 Mayr had evidently turned his back on their ideas and in July 1920 published material about Heim's endeavors.

As a result, Mayr joined the NSDAP and became the first foreign policy editor of the Völkischer Beobachter . In March 1921 he left the NSDAP again. In autumn 1921, on the occasion of rumors of a putsch to restore the Wittelsbach monarchy , he distanced himself from the patriotic associations that were very active in Bavaria and the circle around Erich Ludendorff . He began to leak compromising material to the authorities and the social democratic newspaper Münchener Post . At the beginning of 1923 he uncovered contacts between the French officer Augustin Xavier Richert and Bavarian separatists and acted as a witness in the subsequent trial against Georg Fuchs . At this point Mayr had already become a “Republican of reason”. In the nationalist camp, he was henceforth outlawed.

Mayr joined the SPD in 1925 . After a critical article about the memoirs of a Bavarian officer , he was expelled from the officers' association of the 1st Infantry Regiment. He made contact with the liberal historian Hans Delbrück , who helped him with publications. Mayr, in turn, assisted Delbrück with his expert opinion on the so-called stab in the back process .

In the second half of the 1920s, Mayr played a key role as a speaker in the development of the pro-republican military association Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold , which was mainly made up of supporters of the SPD, the trade unions, the center and the Weimar Republic left-wing liberal parties. Mayr was already a founding member of the "Auergarde" in 1923, a Munich forerunner of the Reich Banner, and also in the League of Republican War Participants founded in 1924 . During the clashes with the radical pacifists within the Reichsbanner, he was in favor of ousting the advocates of conscientious objection . His argument with Fritz Küster escalated in 1929/30 to the point of libel proceedings.

In addition, Mayr also distinguished himself as an editor in the social democratic press. In the fall of 1928 he was a member of the military commission of the SPD methods and has been against the armored cruiser A pronounced.

In the early 1930s Mayr collected material about Georg Bell , among other things . Some related in the SPD press. Mayr's involvement in a scandal involving the Chief of Staff of the SA Ernst Röhm in 1932 caused a public sensation : In the autumn of that year it became known that parts of the party leadership of the NSDAP Röhm and some of his employees were killing their lives. In order to avoid an allegedly planned attack on his life, Röhm temporarily fled from Munich to Berlin, where discussions took place between him and Mayr, to whom Röhm also passed information about his internal party opponents. When these conversations became known, the anti-NSDAP press used it to campaign against the alleged “Feme in the Brown House ”. In particular, she dealt with the fact that Hitler's chief of staff had sought “shelter” with a social democrat.

Emigration and death

After the National Socialist " seizure of power ", Karl Mayr emigrated to France in the spring of 1933 . After the German invasion in 1940 , he was arrested by the Gestapo in Paris and taken to Germany. He ended up as a prisoner in Buchenwald via the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in 1941. Since he does not appear in the camp's number card index or in the list of prominent prisoners, research has suggested that he had the status of Hitler's special prisoner.

He died on February 9, 1945 in the Buchenwald concentration camp, although it has not yet been fully clarified whether he fell victim to an Allied air raid during an external command or whether he was murdered on the basis of a special order.

Mayr's personal papers were confiscated by the Gestapo in 1933. The estate is considered lost.

Assessments

The contemporary communist daily press of the Weimar Republic suspected Mayr on the one hand of remaining a staunch National Socialist, on the other hand of being a French spy. Pacifists such as Carl von Ossietzky or Fritz Küster saw Mayr as the "mastermind" of the militaristic policy of Reichsbanner and the SPD. Historians of the GDR assumed that Mayr joined the SPD to investigate social democratic defense policy on behalf of the Reichswehr. The historian Benjamin Ziemann sees such judgments as exaggerations, which are due to Mayr's abrupt changes in political position and his propensity for polemics . With his work in the Reichsbanner, Mayr tried to maintain and protect the republic as an important prerequisite for peace policy work. At the same time, however, he remained true to his practice of trickery behind the scenes.

Fonts

  • Social Democracy and the Defense Program. Basic consideration. By Karl Mayr, formerly General Staff Officer with the German Alpine Corps , (= special print from the Socialist Monthly Bulletins) Berlin undated [1928].

