Martin Lennings

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Hans Martin Lennings (born December 6, 1904 in Wuppertal ; † 1962 ) was a German SA member. Lennings achieved posthumous notoriety in 2019 because of the discovery of an affidavit he made in 1955 , in which he accused himself of participating in the burning of the Berlin Reichstag building on February 27, 1933.

Life and information on his involvement in the Reichstag fire

Lennings came from what is now Wuppertal and grew up in Hanover . His father Heinrich Lennings (1871-1923), who had completed the first and second exams in Protestant theology , taught at the Progymnasium with Realschule in Schwelm from 1902 and from 1907 at the Oberrealschule at the Luther Church in Hanover. Lenning's older brother Heinrich jun. became a pastor .

As Lennings affirmed, he had been active in the German-Völkisch movement since 1924 - according to the historian Rainer Orth with the Artamans - and had become a member of the NSDAP in 1926 . He was friends with Ernst Röhm and was accepted by him shortly before January 30, 1933 as a simple troop leader in the SA, the street combat group of the NSDAP, after he had previously rejected an offer from Röhm in 1930 to join the leadership of the SA. According to his denazification process , which he completed in 1948 , he had excellent contacts with the NSDAP leadership, for example, in the summer of 1930, after a fight with communists, he received a visit from Adolf Hitler in the hospital and accompanied Röhm on several trips. In February 1933 he belonged to a Berlin SA special troop ("for special use") and, in civilian clothes, spied on a labor service of the so-called Christian Kampfschar in General-Pape-Strasse . On the evening of February 27, 1933, Lennings, as a member of his SA troops, claims to have been involved in the events surrounding the burning of the Reichstag building .

In 1955, Lennings, who stated his profession as a businessman and lived with his brother, Pastor Heinrich Lennings, in Bad Pyrmont , submitted an affidavit to the notary Paul Siegel in Hanover, dated November 8, 1955, which was then included in the document roll of the notary at the Hanover District Court with the roll number 501. In his statement, Lennings gave the following information about his alleged involvement in the Reichstag fire of February 1933: On the evening of February 27, 1933 he, Lennings, had received an order from the leader of the SA sub-group in East Berlin, Karl Ernst , to be a younger man Man from an SA hospital in Lützowstrasse in Berlin's Tiergarten driving an automobile to the Reichstag building. The order was not placed directly, but via a police spy in an inn in Berlin-Mahlsdorf . It was probably the restaurant Zum strammen Kater at Hönower Straße 147. He and two other SA members dressed in civilian clothes carried out this order between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m. and transported the young man to the Reichstag. During the journey, the man said “not a word” and made a “dazed” impression. At the Reichstag, he and the other two SA men, according to Lennings, handed over the man he did not know at a side entrance to an SA man who was also waiting there and who was also appearing in “civil clothing”. When they were handed over, he had instructed them to move away quickly. When the man he was transporting was handed over to the SA leader waiting in front of the Reichstag, Lennings said he noticed that there was “a peculiar smell of fire and that faint puffs of smoke also wafted through the rooms”.

In the following days, Lennings continued in his statement, based on the photographs of the Dutch anarcho-syndicalist Marinus van der Lubbe, who was arrested in the burning Reichstag building in the newspapers, he recognized this man as the man he and the other two SA men on the evening of February 27, 1933 from the Berlin Tiergarten to the Reichstag building. The fact that Lubbe was portrayed as an arsonist in the press, although he, Lennings, and his comrades had known that he could not have been the arsonist, since the building had already burned when they delivered Lubbe there prompted complaints leading to contact his superiors: "because could not possibly have been the arsonist we believe van der Lubbe, since had to be set according to our findings, the Reichstag already on fire when we van were delivering der Lubbe there." He and other SA men protested against the arrest and allegedly untruthful public execution of Lubbe as an arsonist: They were then taken into protective custody and had to sign reverse declaring that “we know nothing about anything”. After a week, they were released again on Röhm's orders.

