Karl Zehnter

Karl Zehnter (born March 27, 1900 in Munich ; † June 30 or July 1, 1934 there ) was a German innkeeper. Tenth was best known as one of the victims of the Röhm affair in the early summer of 1934.

Live and act

Youth (1900 to 1924)

Karl Zehnter was the second of three children of the innkeeper Georg Zehnter and his wife Barbette, b. Baumler. Sister Margarethe (1897–1954) was born before him and sister Käthe (1903–1977) was born after him. In his youth, Zehnter began to work in his parents' inn, the Munich restaurant “Zum Bratwurstglöckl”, next to the Liebfrauendom in Munich. After the death of his father in 1922 and his mother in 1924, Tenth became the new owner of the restaurant.

Relationship to the circle around Ernst Röhm

In the aftermath of the First World War , Zehnter began to move in circles on the far right. At the beginning of the 1920s he had connections with the Freikorps Roßbach active in Munich , to which he may also belong temporarily. On this way he got to know the World War II veteran and murderer Edmund Heines , one of the leaders of the "Roßbacher", with whom he developed friendly ties. In 1923, Zehnter belonged to the "Heines Group". In 1924, through Heines, Zehnter met the then leader of the paramilitary organization Frontbann and later NSDAP politician Ernst Röhm , who was a regular at Zehnters Restaurant at the time. In the following ten years the "Bratwurstglöckl" served as a permanent meeting point and transfer point for the circle of friends around Heines and Röhm, who maintained a regular table in the Bratwurstglöckl. Since numerous homosexuals also belonged to this group, it was often assumed in the literature that tenth was also homosexual.

When Heines was able to win a Reichstag mandate for the NSDAP in the Reichstag election of September 1930 and Röhm was appointed Chief of Staff of the SA by Adolf Hitler at the end of 1930 , the political opponents of the NSDAP began to use their homosexuality as a propaganda target. In this way, Zehnter and his restaurant also came into focus in the attacks of the NSDAP opponents directed against the SA leaders. For example, an article published on April 14, 1931 in the social democratic newspaper Münchener Post with the headline “Stammtisch 175” ( Section 175 of the Criminal Code criminalized homosexual relationships at the time), in which “Heines, Röhm, Zentner [sic! ] and what they are all called ”were publicly identified as homosexual in a bogus letter from an alleged former NSDAP member. In addition, the author of the article expressed satisfaction that he had turned his back on the “clique of the Bratwurstglöckl”.

Despite his close association with leading Nazi politicians, Zehnter did not officially join the NSDAP until May 1, 1933 (membership number 3,209,598).

The Karl Zehnter murder case

On June 30 or July 1, 1934, Zehnter was arrested and murdered in the course of the Röhm affair . As the Schwabenhausen gendarmerie station reported to the public prosecutor at the Munich II district court , Zehnter was shot dead in the car on the evening of June 30 at around 7 p.m. on the road from Dachau to Augsburg near Lengermoos , and the body was left in the ditch. The dead man was initially guarded by an SA man on behalf of the gendarmerie, but was later confiscated by four SS men who forced the SA man to hand over the dead man at gunpoint. The incipient to investigations by the public prosecutor's office came to the conclusion that it had been shot without doubt firmly stands that tenth of armed SS men as the chief prosecutor of the Attorney General reported in Munich. Since the judicial authorities were not sure whether the shooting was part of the political measures taken on June 30th and therefore fell under " State emergency services ", the Bavarian Ministry of Justice asked for a decision on how to proceed. Later, no further investigations were made after the name Zehnter was placed on a list of 77 (later 83) names, the killing of which Hitler subsequently approved and thus withdrawn from public prosecution investigation.

The Germany-reports of Sopade give the following account of Zehnters death of largely (then not yet publicly known) with the prosecutor agrees:

“The landlord of the Bratwurstglöckl Zehnter fled with another Nazi , whose name could not be determined, in a car on the road to Ginding. They were followed by the SS. The car was forced to stop, the two occupants were torn out and immediately slammed down on the street. "

After his death, Zehnters restaurant was taken over by his younger sister Käthe and her husband Eduard Staub. In the death register of the Prittlbach registry office, the Bavarian Political Police later untruthfully left the Dachau plant, d. H. the Dachau concentration camp , registered as a place of death Zehnters.