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Annual report on the K. Wilhelms-Gymnasium in Munich. ZDB ID 12448436 , 1900/01
  2. ↑ Othmar Plöckinger: Among soldiers and agitators . Paderborn 2013, pp. 59–60.
  3. ↑ The higher-level department of news and communication services; Politics; Administration of special funds was headed by Captain (?) Max Pflaumer. The rules of procedure of the Ministry for Military Affairs (Munich) of May 13, 1919 led Major Pflaumer as head of Dept. Ib in the General Staff of the just formally created Group Command 4 of the provisional Reichswehr in Bavaria (Othmar Hackl: Der Bayerische Generalstab (1792-1919) . Munich 1999, p. 381). Pflaumer remained the head of the Department of Intelligence and Liaison Services until the end of September 1919, after which he moved to the Reichswehr Ministry (Othmar Plöckinger: Under soldiers and agitators . Paderborn 2013, p. 73 and there note 44).
  4. ↑ Othmar Hackl: The Bavarian General Staff (1792-1919) . Series of publications on Bavarian regional history, Volume 122. Munich 1999, p. 380.
  5. ↑ Claudia Schmölders: Hitler's face. A physiognomic biography . Munich 2000, p. 45.
  6. ↑ a b c Benjamin Ziemann : Wanderer between the worlds - the military critic and opponent of decided pacifism Major a. D. Karl Mayr (1883-1945) . In: Wolfram Wette (ed.): Pacifist officers in Germany 1871–1933 . Donat-Verlag, Bremen 1999, p. 274.
  7. ↑ So with Ian Kershaw : Hitler. 1889-1936. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1998, p. 166f. Mayr's Group Command 4 had ordered on May 28, 1919 “Subject: Propaganda activity among the troops”: “The troop units set up [...] a propaganda service. […] It is possible that the elected shop stewards are particularly useful for this purpose ”(quoted from Anton Joachimsthaler : Hitler's path began in Munich . Munich 2000. pp. 223–224). Hitler was an elected shop steward. The historian Ernst Deuerlein had probably first spoken of Hitler as a "V-man", based on "lists of propaganda and shop stewards" of the Propaganda Department Ib / P of the group command 4, as Deuerlein in Hitler's entry into politics and the Reichswehr in : Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte , Volume 7 (1959), Issue 2, p. 179, published.
  8. ↑ Othmar Plöckinger: Soldiers and agitators. Hitler's formative years in the German military 1918–1920 . Paderborn 2013, p. 118, points out that Hitler is not listed as an undercover agent in a corresponding “directory of propaganda people”.
  9. ↑ See business distribution of Bayer. Size Kdos. No. 4 , the business distribution plan of the group command No. 4 as of July 7, 1919 (Friedrich Rau: Personnel policy and organization in the provisional Reichswehr. The conditions in the area of ​​group command 4 up to the formation of the transitional army (200,000 man army) . Landsberg / Warthe, p. 242.)
  10. ↑ It is generally assumed that Hitler was already a member of the Reichswehr at that time (see Ian Kershaw: Hitler 1889–1936 , Stuttgart 1998, p. 172). Othmar Plöckinger: Among soldiers and agitators . Paderborn 2013, p. 177, noted “Until his release on March 31, 1920 he had always been a soldier in the old army.” The final entry on Hitler's war roll with the 2nd Infantry Regiment reads: “On March 31, 2020 inf. Demobilm. [Achung] n. [Ach] Munich supply [ungs-] position I dismissed ". Partly supplemented [] and quoted from Ernst Deuerlein, Hitler's entry into politics and the Reichswehr , in: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte , Volume 7 (1959), Issue 2, Document 1a between p. 190 and p. 191. This war log is used as last military unit to which Hitler belonged, "Kom. [mandierte] Komp. [anie] 2. I. [nfanterie] R. [egiment]" stated. Before that, Hitler was at “2. Dem. Kp./2. IR ”with the 2nd Demobilization Company in the 2nd Infantry Regiment. The historian Anton Joachimsthaler