Karl Schmidt-Römer

Karl Schmidt-Römer , born Karl Schmidt , from 1950 Karl Schmidt-Rux (born January 8, 1905 in Danzig - Langfuhr ; † after 1975) was a German political functionary (NSDAP) and lawyer.

Life and activity

After attending school, Schmidt studied law. He completed his training in 1930 with a doctorate as Dr. jur. from. After his marriage, he added his wife's last name to his surname to create the double name Schmidt-Römer. Following his training, he worked in the financial administration of the city of Gdansk, where he eventually achieved the rank of senior government councilor.

On April 1, 1933, Schmidt-Römer joined the NSDAP (membership number 1,821,616). At that time he was a clerk for financial matters in the Gauamtsleitung of the National Socialist People's Welfare. In the Sturmabteilung (SA) he brought it up to the Obersturmführer for the special use of the Supreme SA leadership.

From 1940 Schmidt-Römer worked in the party chancellery of the NSDAP , the central steering instrument led by Martin Bormann for controlling the party apparatus. On February 21, 1942 he received the rank of Reichsamtsleiter in the leadership corps of the NSDAP. His main task was to advise Bormann on questions of constitutional law. At the end of the war he headed the Office II N (communications) in the party office. Previously, he was senior government councilor and division manager / Reichsamtsleiter, deputy head of the office group III D Krüger: (church, school, university, youth leader of the German Reich, Ministry of Propaganda, celebrations, provision for war survivors) and head of the main department III D 3 (finance and property affairs of the churches , including church matters of the Reich Ministry of Finance; church and economy).

Especially in the last phase of the war, Schmidt-Römer was one of Bormann's closest collaborators. He is mentioned five times on the few remaining pages of Bormann's notebook for the period from February 18 to April 12, 1945 alone. Werner Holtfort even stated that he had found out that Schmidt-Römer was considered Bormann's "gray eminence".

When asked about Schmidt-Römer in the 1970s, Bormann's adjutant Heinrich Heim recalled that he was "an agile and accomplished man" who "had his heart in the right place" because: "Otherwise he would never have become an advisor to the Reichsleiter . " And Gerhard Klopfer knew that Schmidt-Römer "was with Bormann almost every day, just like me".

post war period

After the Second World War, Schmidt-Römer went underground. In the late 1940s he worked under the inconspicuous name of Karl Schmidt in a quarry in Lower Saxony.

In 1950 Schmidt / Schmidt-Römer - meanwhile divorced from his wife - changed his name to Schmidt-Rux, whereby the part of the name Rux was the maiden name of a grandmother (name change certificate from the District President of Hanover of April 29, 1950). At that time he started a new career as a tax assistant. Schmidt-Rux's clients included a. the provincial newspaper Wunstorfer Zeitung . When he applied for his re-admission as a lawyer, Schmidt-Rux kept silent about his work in the party chancellery of the NSDAP and instead claimed to have been active in the Danzig financial administration during the war.

In 1953 in Hanover, Schmidt-Rux met the Hanoverian publisher Luise Madsack , who after the death of her husband had become the owner of one of the largest press publishers in northern Germany. Madsack finally made Schmidt-Rux her chief lawyer and her personal negotiator. In this position, both worked closely together for more than two decades.

As a representative of Madsack Schmidt-Römer u. a. Chairman of the supervisory board of the Stuttgarter Zeitung and member of the supervisory board of the Münchner Merkur newspaper . He also bought the Göttinger Tageblatt for his publisher when it was about to collapse in 1974 and at that time he brokered a thirty percent stake in the Madsack Group for the SPD. At that time, the SPD entered the Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung, which was actually close to the CDU, with DM 23 million . He also became President of the Chamber of Tax Advisors.

Through close cooperation with Madsack and other top-class clients, Schmidt-Römer developed into one of the most well-known and influential lawyers in Hanover from the 1950s to the 1970s, and one of the most powerful men in Hanover in general, a reputation that has developed a. was reflected in the fact that he was known in the city's legal circles as the "gray eminence with throws".