Lubbe, the only officially convicted suspect, was sentenced to death in the Reichstag fire trial before the Leipzig Reich Court in December 1933 and executed in January 1934. According to Lennings, almost all SA members belonging to the inner circle of those involved in the Reichstag fire were later shot and he also suspected that this was the reason for the murder of Karl Ernst. However, according to Lennings, he himself had been warned and fled to Czechoslovakia . After his expulsion from Czechoslovakia and an amnesty in the meantime, he said he returned to Germany in 1934. Because of statements against the regime, he was briefly taken into protective custody at the end of 1934 and in 1936 in the Gestapo prison Hotel Silber in Stuttgart , after visiting the grave of someone shot in the Röhm putsch in Rudolstadt . After imprisonment in various protective custody camps, he was released in Stuttgart in 1937.

In the second half of the 1940s, Lennings was subjected to two arbitration chamber proceedings before arbitration chambers 30 (Ludwigsburg) and 37 (Stuttgart). At that time he stated the position as a merchant and Großsachsenheim as the place of residence .

In his declaration in 1955, Lennings himself explained his motivation for putting the information incriminating himself on oath in front of a notary, saying that he was a devout Catholic and that he made the testimony on the advice of his confessor . The reason for Lenning's decision to make his declaration in 1955 of all places was, according to his own statement, its use in a reopening trial of the Reichstag fire proceedings of 1933, which was discussed at the time. He himself intends to leave the country shortly. In his affidavit he authorized the lawyer Arthur Brandt in the retrial to use it in the trial.

According to Meding's article, there are copies of letters from Lennings to his brother from the 1950s in the Federal Archives. Afterwards Lennings concealed some facts in his affidavit that could have incriminated him himself. For example, a few days before the Reichstag fire in the Trompeterschlösschen in Dresden there was a meeting of members of the SA, including Edmund Heines , at which the upcoming fire was discussed and the men selected for it.

Public reception

Alexander Bahar and Wilfried Kugel already mentioned in their documentary “Der Reichstagbrand. How history is made ”(edition q, Berlin 2001,“ Der Zeuge des Rechtsanwalts Arthur Brandt ”, pp. 588–591) in detail about the statements made by Marinus van der Lubbe, who were quoted by the Berlin lawyer Arthur Brandt in the annulment proceedings, but kept anonymous Witnesses reported. Its affidavit, filed in 1955, was only available to the authors in extracts at the time. A copy of Lennings' affidavit was only discovered in connection with research by the Lower Saxony State Criminal Police Office into its own history in the estate of the constitutional protection officer and Reichstag fire researcher Fritz Tobias in the Koblenz Federal Archives , and the search for the original of the declaration was then initiated. The further research was supported by Hersch Fischler . The discovery of the original in the archive of the Hanover District Court in July 2019 confirmed the official character and authenticity of the document as such (but not necessarily the accuracy of the allegations it contained). The authenticity of the document was also confirmed by the State Criminal Police Office.

The existence of the document was first published on July 26th in an article by journalist and editor Conrad von Meding in the Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung . Lennings' declaration was made available to the German Press Agency (dpa) in officially certified copies at the end of July 2019 . As a result, numerous newspapers and other media reported in the following days about the discovery of the explosive or apparently explosive Lennings document, its contents and the possible significance for the clarification of the riddle of who set the Reichstag on fire, for example the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , the Frankfurter Rundschau , the Süddeutsche Zeitung , the daily newspaper (taz) and Die Welt .

The evaluation of the new document and its source value differed widely:

Conrad von Meding interpreted Lennings' declaration as evidence that the view that had dominated specialist research for decades that Marinus van der Lubbe had set the Reichstag on fire as a single perpetrator was a "protective claim". It is particularly important because Lennings did not try to exonerate himself with this assertion, as was common practice in the post-war years, but that, on the contrary, he had incriminated himself. For this reason, Meding believed he could dare to predict that research on the Reichstag fire would “start again” based on Lennings' declaration.

