Karl Reineking

Ernst Wilhelm Karl Reineking (born November 5, 1903 in Oberg , Peine district ; † June 2, 1936 in Dachau concentration camp , Prittlbach Dachau plant) was a German civil servant.

Live and act

Youth and previous career

Reineking was born in 1903 as the eldest of five children of the ironworker Karl Reineking (1878-1944) and Minna Müller (1881-1944). After attending primary school, he learned the molding trade in the Ilseder Hütte. At the age of twenty, Reineking registered for the Reichswehr : from February 16, 1923 to August 9, 1923, he was with the 15th Company of the 16th Infantry Regiment and from August 10th, 1923 to March 17, 1931 with the 5th Company of the 16th Infantry Regiment. In 1931, after an accident in which he suffered leg damage (gunshot wound in the leg), he left the army prematurely as a corporal.

On May 28, 1931, Reineking passed the final examination I for civil service candidates. He got a job with the city administration in Peine , where he first worked for the municipal light and water works, and then switched to the service of the welfare office. On March 20, 1933, he got a job with the municipal police administration, where he served in the criminal investigation department .

On June 1, 1932, Reineking joined the SA . In the same month he was promoted to SA-Scharführer and a month later, on July 15, 1932, to SA-Truppführer with simultaneous appointment as leader of the Sturmbannes II / 208. Shortly afterwards, on September 1, 1932, he was granted the rank of storm leader.

In National Socialism

A few weeks after the National Socialists came to power in the spring of 1933, Reineking and other police officers were attacked in Handorf near Peine on the night of March 4th and 5th by alleged Reichsbanner people who opened fire on the officials. When the police resisted, Reineking fired two shots, one of which hit one of the "Reichsbanner people". This turned out to be SA man Wilhelm Vöste. Vöste died of his injuries on March 6, 1933. The incident was also reported in the national press.

As it turned out, SA people had disguised themselves as members of the Reichsbanner in order to simulate an attack by the Reichsbanner on the police. In this way, through a staged provocation action, a pretext for action against the local Reichsbanner group was to be created. A police or public prosecutor's office investigation of the case did not take place at the time. According to statements made by the chief criminal secretary Herbert Kruse from the post-war period, this was forbidden from above for political reasons.

Reineking's SA career took a downward turn at this time: On March 4, 1933, he was relieved of his position as storm leader on March 4, 1933 by the now appointed leader of the SA-Sturmbannes II / 208 and on June 27, 1933 by the SA - Braunschweig sub-group excluded from the SA. In an evaluation of Standard 208 he was described as unreliable and unscrupulous.

In May 1933 Reineking got a job in the middle judicial service as clerk at the district court in Berlin-Moabit. At the same time he began to practice his rehabilitation with the SA.

Evidence shows that he had good relations with high SA leaders from October 1933 at the latest: For example, a letter from Karl Ernst to the SA leadership from October 1933 in which Ernst spoke out on his behalf has survived "That Reineking did an incredible service to the SA". This information is confirmed in a letter from the chairman of the Gaugerichtskammer II, Schomerus, in which he pointed out to the Reich Minister at the time, Hanns Kerrl , that Reineking had stated that he had rendered "unusually great services" to the SA leadership.

Thanks to Ernst's support, Reineking was re-admitted to the SA, probably in October 1933. On December 7, 1933, he was appointed to the rank of SA storm leader.

The fact that Reineking's wedding celebration with the farmer's daughter Betty Voigt, which took place on February 27, 1934 in Brunne in Neuruppin, was attended by Karl Ernst and the later Reich Criminal Director Arthur Nebe as guests , also documents the ongoing good relationship with the SA . The son Detlef (born January 15, 1936) emerged from Reineking's marriage. There was also an illegitimate son, Gerhard Möller (born July 7, 1927), who came from an earlier relationship.

On November 1, 1933, Reineking was admitted to the Secret State Police Office as a detective through the mediation of Karl Ernst . On June 30, 1934, Reineking was involved in the arrests as part of the National Socialists' wave of political cleansing, known as the Röhm Putsch . At the end of 1934 he was transferred to the criminal police in Königsberg .