writes in Hitler's Way began in Munich , Munich 2000, p. 221: “The 30-year-old Hitler, who was to be released so often, could continue to stay in the military. The two demobilization companies - to the 2nd demo comp. belonged to Hitler - were disbanded from the beginning of May 1919 and the soldiers were released. At the Demob.Balt only one supply and one command company remained ”. Plöckinger, Unter soldiers , p. 29, comments on this: “He then returned to Munich and on November 21 [1918] was assigned to the 7th company of the replacement battalion of the 2nd Infantry Regiment (also referred to as the 'commanded company') ), which took in numerous soldiers pouring into Munich from other units ”.
  11. ↑ Othmar Plöckinger: Among soldiers and agitators . P. 109, the document shown shows the participant report for the 3rd reconnaissance course to the Reichswehrgruppenkommando 4 by the general command of the I. Bavarian Army Corps (old army). Hitler is listed as a participant in the course, which started on July 10, 1919. The General Command of the I. Bavarian Army Corps, which also belonged to Hitler's processing office, had not looked for or sent any participants for the first two courses (Plöckinger, Unter soldiers , p. 104).
  12. ↑ Ian Kershaw: Hitler. 1889-1936. Stuttgart 1998, p. 168; Ernst Deuerlein : Hitler's entry into politics and the Reichswehr. In: VfZ 7/1959 (PDF; 2.22 MB), pp. 178-184.
  13. ^ Thomas Weber: Hitler's First War . Berlin 2011, p. 341.
  14. ^ The one in Eberhard Jäckel / Axel Kuhn: Hitler. All records 1905-1924. Stuttgart 1980. pp. 90–91, reproduced, allegedly handwritten and signed by Hitler documents in connection with Hitler's membership of the DAP are probably products of the forger Konrad Kujau , as the two editors in New Findings on the Forgery of Hitler Documents ( in: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte , Volume 32 (1984), Issue 1) announced.
  15. ↑ Benjamin Ziemann: Wanderer between the worlds - the military critic and opponent of decided pacifism Major a. D. Karl Mayr (1883-1945) . In: Wolfram Wette (ed.): Pacifist officers in Germany 1871–1933 . Donat-Verlag, Bremen 1999, pp. 273f.
  16. ↑ Benjamin Ziemann: Wanderer between the worlds - the military critic and opponent of decided pacifism Major a. D. Karl Mayr (1883-1945) . In: Wolfram Wette (ed.): Pacifist officers in Germany 1871–1933. Donat Publishing House. Bremen 1999. pp. 275-277.
  17. ↑ Benjamin Ziemann: Wanderer between the worlds - the military critic and opponent of decided pacifism Major a. D. Karl Mayr (1883-1945) . In: Wolfram Wette (ed.): Pacifist officers in Germany 1871–1933. Donat Publishing House. Bremen 1999. p. 282.
  18. ↑ Benjamin Ziemann: Wanderer between the worlds - the military critic and opponent of decided pacifism Major a. D. Karl Mayr (1883-1945) . In: Wolfram Wette (ed.): Pacifist officers in Germany 1871–1933 . Donat Publishing House. Bremen 1999. p. 281.
  19. ^ Andreas Dornheim: Röhm's husband for abroad. Politics and assassination of the SA agent Georg Bell. Münster 1998, p. 253.
  20. ↑ Wolfgang Mommsen: The bequests in the German archives , part 1, Boppard am Rhein 1971, p. 327.
  21. ↑ Benjamin Ziemann: Wanderer between the worlds - the military critic and opponent of decided pacifism Major a. D. Karl Mayr (1883-1945) . In: Wolfram Wette (ed.): Pacifist officers in Germany 1871–1933 . Donat-Verlag, Bremen 1999, p. 273.
  22. ↑ Benjamin Ziemann: Wanderer between the worlds - the military critic and opponent of decided pacifism Major a. D. Karl Mayr (1883-1945) . In: Wolfram Wette (ed.): Pacifist officers in Germany 1871–1933 . Donat-Verlag, Bremen 1999, p. 285.
personal data
SURNAME Mayr, Karl
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician and officer
DATE OF BIRTH January 5, 1883
PLACE OF BIRTH Mindelheim
DATE OF DEATH February 9, 1945
Place of death Buchenwald concentration camp