Max Vogel (SA member)

Maximilian "Max" Vogel (born July 18, 1908 in Munich ; † July 1, 1934 in the Dachau concentration camp ) was a German SA leader and one of the victims of the so-called Röhm Putsch .

Life

Vogel was a son of Georg Vogel (1879–1938) and his wife Luise, nee. Fischer (1881-1947). After attending school, Vogel was trained as a mechanic. On August 9, 1929, he was sentenced to one month in prison for theft. However, the sentence was suspended.

At the end of the 1920s, Vogel joined the NSDAP and the SA. Since 1932 at the latest, probably since the end of 1930 or 1931, he was part of Ernst Röhm's staff , for whom he worked as a chauffeur and mechanic. According to the Hitler biographer John Toland , Vogel was a cousin of Röhm. In the SA he had achieved the rank of storm leader in September 1932.

In the spring of 1933, Vogel was noticed by the party leadership because of a violent assault against a personal enemy within the NSDAP: On the night of March 9-10, 1933, he was made available to several members of the SA staff in the SA headquarters in Munich. The reason he gave was that he had to search the apartment of a union secretary in Neuhausen in order to confiscate SPD material there and arrest the secretary. Julius Uhl then gave Vogel the SA squad leaders Eggert, Höfl and Lechhart as well as two people from SA storm 10 / L. Vogel and this escort team reached the house of the alleged union secretary at Lechelstrasse 36 in Munich-Moosach at around 3 a.m. After the man was called out into the street, Vogel instructed his companions to assault him physically. Among other things, rifle butts were used for this.

The victim was Josef Jegg, a member of the NSDAP. Jegg had to be taken to the Schwabing hospital injured. The background to the attack was apparently a personal dispute. The NSDAP local group leader Andreas Markl thereupon requested "in the interests of the cleanliness of the movement and our jurisdiction, the immediate arrest of the bird". In addition, Röhm's adjutant Hans Erwin von Spreti-Weilbach , the NSDAP treasurer Franz Xaver Schwarz and Reinhard Heydrich , then head of the Bavarian Political Police , were turned on. An investigation by the Party Supreme Court came to the conclusion that the attack on Jegg, with whose daughter Vogel had a relationship and in which he occasionally suspected items such as car fuel as an act of revenge, was based on family and party political factors would have. Apparently, Vogel was not arrested. An “immediate exclusion” of Vogels from the NSDAP and the SA, which was demanded by the Bavarian Political Police in a letter dated April 29 to the party's investigative and arbitration committee, evidently did not materialize either. Vogel remained in Röhm's service and was promoted to Obersturmführer on March 1, 1934.

On June 30, 1934, Vogel was arrested in Bad Wiessee and taken to the Stadelheim prison in Munich. It is not entirely clear whether he, like Röhm, was arrested in the Pension Hanselbauer or - this description can be found in the Hitler biography of John Toland - was picked up by Hitler's chauffeur Erich Kempka from a neighboring pension. In contrast to the cliché that the people around Röhm consisted exclusively of homosexuals who were "caught" in bed with other men on June 30th, he is said to have been found in bed with a young woman. On July 1, after Röhm's murder by Theodor Eicke and Michel Lippert , Vogel was transferred to the Dachau concentration camp together with three other SA members ( Edmund Paul Neumayer , Erich Schiewek and Hans Schweighart ) and shot there in the early evening by an execution squad.

According to the historian Louis Leo Snyder , the order to shoot came from Hitler himself, who, according to Snyder, had originally ordered Vogel to be shot first and to inform Röhm about this in order to make him aware of the hopelessness of his situation and thus the pressure To commit suicide amplify. Why, if this claim is true at all, that Vogel was only shot after Röhm was shot, can no longer be determined. In his study on the Munich victims of the Röhm affair, Wolfram Selig recently took the view that Vogel was one of the people murdered between June 30 and July 2, 1934, whose "only crime it was probably" was , "That they belonged to the inner circle around Röhm".

On the night of July 2 to 3, 1934, Vogel's body was taken to the crematorium of Munich's Ostfriedhof and burned there. Vogel was posthumously expelled from the SA in October 1934.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Life data according to Günther Kimmel: "The Dachau Concentration Camp. A Study of the National Socialist Violent Crimes", in: Martin Broszat (Hrsg.): Bavaria in the Nazi era. Dominance and Society in Conflict , Vol. 2, Munich 1979, p. 366.
2. ↑ John Toland: Adolf Hitler , 1976, p. 339.
3. ↑ See Fuehrer's Order of the Supreme SA Leadership No. II of September 9, 19332, p. 3.
4. ↑ Leader's order of the Supreme SA Leadership No. 23 of March 27, 1934.
5. ↑ John Toland: Adolf Hitler , 1976, p. 339. "While Hitler was discussing what should be done next, Kempka was sent to a nearby pension to apprehend Max Vogel, Rohm's cousin, who also served as his chauffeur. Vogel was in bed with a girl - the only such case such morning. Kempka, a good friend of his fellow chauffeur, apologetically announced he was under arrest. As they went to the garage for the Rohm car, Vogel made a curious last request: could he drive it just once more? Kempka understood and let him make a few slow turns in the driveway as he himself stood on the running board. Just as Kempka and his prisoner got back to the Hanselbauer a truck filled with about forty armed Brownshirts of Röhm's "Headquarters Guards "Arrived from Munich. Their commander was sill locked up in the laundry and they were unhappy about it."
6. ↑ Lothar Gruchmann : Justice in the Third Reich 1933-1940: Adaptation and submission in the Gürtner era , p. 437.
7. ↑ Louis Leo Snyder : Hitler's Elite. Biographical Sketches of Nazis who Shaped the Third Reich , 1989, p. 73.
8. ↑ Selig: "Sacrifice", p. 347.
9. ↑ Selig: "Sacrifice", p. 347.
10. ↑ Leader Order of the Supreme SA Leadership No. 26 of October 31, 1934, p. 4.

literature

• Wolfram Selig : "The victims of the Röhm putsch in Munich", in: Winfried Becker / Werner Chrobak (eds.): State, culture, politics, contributions to the history of Bavaria and Catholicism. Festschrift for Dieter Allbrecht's 65th birthday , Kallmütz 1992, pp. 341–356, especially p. 347.

Archival material

• NSDAP personal card (Federal Archives: holdings PK, film S 50 "Vogel, Martin - Vogel, Richard", pictures 577-582)
• OPG files on Max Vogel, Federal Archives
• SA files on Max Vogel, Federal Archives