Murders on Bülowplatz
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The murders on Bülowplatz were a crime in the final phase of the Weimar Republic . The later Minister for State Security of the GDR , Erich Mielke , and his accomplice Erich Ziemer shot dead the two police officers Paul Anlauf and Franz Lenck on August 9, 1931 on Bülowplatz in Berlin . The act is considered revenge for the KPD sympathizer Fritz Auge who was shot by the police the day before in a scuffle.
History and mission
In Berlin, the political struggle had intensified in the run-up to the referendum on August 9, 1931, to dissolve the Prussian state parliament, which was supported by the KPD . After the 19-year-old plumber Fritz Auge was shot dead by the police in a scuffle during the repeated evacuation of Bülowplatz in the immediate vicinity of the KPD party headquarters, the KPD members of the Reichstag planned - according to later statements by those involved Hans Kippenberger and Heinz Neumann in the back room of a pub together with the head of the party self-protection in Berlin-Wedding , Michael Klause , the shooting of the officer of the Prussian police and head of the Revierwache 7, Paul Anlauf.
Klause found Erich Mielke and Erich Ziemer, two volunteers as shooters, on Kippenberger's behalf .
The planned action was also supported by Walter Ulbricht , at that time the political leader of the KPD district Berlin-Brandenburg - Lausitz - Grenzmark . On August 2nd, he had disgraced MPs Kippenberger and Neumann and called for them to "shoot the police in the head" shortly.
Sequence of events
On the evening of August 9, 1931 at around 7 p.m. (other sources state the time around 8 p.m.) were Captain Paul Anlauf (born April 9, 1882), Captain Franz Lenck (born May 20, 1892) from the trade field service and the police Oberwachtmeister August willingly strip transition from the ground station 7 in the Hankenstraße by the Weydingerstraße direction Karl Liebknecht house . Once there, they met the police sergeant major Burkert. He advised them to have the Bülowplatz cleared, as the atmosphere of the approximately 1,000 people on the square was very aggressive and heated.
The three officers then went back through Weydingerstrasse towards Hankestrasse. Mielke and Ziemer, who had probably been hiding in a house entrance until then, now approached the officers very quickly from behind. In Weydingerstraße, which runs towards the Babylon cinema, they briefly discussed their plans for the crime directly behind the officials. Willig noticed this and wanted to pull his pistol 08 out of its holster and turn to face the assassins. At that moment, the perpetrators fired at least six times at their victims from behind from a distance of about four to five meters. Anlauf was shot in the head and died immediately. Lenck was hit in the back, dragged himself into the entrance of the Babylon cinema with his gun drawn, and died a little later on the way to the rescue center. Willing, briefly collapsed, was able to sit up again and empty the entire magazine of his service weapon at bystanders who were not involved. He survived with a stomach shot and hand injury.
The police forces in front of the Karl-Liebknecht-Haus - meanwhile in a panic - now believed in a large-scale attack and shot at random passers-by. After reinforcements arrived, Bülowplatz was almost deserted, and police officers were still firing at what were supposed to be snipers. Surrounding houses were searched, as were visitors to the Babylon cinema.
Mielke and Ziemer managed to escape.
The offender
The perpetrators who shot at the police officers belonged to the party self-protection of the KPD (PSS), a paramilitary organized and armed group within the party. The shooters were the later Minister for State Security in the German Democratic Republic Erich Mielke and Erich Ziemer. With the help of their party, both fled to Moscow via Rostock and Leningrad . The order to murder came from the Communist Reichstag representative and head of the KPD's military apparatus, Hans Kippenberger. The main political responsible person was Heinz Neumann, at that time number two in the KPD after Ernst Thälmann . The instructed Michael Klause asked for two volunteers (Mielke and Ziemer) and put five armed stewards as rearguard and several unarmed initiates to block the way of possible persecutors such as the police. In addition, Klause did not participate in the execution.
To this day it has not been completely clarified whether a third assassin was involved in the execution of the crime, who is said to have not fired any shots from his pistol.
Prosecution in the Weimar Republic
On August 9, 1931, several houses on Bülowplatz were searched, including the Karl Liebknecht House, which was sealed off at around 11 p.m. and occupied by the police at 5 a.m. the following day. It made personal findings , a KPD personnel file and the latest issue of Red Flag were seized.