The reasons for the murder of Zehnters are still not fully established. Most likely, however, is that he was killed for no special reason, but simply ended up on a blacklist as a member of the circle of friends of Ernst Röhm and Heines, the entries of which were processed in the days of the coup. This is supported by the fact that numerous other people from the vicinity of the higher SA leaders who were allegedly committed to the coup, such as chauffeurs and adjutants, were shot. The background for the elimination of these relatively insignificant people is mostly assumed that the organizers of the wave of purges through the elimination of the people in the personal environment of the main goals, i. H. of the higher SA leaders, wanted to ensure that they would no longer be able to give exonerating certificates for the murdered after the wave of purges by testifying that they had not had the coup plans alleged by the propaganda.

An alternative interpretation of the murder comes from the anti-Nazi German exile journalism of the 1930s. In the first few years after the events of the Röhm Putsch, the assertion was repeatedly made that Tenth was shot at the instigation of Joseph Goebbels , and Tenth as an uncomfortable witness to a meeting between him, Goebbels, and Röhm in a room at the Bratwurstglöckl a few weeks ago the events of June 30th - at which Goebbels declared his solidarity with Röhm - had them eliminated. This claim can be proven for the first time in Otto Strasser's book Die deutsche Bartholomäusnacht , which appeared in Czechoslovakia at the end of 1934 , as well as in the communist white book about the shootings of June 30, 1934 , two works that influenced each other in their development phase, so that it is not clear What needs to be clarified is who is the original author of the Goebbels claim. Although no proof of the correctness of the claim that Goebbels was authorship has been brought to light, the claim has been taken up again and again in the historical and journalistic literature on the Röhm Putsch. The allegation of the alleged Röhm-Goebbels meeting is viewed by the majority of researchers as doubtful. Kurt Gossweiler characterized it as a “pure fantasy product”.

The repeated assertion that besides Zehnter, several of his servants were shot dead: The Weissbuch and Strasser state that besides Zehnter, his waiter and tap master were also killed. In this sense, Hans Bernd Gisevius claimed in the 1950s that, in addition to Tenth, "three of his degenerate waiters" had also been shot.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ The official death list of the Secret State Police Office claims July 1st as the day of death [reprinted in Bennecke: Die Reichswehr und der Röhm-Putsch , p. 88]. However, since the dates of death on this list have been proven to be incorrect in numerous cases, caution is advised here. Gruchmann: Justice in the Third Quotes a police report that states June 30th as the shooting date.
2. ↑ Reinhard Weber: Max Hirschberg. Jude und Demokratie , 1998, p. 295.
3. ^ Lothar Gruchmann : Justice in the 3rd Reich. 1933-1940 , p. 438.
4. ↑ Germany report by Sopade , Vol. 1, p. 196.
5. ↑ Otto Strasser: Die deutsche Bartholomäusnacht, 7th edition, 1938, p. 90.
6. ↑ So z. B. at Paul Merker: Germany. To be or not to be? , 1945, p. 379; from Harry Schulze-Wilde: The Reich Chancellery 1933-1945: Beginning and End of the Third Reich , 1966, p. 185; from Helmut Heiber : Joseph Goebbels , 1962; Herbert Kranz: Das Ende des Reiches , 1962, p. 82 or Wulf Schwarzwäller: Der Stellvertreter des Führers , 1974, p. 127.
7. ↑ Kurt Gossweiler: The Röhm Affair: Backgrounds, Connections, Effects , 1983, p. 492.
8. ↑ Weissbuch, 1934, p. 90.
9. ^ Strasser: Die deutsche Bartholomäusnacht , 1938, p. 90ff.
10. ↑ Hans Bernd Gisevius: Until the Bitter End , 1954, p. 161.