Karl Tillessen

Karl Tillessen , also Carl   (born August 22, 1891 in Cologne- Lindenthal; † March 16, 1979 in Krefeld ), was a German naval officer , most recently corvette captain in World War II . He was Hermann Ehrhardt's deputy in the Consul organization and was involved in the planning of political assassinations in the 1920s , including those on Philipp Scheidemann and Walther Rathenau .

His younger brother Heinrich Tillessen was the murderer of Matthias Erzberger . His older brother Werner Tillessen was also a naval officer and an admiral in World War II.

Life

The third son of Lieutenant General Karl Hugo Franz Tillessen (1846–1910) joined the Imperial Navy in 1909 and took part in the First World War as a watch officer and torpedo boat commander. In 1919 he joined the II. Ehrhardt Marine Brigade in Wilhelmshaven and was also a member of the local group of the German National Guard and Defense Association of Wilhelmshaven-Rüstringen. He was involved in the Kapp Putsch in 1920 . On September 10, 1920 he was discharged from the Navy. In 1921 he became head of the "Organization Consul" (OC) in Saxony .

Together with Erwin Kern , Tillessen tried in vain on August 10, 1921 to free the two lieutenants John Boldt and Ludwig Dithmar, who had been convicted of war criminals in the Leipzig trials for the sinking of the English hospital ship Llandovery Castle, from the Leipzig prison. On January 28, 1922, Frankfurt OC activists led by Tillessen and Friedrich Wilhelm Heinz succeeded in freeing Dithmar, who had meanwhile been moved to Naumburg / Saale , from the prison there. On the night of March 4 to 5, 1922, Kern and the OC member Ernst von Salomon tried to kill Erwin Wagner, the driver of the getaway car, as a supposed informant in Bad Nauheim.

At the beginning of 1922 Tillessen became head of the Consul Organization for West Germany and took over the upper districts II (Hanover) and IV (Frankfurt / Main). In his function as a leading member of the Consul organization, he had already planned the hydrogen cyanide attack on Philipp Scheidemann , who was Lord Mayor of Kassel at Pentecost 1922, before the assassination attempt on Walther Rathenau .

Karl Tillessen was much more involved in the preparations for the assassination attempt on the Reich Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau than could be proven to him in the later trial. In the Völkische Rundschau , Karl Tillessen announced the planned murder of Rathenau in spring 1922 with the words: "The Jewish coachman who drove the Reichwagen into the swamp for many years in the dark must be eliminated." In the same issue Tillessen campaigned for Adolf Hitler and the NSDAP , which was the only party to protect the Germans from " Alljuda ". It was also Karl Tillessen who ordered the assassins Erwin Kern, Hermann Fischer and Ernst Werner Techow to murder Rathenau. Ernst von Salomon was one of the accomplices in this attack. After the assassination attempt, Karl Tillessen was arrested in Frankfurt, charged with “failing to report a crime” and from October 1922 had to answer before the newly established “ State Court for the Protection of the Republic ” in Leipzig. He was sentenced to three years imprisonment, which he served in Cottbus prison.

After his release from prison, it was planned to hire Karl Tillessen from January 1, 1926 as a mentor to the department head Walter Lohmann (1878–1930) in the maritime transport department at the Naval Office. However, the permanent position did not materialize. For this purpose, Lieutenant Hans Schottky (* 1902) was hired in the planned position.

After the attempted murder of Wagner became known in the femoral committee of the German Reichstag , the Giessen fememicide trial against Heinz, Salomon and another OC man, Ernst Schwing, took place in 1927. At the trial, all witnesses withdrew their statements incriminating the defendants. The defendants, in turn, put all the blame on Erwin Kern, who died in the Rathenau assassination attempt. The activities of the OC remained in the dark and Karl Tillesen was able to assert as a witness that the usual distance in the organization did not mean the murder, but only consisted of the social ostracism of the victims. At most they wanted to give the victim one rub . The judges' mild decision is also an example of a judiciary that was biased against the republic during the Weimar period. Salomon was sentenced to three and a half years in prison for assault and Ernst Schwing to one and a half years in prison for assisting in attempted manslaughter. Heinz was acquitted for lack of evidence.

According to the historian Martin Sabrow , Karl Tillessen was "the head of a department of the Consul organization entrusted by Ehrhardt with special terrorist tasks".

