Max Matern

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Max Matern (born January 19, 1902 in Berndshof ; † May 22, 1935 in Berlin-Plötzensee ) was a German machine shaper and communist . Towards the end of the Weimar Republic he belonged to the “Proletarian Self-Protection” of the KPD , a successor organization to the Red Front Fighter League , and was sentenced to death and executed during the Nazi era for the 1931 murders on Bülowplatz .

Life

Member of the KPD and the PSS

After attending elementary school, the son of a social democratic brickworker learned the trade of a former in the Haller works, an iron foundry in Torgelow . In 1925 he moved to Berlin , where his brother had found him work. He joined the KPD, the German Metalworkers' Association and the Red Front Fighter League.

In 1930, Matern joined the “Proletarian Self-Protection”, a communist fighting organization that was supposed to take over the security and defense functions of the Red Front Fighters League, which was banned in 1929. Since February 1931 he led the “1. Resistance Group ”in the northern sub-district of the KPD. In 1932 he took over the management of a subsection in the north district.

Bülowplatz trial 1934

On August 9, 1931, not far from the KPD headquarters on Bülowplatz in Berlin, today's Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz , the police officers Paul Anlauf and Franz Lenck were shot. At that time, only the secondary participant Max Thunert could be determined, who was punished with seven months in prison. After the National Socialist " seizure of power ", the investigation by the Berlin Murder Inspection under Ernst Gennat was resumed. Gennat heard Thunert again, who got entangled in contradictions, and Gennat had him arrested on March 21, 1933. According to a report by the criminal police on the investigation into the Anlauf / Lenck murder of September 25, 1933, Thunert testified after four days and named Matern as the one who took him to Bülowplatz and gave him a pistol. As a result, Matern was arrested on March 25th. Matern testified to have given Thunert a pistol and to have shown the two shooters Erich Mielke and Erich Ziemer the captain run-up. Nobody else was there, and the murder plan had only come from him. The newly appointed Prussian Prime Minister Hermann Göring urged, according to the journalist Jochen von Lang , through the judiciary and the newly established Secret State Police Office "for an atonement for the attack". Götz Aly points out that the police files suggested a high probability that Matern was tortured .

The preliminary investigation was opened in July 1933, followed by the arrests of other communists, including Friedrich Broede , Michael Klause and Erich Wichert . On March 16, 1934, the public prosecutor's office in Berlin opened the main proceedings. The first to be charged were the functionaries Hans Kippenberger , Heinz Neumann and Albert Kuntz , with Kippenberger and Neumann being on the run. When preparing the trial, the judiciary also tried to establish a connection with the Reichstag fire trial and Ernst Thälmann in order to prove a communist overthrow plan. Alfred Kattner , who was not involved in the crime, was supposed to serve as the witness, but after his arrest on March 3, 1933, he was made docile and used as a decoy by the Gestapo. However, Kattner was shot on February 1, 1934 on behalf of Rudolf Schwarz , the head of the defense of the KPD. Instead, Michael Klause served as the “key witness” for the prosecution.

In the Bülowplatz trial, which began on June 4, 1934, Matern also confessed that Mielke and Ziemer had been named to him as shooters. Erich Wichert, meanwhile a high-ranking officer in the Ministry for State Security , stated in a handwritten résumé in 1950 that Matern had taken the deed on himself in a hopeless situation in 1934 and thereby fled Comrade Wilhelm Peschky, Wilhelm Becker, Herbert Dobersalske, Paul Kähne and Karl Holstein enables. None of the named has returned from the Soviet Union. The comrades named by Wichert went into hiding or fled in 1933. The use of firearms could not be proven for any of the accused. Klause, Broede and Matern were sentenced to death on June 19, 1934 as accomplices who knew the murder plan and the intended shooters and who would have wanted the act. The court imposed long prison sentences on other defendants. The political disputes of the summer of 1931 were left out. Requests for revision were rejected; Hitler turned down a request for clemency from Matern on May 2, 1935. Matern was beheaded with a hand ax on May 22, 1935 in Plötzensee prison .

