Kurt Neubauer (putschist)

The putschists killed on November 9, 1923 were honored between 1933 and 1945 as " martyrs of the movement " and at the same time instrumentalized by Nazi propaganda ; Neubauer 3rd row from the top, 4th from the left (caption with wrong first name).

Kurt Neubauer (born March 27, 1899 in Hopfengarten, district of Bromberg , † November 9, 1923 in Munich ) was a German servant . Neubauer was the personal servant of Erich Ludendorff and one of the killed participants in the Hitler-Ludendorff putsch of November 1923.

Live and act

Neubauer left his parents' house in 1915 to volunteer in Graudenz to take part in the First World War . He then fought in the war until 1918, when he was awarded the Iron Cross, 2nd class. After the war he joined the Freikorps Roßbach , with whom he fought in the Baltic States, Upper Silesia and Westphalia.

On July 13, 1920, Neubauer joined the 27th Jäger Battalion of the Reichswehr , which he soon left to join General Erich Ludendorff as a servant. In 1923 he became a member of the Munich Roßbach department, which at the end of 1922 was incorporated into the NSDAP's assault department as the 20th hundred of the Munich SA. Here he acted as platoon leader and deputy of the Hundred commander Edmund Heines . In the spring of 1923, the social democratic Munich Post reported on Neubauer's leading role in illegal paramilitary maneuvers outside of Munich. In March 1923 he was questioned by the police as a potential carrier of knowledge in connection with the murder of the student Karl Baur .

After the establishment of the Munich SA regiment in July 1923, Neubauer was appointed adjutant of the 3rd Battalion, headed by Edmund Heines. In October 1923 he accommodated Johann Aigner's members of the former 20th century as a guest in the Villa Ludendorff after the latter (Aigner) had been released from prison after several months of imprisonment because of his participation in the assault on the Hotel Grünwald . (The hotel was demolished in retaliation for the hospitality of members of a military monitoring commission sent to Germany after the First World War by members of the Munich SA under the leadership of Heines; this resulted in damage of several million Reichsmarks.)

As Ludendorff's servant, Neubauer took part in November 1923, together with his master, in the attempted coup against the republic by the National Socialists and various ethnic groups, which was to start in Munich. On the evening of November 8th, Neubauer came with Ludendorff and his stepson Heinz Pernet to the Munich Bürgerbräukeller , which was occupied by the National Socialists and where Hitler had called the general. Ludendorff's advice to Neubauer to go home again so as not to expose himself to any danger, he did not follow.

As an adjutant to Edmund Heines, Neubauer spent the night of November 8th and 9th and the morning hours of November 9th until about 11.00 a.m. at Heines' side: He took part in the occupation of the Munich infantry school led by Heines and accompanied Heines, Wilhelm On the morning of November 9th, Brückner and Hans Knauth went on a patrol trip along the Isar, during which Brückner commissioned Heines with the military security of the Munich Isar bridges in the sense of the putsch enterprise: Heines then had the bridges occupied and orders issued, only civilian passers-by, but not Allow members of the police and the Reichswehr to cross the bridges. At about this point in time, Neubauer left Heines and returned to Ludendorff.

At noon on November 9th, Neubauer then took part in the march to the Feldherrnhalle at Ludendorff's side . He walked behind Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter , Hitler and Weber and next to Ludendorff, Goering and Brückner in the second row of the demonstration. According to a National Socialist publication from 1933, Neubauer and Oskar Körner were the first two members of the demonstration to be killed when the state police opened machine gun fire on the putschists on Odeonsplatz . Ludendorff later stated that at first he did not notice the death of his servant, but that he was only informed of this fact in his house in the villa colony of Prince Ludwigshöhe .

Neubauer was buried a few days after the attempted coup in the Sollner cemetery near Munich.

Posthumous appropriation by Nazi propaganda

Soon after his death, Neubauer, like the other killed participants in the failed Hitler putsch of 1923, was hyped up by Nazi propaganda into a martyr and “ martyr ” of the “freedom struggle” of the nationalists and especially the Hitler movement and included in the cult that the National Socialists have been driving around the events of November 1923 since the re-establishment of the NSDAP in 1925.

Hitler dedicated the first volume of his book Mein Kampf , published for the first time that year, to Neubauer and the other 15 killed coup participants in 1923 . These men are listed by name in a dedication in the preface.

In 1933 a plaque was put up at the Feldherrnhalle in Munich with the names of the sixteen putsch participants killed in the Hitler putsch. A permanent SS honor guard was set up next to this plaque . Every passerby who passed the blackboard was obliged to honor it with the Hitler salute.

In 1935 two "Temples of Honor" were erected on Königsplatz in the center of Munich, which from then on served as a common grave for the sixteen people who participated in the 1923 coup. As part of this reburial of the dead, Neubauer - like the other fifteen putschists who had been killed - was exhumed more than a decade after his death and buried together in one of these temples on November 9, 1935 as part of an official state ceremony. Neubauer was buried again in bronze sarcophagi with three other men killed during the November putsch - Johann Rickmers , Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter and Karl Kuhn . Hitler later called the "little Neubauer" a "loyal supporter" in one of his monologues at the Fuehrer's headquarters.

After the end of the Second World War, the “Temples of Honor” on Munich's Königsplatz were torn down and Neubauer was buried again in the Solln cemetery.

Kurt-Neubauer-Strasse in Solln , named after Neubauer in 1933 , was renamed Echterstrasse in 1945 .

Archival tradition

Information about Neubauer was mainly contained in the files of the Munich Police Department on the Hitler putsch, which are now kept in the Munich State Archives ; underneath is a newspaper page from 19./20. November with the reprint of Neubauer's last letter to his sister.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Walter Danco: The world changer. 1994, p. 53.
2. ↑ Franz Uhle-Wettler: Erich Ludendorff in his time , 1996, p. 399.
3. ^ Karl Ströbel: Chronicle of the local group: The völkisch awakening in Neustadt a. d. Aisch. In: Wolfgang Mück: Nazi stronghold in Middle Franconia: The völkisch awakening in Neustadt an der Aisch 1922–1933 (=  highlights from the local history. Special volume 4). Verlag Philipp Schmidt, 2016, ISBN 978-3-87707-990-4 , pp. 283–365, here: p. 335.
4. ^ Walter Maria Espe, Hans Henning Grote: Das Buch der NSDAP 1933, p. 20.
5. ↑ Ludendorff: At the holy source of German power. 1933, p. 296.
6. ↑ ^{a b} File from the Munich State Archives (PDM 6713): Page from the newspaper Der Oberbayer from 19./20. November 1923, article A Hero's Legacy.
7. ^ Heinrich Heim: Monologues in the Führer Headquarters 1941-1944. 1980, p. 209.
8. ↑ Dorle Gribl: Solln in the years 1933–1945. Volk Verlag, Munich 2006, ISBN 978-3-937200-08-8 , pp. 17-18.
9. ↑ Echterstrasse. In: sollner-hefte.de. Retrieved June 17, 2013 .