In an interview with Conrad von Meding, the American historian Benjamin Carter Hett stated that - subject to closer examination - this appears to be the first document in which an accomplice reports that he himself participated in the preparations on the orders of the Nazis to be. Documents that had previously emerged all turned out to be forgeries. Lennings' statement supported a statement by retrial attorney Arthur Brandt that he had been contacted by a former SA man who wanted to "unpack" in favor of van der Lubbes. The former SA man did, as quoted by Hett Brandt in his book Der Reichstagbrand , published in English in 2014 . Retrial , not wanting to testify in court for fear of life; But Brandt used his statement in the process without naming his name and firmly believed in its truthfulness. In his book, Hett was still skeptical of this statement, but noted that Brandt had a high reputation among colleagues and that the encounter had been confirmed by his daughter and Hans Bernd Gisevius , who had heard a tape recording of his statement. In his eleven-part series of articles in the Spiegel magazine in 1959/60, by means of manipulating and suppressing sources and blackmailing historians, Fritz Tobias laid the “foundation stone” for the thesis of van der Lubbe's sole perpetrator, which has prevailed among historians in Germany since the 1960s , in his eleven-part series of articles Nazi-charged investigators in the Reichstag fire who feared to continue their career in the Federal Republic of Germany to protect. Walter Zirpins - from 1951 head of the Lower Saxony State Criminal Police Office - had interrogated van der Lubbe and was one of the authors of the investigation protocols. Hett sees it as a "sad chapter" that the Spiegel has not distanced itself from Tobias' series of articles to this day.

At the end of November 2019, the Spiegel editor and historian Klaus Wiegrefe reported that research by the historian Rainer Orth would show that in 1936/37 two doctors had prepared psychiatric reports on Lennings on behalf of the Hereditary Health Court at the Leipzig District Court , according to which he was a " psychopath " u. a. to anxiety disorders , epilepsy suffer and memory loss. At that time it was about a possible sterilization of Lennings' due to mental illness, which however did not take place because he was probably unable to begetful. In order to clarify what to think of “psychiatric reports from the Nazi era”, according to Wiegrefe, Der Spiegel submitted the reports to a psychiatric expert today, the psychiatrist Frank Schneider . According to Schneider, Lennings' statements cannot be dismissed as lies in principle, but there is “a lot of evidence” that he accused himself of an act in which he was not involved. The fact that Fritz Tobias did not make Lenning's affidavit public in the 1950s had nothing to do with information suppression, concludes Wiegrefe, but rather with the fact that Lennings' brother Tobias warned that he was a “great storyteller” and told stories like "robber pistols".

The journalist Sven Felix Kellerhoff , on the other hand, emphatically denied the authenticity of Lennings' declaration as far as its content was concerned: With reference to the files of the special commission of the Berlin Political Police investigating the fire in 1933, which he himself evaluated, which contain various statements by people who claimed to have seen Marinus van der Lubbe in Berlin on February 27, 1933, Kellerhoff insisted that Lennings Lubbe could not possibly have driven to the Reichstag in an automobile on the evening of February 27, as he claims in his declaration Based on the evidence available, it is certain that Lubbe had already walked into the area of ​​the Reichstag at noon and then stayed for a few hours in the surrounding area of the Mitte district , waiting there for evening darkness to fall, under whose protection he the wanted to commit arson planned by him. Kellerhoff was therefore convinced that Lennings' explanation "does not correspond to the truth", but that it was a false statement. Since the files of the Reichstag fire investigations from 1933 were considered lost or destroyed by the war in the 1950s, Lennings probably thought he could safely dare to make such a false statement, as it could not be refuted to him because the investigation files no longer exist . Kellerhoff suspects that Lennings' insurance was part of the widespread relief strategy of West German society in the 1950s, which consisted of getting the German population in their bulk (although around 1/3 of the population voted for the NSDAP in the 1932 elections had) to absolve as far as possible of the responsibility for the seizure of power by the National Socialists by portraying the establishment of the Nazi dictatorship as the product of treacherous intrigues by a small group of villains in the Nazi leadership in order to conceal the fact that it was in reality at the end of a development supported by the will of large parts of the population.