Reichstag fire and death

For February 1933, after the Second World War, Reineking was associated with the Reichstag fire through the memoirs of Gestapo officer Hans Bernd Gisevius . This claim was later taken up in particular by the research group around Walther Hofer and Edouard Calic as evidence of their thesis that the SA was involved in the Reichstag fire. In detail, Gisevius attributed to Reineking that in October 1933, in his capacity as clerk at the court in Moabit, he met a detainee on remand named Adolf Rall , a former SA man who claimed Reineking was recorded during an interrogation, as a member of the SA to have been involved in the burning of the Reichstag building. Then Reineking leaked this information to the SA leadership and got to know Karl Ernst in this way. The majority of research assumes that Rall's allegations were inaccurate and were only made in the hope that this allegation, which the official authorities would have made known would have meant a highly unpopular accusation, would have put pressure on the authorities and thus for his release force. Instead, however, Rall was murdered in custody, likely to prevent him from making further shameful claims. Some researchers conclude that the information about the probably false but nevertheless compromising allegations of Rall, who was mentioned in Ernst's letter, was "unheard of service", is said to have done Reineking to the SA leadership. According to Gisevius, Rall was finally taken over at the Berlin police headquarters by a four-man SA commando, to which Reineking is said to have belonged, and strangled to death in a wooded area outside Berlin.

Reineking's brother Kurt testified in the 1960s that his brother had told him in 1935 that he, Karl Reineking, as an employee of the Berlin-Moabit Criminal Court, had kept documents about the Reichstag fire trial for himself instead of forwarding or destroying them. He is said to have countered persecution by Reinhard Heydrich , to which he was allegedly exposed, with the threat that these documents or their contents would be published if something should happen to him. The brother also said that he had heard that some documents had been found hidden under coals in the Reineking basement during a house search.

In early 1936, Reineking was arrested while he was relaxing on the Pomeranian estate of the envoy Vicco von Bülow-Schwante .

On January 27, 1936, Reineking was sentenced by the criminal chamber at the Berlin Regional Court to six months in prison for insulting (Az. 1 Sond KM 693/35). The background was derogatory remarks about the Minister Hanns Kerrl , with whom he had been enemies for a long time. The case was largely hushed up in public. Only in the Neue Peiner Zeitung appeared a short note on January 31, 1936, reporting on the process.

After a short stay in the Columbia concentration camp in Berlin, he was transferred to the Dachau concentration camp. Reineking died in Dachau on June 2, 1936. His death was officially recorded at the Prittlbach registry office (No. 5/1936). Family members were told that he had committed suicide by hanging.

In the literature it is mostly assumed that Reineking was killed on the orders of the SS / Gestapo leadership in Dachau and that his death was disguised as a suicide. Reineking's knowledge of the background to the Reichstag fire and the Rall affair (and, if necessary, the attempted removal of evidence on these matters) are cited as motives as to why one could have initiated his murder. It is also asserted that he was involved in the arrests during the Röhm affair and that he should also be removed as a confidante of this matter. In a statement dated October 16, 1950, the Gestapo commissioner Lothar Wandel reported that he had learned from his colleague Christian Brothers Scholz that "those of the Gestapo officers involved in the June 30 [1934] action who were not were considered reliable or secretive, [...] shortly afterwards they were sent to the Dachau concentration camp in a detour via foreign commands and were shot there without further ado. "

Reineking was buried in the camp cemetery and in 1937, after this cemetery was closed, an urn with his alleged ashes was sent to his relatives. She was buried on October 11, 1937 in the Protestant cemetery in Peine.

literature

Technical literature:

• Alexander Bahar : The Reichstag Fire: How History Is Made , 2001.
• Benjamin Carter Hett : Burning the Reichstag. An Investigation into the Third Reich's Enduring Mystery , Oxford 2014.
• Eduard Schneider: Shadows of the past and the present , 1999.
• Fritz Tobias : The Reichstag Fire , 1962.

Memoirs:

• Hans Bernd Gisevius : Until the bitter end. Volume 1: From the Reichstag Fire to the Fritsch Crisis. Second volume: From the Munich Agreement of July 20, 1944 . Both Fretz & Wasmuth Verlag, Zurich 1946.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Fritz Tobias: Der Reichstagbrand , 1962, p. 542.
2. ↑ "auxiliary police officer shoots SA man", in: Vossische newspaper of 7 March 1933 .
3. ↑ Hans Bernd Gisevius: Until the bitter end . Volume 1: From the Reichstag Fire to the Fritsch Crisis . Fretz + Wasmuth, Zurich 1946, p. 86.
4. ↑ Bernhard Sauer: In Heydrichs order, p. 59. With reference to LAB: B.Rep. 058, No. 1499, Bl. 202f.