Honors

In the GDR streets, schools and factories were named after Max Matern, including a foundry in Torgelow and an NVA non-commissioned school in Eggesin-Karpin . A commemorative plaque was attached to his house on Dorfstrasse in Berndshof in the 1950s.

In the post-war period, a commemorative plaque was also attached to the building on Rechtsstrasse 39 in the West Berlin district of Wedding . The inscription read:

"" The anti-fascist / Max Matern / who was executed by Hitler's fascism on May 22nd, 1935 / in Plötzensee lived in this house ""

- Martin Schönfeld: memorial plaques in West Berlin

This memorial plaque was removed in 1955 after the intervention of the Wedding Police Inspectorate. The district's legal office argued that according to the 1934 ruling, Matern “wanted the murder to be his own” and “acted as an accomplice”. Because the act was subject to “punishment at all times in a constitutional state” and was committed before the time of National Socialism , Matern could not be regarded as a victim of Hitler's fascism: “The memorial plaque,” ​​according to the legal office, “is wrong in our opinion because such memorial plaques are only intended for people who actually suffered from Hitler's fascism and were therefore convicted or executed. "Martin Schönfeld notes that the Wedding Legal Office never thought that a trial in the year 1934 possibly based on confessions obtained through torture. District Mayor Walter Röber followed the assessment of his legal department and left it to the police inspection to remove the memorial plaque.

literature

  • History workshop of the Berlin association of former participants in the anti-fascist resistance, those persecuted by the Nazi regime and survivors (BV VdN) eV (ed.): Resistance in Berlin against the Nazi regime 1933 to 1945. A biographical lexicon . Volume 5. Trafo, Berlin 2004, p. 169.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Martin Schönfeld: Memorial plaques in West Berlin . Active Museum Fascism and Resistance in Berlin eV, Berlin 1993, p. 26.
  2. Wilfriede Otto: Erich Mielke - biography. The rise and fall of a chekist. K. Dietz, Berlin 2000, pp. 37-38.
  3. Michael Stricker: Last use. Police officers killed on duty in Berlin from 1918 to 2010 , Verlag für Polizeiwissenschaft, Frankfurt 2010, ISBN 3866761414 , (= series of publications by the German Society for Police History, Volume 11), p. 85 (with evidence). Stricker attaches great importance to the information that the results of the investigation on which the prosecution was based did not come from the Gestapo.
  4. ^ Jochen von Lang : Erich Mielke. A German career . Rowohlt, Berlin 1991, ISBN 3871340146 , pp. 215f.
  5. ^ Jochen von Lang: Erich Mielke. A German career . Rowohlt, Berlin 1991, ISBN 3871340146 , p. 37; quoted after Wilfriede Otto: Erich Mielke - biography. The rise and fall of a chekist. K. Dietz, Berlin 2000, p. 38.
  6. Götz Aly: Power - Spirit - Wahn. Continuities of German Thought. Argon, Berlin 1997, p. 13.
  7. Wilfriede Otto: Erich Mielke - biography. The rise and fall of a chekist. K. Dietz, Berlin 2000, pp. 38-40.
  8. a b Wilfriede Otto: Erich Mielke - biography. The rise and fall of a chekist. K. Dietz, Berlin 2000, p. 41.
  9. Wilfriede Otto: Erich Mielke - biography. The rise and fall of a chekist. K. Dietz, Berlin 2000, p. 49.
  10. Wilfriede Otto: Erich Mielke - biography. The rise and fall of a chekist. K. Dietz, Berlin 2000, pp. 41-43.
  11. ^ Stricker, p. 100, with facsimile of the rejection.
  12. a b Martin Schönfeld: Memorial plaques in West Berlin . Active Museum Fascism and Resistance in Berlin eV, Berlin 1993, p. 15f.