According to Hersch Fischler, Lennings is confirmed by the testimony of a police superintendent recorded in 1933. He had seen a gray-green car at 9:15 p.m. at the side entrance of the Reichstag (at that time Simonsstrasse) to the Kroll Opera, but had not been summoned as a witness during the trial. According to Fischler, Van der Lubbe also testified that he had passed armor in the Reichstag. According to Fischler, they were only available at the Simonsstrasse entrance and not on the way, according to the investigation protocol, on which he should have come to the Reichstag. There are also doubts about the statement by van der Lubbe, who was walking and severely visually impaired, that he had climbed a five-meter-high balustrade to get into the Reichstag, which was also surrounded by a two-meter-deep trench that was secured with barbed wire . Various fire experts also expressed skepticism towards the recorded statements of van der Lubbe after the war. According to Fischler, the interrogation protocols and investigation files had demonstrably been manipulated several times and parts were removed. According to Fischler, van der Lubbe's self-incriminating behavior was primarily driven by the will to become known as a single perpetrator and to set an example against the National Socialists.

Archival tradition

Lennings' Spruchkammer files have been preserved in the Ludwigsburg State Archives under the shelfmarks "EL 902/20 Bü 18246" and "EL 902/15 Bü 13880". The affidavit from 1955 at the Hanover District Court was handed over to the Lower Saxony State Archives , Hanover Department in November 2019 and there under the signature NLA HA Nds. 725 Hanover Acc. 2019/125 No. 1 recorded.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g Conrad von Meding: Who was the real arsonist? In: Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung . July 26, 2019, pp. 2–3 (with a photocopy of the affidavit). Digitized at hi-senior.de (PDF; 1.2 MB).
  2. ^ Heinrich Lennings' personal information sheet. In: opac.bbf.dipf.de. Library for Research on Educational History , December 13, 2010, accessed August 24, 2019.
  3. ^ Franz Kössler: Lennings, Heinrich. In: Personal dictionary of teachers of the 19th century. Professional biographies from school annual reports and school programs 1825–1918 with lists of publications. Volume: Labs-Lyon. In: geb.uni-giessen.de. Electronic library of the University of Giessen , December 18, 2007, accessed on August 24, 2019, p. 138 (PDF; 5.5 MB).
  4. ↑ a b Klaus Wiegrefe: Testimony of a psychopath. In: Der Spiegel. No. 49, November 30, 2019, pp. 42–44, here p. 43.
  5. ↑ a b c d e f g h i Affidavit from Lennings, 1955, printed in HAZ, July 26, 2019, p. 3
  6. ↑ According to Lennings, a certain Max Becker, former member of the Red Front Fighters League . He identified himself with a special written ID.
  7. ↑ "Reichstag fire in 1933: A trail leads to Mahlsdorf", in: tagesspiegel from August 6, 2019 as well as an entry for the house at Hönower Strasse 147 in the Berlin address book for 1933 . As the owner, a guest becomes “F. Gruhn "called.
  8. ^ Benjamin Carter Hett: Burning the Reichstag. An Investigation into the Third Reich's Enduring Mystery. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2014, ISBN 978-0-19-932232-9 , p. 253 (English).
  9. ↑ Klaus Wiegrefe: Testimony of a psychopath. In: Der Spiegel. No. 49, November 30, 2019, pp. 42–44, here p. 42 f.
  10. ↑ Klaus Wiegrefe: Testimony of a psychopath. In: Der Spiegel. No. 49, November 30, 2019, pp. 42–44, here p. 44.
  11. ^ Entry in the archive database of the Ludwigsburg State Archives .
  12. ^ Declaration on the Reichstag fire and wills from Klara Berliner | Nds. State Archives. Retrieved December 5, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Lennings, Martin
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Lennings, Hans Martin (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German SA member
DATE OF BIRTH December 6, 1904
PLACE OF BIRTH uncertain: Wuppertal
DATE OF DEATH 1962