Later Karl Tillessen was the leader of various activist groups all over Germany. In Frankfurt he led the German-Völkisch gymnastics club "Friedrich Ludwig Jahn 1919" together with Kurt Münch , which later became the nucleus of the SA in Frankfurt.

Karl Tillessen joined the NSDAP on May 1, 1933 and the SS on October 5, 1933 (membership no. 131.861). During the Second World War he was corvette captain and remained a member of the SS.

Tillessen lake

In Dorsten , North Rhine-Westphalia , an artificially created quartz lake was called "Tillessen Lake" for around 50 years. From 1930 and 1935 Carl Tillessen was managing director of the Westphalian sand and clay works located there. In March 2016 the city decided to rename the lake Hardtberg-See .

literature

• Cord Gebhardt: The case of the Erzberger murderer Heinrich Tillessen. A contribution to the history of the judiciary after 1945 . Mohr, Tübingen 1995, ISBN 3-16-146490-7 .
• Martin Sabrow: The Rathenaumord. Reconstruction of a conspiracy against the Republic of Weimar . Oldenbourg, Munich 1994, ISBN 3-486-64569-2 .

Web links

• Wolfram Wette: “ The Enemy Inside ”, in: Die Zeit, June 5, 2003

Individual evidence

1. ↑ So the spelling both in the baptismal register and on his tombstone. Since his school days in the 1900s and until after the Second World War, his first name was spelled Karl in official documents . see. Wolf Stegemann, article on Carl Tillessen in dorsten-lexikon.de .
2. ↑ Uwe Lohalm: Völkischer Radikalismus. The history of the Deutschvölkischer Schutz- und Trutz-Bund. 1919-1923. Leibniz-Verlag, Hamburg 1970, p. 217. ISBN 3-87473-000-X .
3. ↑ On the trial against Boldt and Dithmar see Harald Wiggenhorn: A debt almost without atonement. In: Die Zeit 34/1996, August 16, 1996.
4. ↑ Martin Sabrow: The Rathenaumord. Reconstruction of a conspiracy against the Republic of Weimar. Dissertation, Freiburg 1992, pp. 177-182.
5. ↑ ^{a b c} Article on Carl Tillessen in dorsten-lexikon.de (Wolf Stegemann), accessed May 7, 2017.
6. ↑ Bernhard Sauer: Freikorps and anti-Semitism in the early days of the Weimar Republic, FN 61 (PDF; 138 kB).
7. ↑ Martin Sabrow: The Rathenaumord. Freiburg 1992, pp. 139-149; Bernd Braun: Integration through representation. The Reich President in the Länder. In: Eberhard Kolb (ed.): Friedrich Ebert as Reich President. Administration and understanding of office (series of publications by the Reichspräsident-Friedrich-Ebert-Gedenkstätte Foundation, Volume 4). Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 1997, pp. 157–188 (here: p. 168, note 42).
8. ↑ The "Völkische Rundschau" (1921-1922) - Frankfurt's first National Socialist weekly newspaper, online at www.ffmhist.de
9. ↑ Wolfram Wette: The Enemy Within. In: Die Zeit , June 5, 2003, No. 24/2003 .
10. ↑ Ernst von Salomon - Free Corps Fighter, Writer, Prussia, online at www.ffmhist.de
11. ↑ Volker Ullrich: Five shots on Bismarck. Historical reports 1789–1945. Beck, Munich 2002, p. 157f. ( limited preview ).
12. ^ Eugene Davidson: The making of Adolf Hitler. University of Missouri Press, 1997, p. 181 ( limited preview ).
13. ↑ Bernd Remmele: The secret maritime armor under Captain Lohmann . Freiburg University of Education, 1997, p. 26
14. ↑ Martin Sabrow: The suppressed conspiracy. The Rathenau murder and the German counter-revolution. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1999, ISBN 3-596-14302-0 , p. 178.
15. ↑ Martin Sabrow: The Rathenaumord. Freiburg 1992, p. 134.
16. ^ Early SA organization in Frankfurt until 1925, online at www.ffmhist.de
17. ↑ Bernhard Sauer: Black Reichswehr and Fememorde: a milieu study on right-wing radicalism in the Weimar Republic . Metropol, Berlin 2004, p. 100.