Schmidt-Rux's past becomes known

At the beginning of 1975, the Spiegel briefly noted Schmidt-Rux '- who was characterized as the "founder of the merger between the bourgeois Hannoversche Allgemeine and the social-democratic Hannoversche Presse" - in its personal data column , pointing out in particular that Schmidt-Rux as Schmidt-Römer often appeared in the recently published publication of "Martin Bormann's last notes". At the same point, the magazine noted that Schmidt-Rux emphasized that he only knew Bormann "how you know your boss" and that he denied his membership in the NSDAP and claimed that he only held a very subordinate position in financial administration to have.

In 1975 Schmidt-Rux's past as Schmidt-Römer came to light through a report in the magazine Stern , which had previously discovered his party files while researching himself: Before that, Schmidt-Rux's lawyer, Josef Augstein - a brother of Spiegel - publisher Rudolf Augstein - threatened the newspaper's editorial team with legal action if they implemented their publication plans. In particular, Augstein insisted that Schmidt-Rux was just a simple party member, but never held an office in the party hierarchy.

Applications by Schmidt-Rux against the star were rejected by the regional court and higher regional court in Hamburg as "misleading and incorrect statements of fact".

Even the most conservative legal circles in Hanover took a protective position before Schmidt-Rux: The lawyer and member of the state parliament Werner Holtfort applied for an honorary court case against Schmidt-Rux before the Celle Bar Association, which he justified with the fact that Schmidt-Rux was licensed to practice as a lawyer in 1950 false facts (specifically, the concealment of his function in the Nazi party apparatus, which would actually have been mandatory according to the relevant provisions), so that his admission as a lawyer was made assuming false conditions.

In the vote on the initiation of the court of honor proceedings by the bar association, there was a result of 8 to 8 votes for and against this step, with the vote against the introduction of the chamber chairman Behrens - who himself had once been NSDAP local group leader in Celle - the decisive factor against the introduction of a procedure. Instead, Holtfort has been the target of hostility from the legal profession. So one accused him of having no respect for the other, as well as "profile addiction" and troublemaking.

While German newspapers, with the exception of Stern and the Frankfurter Rundschau , kept silent about the Schmidt-Rux / Schmidt-Römer affair, it was meticulously acknowledged abroad: The French Figaro and the British Daily Mail informed their readers about the process. The latter wrote that "the scandal [...] is characteristic of a profession" that is "still riddled with old Nazis in West Germany."

Fonts

• The personal legal status of the consuls in Germany and Danzig , Kafemann, Danzig 1930. (Dissertation Marburg 1930; published as Karl Schmidt)

literature

• Lev Bezymenski: Martin Bormann's last notes: a document and its author , 1974.
• Werner Holtfort: Learning processes of a German. in: Rainer Eisfeld / Ingo Müller: Against barbarism: Essays Robert MW Kempner in honor , 1989, pp. 37–50.
• Werner Holtfort: Behind the Facades: Stories from a German City , 1982, pp. 116–119.
• Wolfgang Köpp: Martin Bormann: Hitler's brown shadow or the landscape of desire , 2010.
• Nazi past is present. Gray Eminence with a throw at the levers of power. in: Oltmann: Search for traces. On Scorched Earth , pp. 134–137.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Oltmann: Spurensuche, p. 136.
2. ↑ Oltmann: Spurensuche , p. 135.
3. ↑ Werner Holtfort: Behind the facades. Stories from a German City , 1982, p. 117.
4. ↑ Oltmann: Spurensuche, p. 135.
5. ↑ Alwin Meyer / Karl-Klaus Rabe: Phantom Democrats. Or the everyday present of the past , 1979, p. 121.
6. ↑ Oltmann: Spurensuche, p. 134f; Holtfort. Learning processes, p. 37.
7. ↑ Oltmann: Spurensuche , p. 136; Holtfort: "Learning Processes", p. 37.
8. ↑ Holtfort: learning processes, p. 38.
9. ↑ Oltmann: Spurensuche, p. 135.
10. ↑ Personal data, in: Der Spiegel from February 17, 1975 (digitized version) .
11. ↑ Oltmann: Spurensuche, p. 136.
12. ↑ Holtfort: learning processes, p. 43.