The only possible suspect that the political police were able to identify at the time was Max Thunert, who was discovered by the police sitting in a rain barrel on August 9th at Bülowplatz and who had stated that he was only hiding there for fear of being shot by the police. At that time, no direct involvement in the crime could be proven.
Persecution of the deed in the time of National Socialism
After the National Socialists came to power in 1933, so far unsolved cases of so-called red murders were handed over to the murder commission of the Berlin criminal police under Ernst Gennat . Both weapons that Mielke and Ziemer had thrown over a fence on their escape in the direction of the Volksbühne could be found. Thunert was interrogated again by Gennat. Now he admitted that he had been involved, but denied having shot himself and seriously incriminated Max Matern as the alleged client. On April 23, 1933, the Berlin Regional Court issued arrest warrants against Mielke and Ziemer.
After Klause's arrest by the National Socialists on July 17, 1933, he was mistreated by the SA and was supposed to testify as a key witness in the Bülowplatz trial. In the course of the investigation, Max Matern, Friedrich Broede , Albert Kuntz and Erich Wichert were also interrogated. In addition to Matern and Broede, Klause was sentenced to death on June 19, 1934 by the jury court I at the Berlin regional court, presided over by the regional court director Walter Böhmert, for "joint murder and favoritism". A pardon to Adolf Hitler led to the conversion of Klause's death sentence into a life imprisonment . In a later trial, Kuntz and Wichert were sentenced to prison or protective custody for high treason .
1947: Arrest warrant against Erich Mielke
On February 7, 1947, the Berlin-Mitte district court issued an arrest warrant against Erich Mielke (not against Erich Ziemer, who had died in Spain in 1937) for the double murder of the police officers Anlauf and Lenck. At the instigation of the SED , the arrest warrant was suspended and the Soviet occupying power confiscated the procedural files.
In West Berlin , the arrest warrant for Mielke remained in force.
Consideration of the fact in the GDR
In volume four of the eight-volume edition of the history of the German workers 'movement , the chairman of the authors' collective was none other than Walter Ulbricht, Neumann and Kippenberger alone were held responsible for the police murders on Berlin's Bülowplatz, who were murdered in 1937 as part of the Stalinist purges in the Soviet Union . In the exercise of individual terror , which is incompatible with membership in the KPD and contradicts the Marxist-Leninist views of the class struggle , they committed an anti-party act and in August 1931 the shooting of two police officers who were hated by the workers because of their brutality organized. This happened behind the back of the party leadership and the Berlin district leadership. The party leadership and the Berlin district leadership were completely surprised by the incident.
Wichert, who survived imprisonment and was a high-ranking officer of the Ministry for State Security after the Second World War , later stated in his handwritten résumé that Matern had taken the blame in the process and thus the accomplices Wilhelm Peschky and Wilhelm Becker who were involved in the action , Herbert Dobersalske, Paul Kähne and Karl Holstein made the escape from Germany possible.
Prosecution in the Federal Republic of Germany
Erich Mielke was founded in 1993 by the Berlin District Court for the murder of the two police officers to a term of imprisonment convicted of six years. He was aged 88 years at the end of 1995 probation dismissed.
Individual evidence
- ^ John O. Koehler : Stasi. The untold story of the East German Secret Police , Boulder Colorado USA 1999, p. 36.
- ↑ BGH 5 StR 434/94 - judgment of March 10, 1995 (LG Berlin)
- ↑ By Lang, Jochen: Erich Mielke. A German career Rowohlt, Reinbek, 1993, pp. 23-26, 219.
- ^ John O. Koehler: Stasi. The untold story of the East German Secret Police , Boulder Colorado USA 1999, pages 41 and 42.
- ↑ Wilfriede Otto : Erich Mielke - biography. The rise and fall of a chekist , K. Dietz, Berlin, 2000, p. 49.
literature
- Michael Stricker: Last deployment. Police officers killed on duty in Berlin from 1918 to 2010 (= series of publications by the German Society for Police History, Volume 11). Verlag für Polizeiwissenschaft, Frankfurt 2010, ISBN 978-3-86676-141-4 , pp. 63-106.
- Zank, Wolfgang: Murder on Bülowplatz , in: Die Zeit , August 16, 1991, No. 34.
Web links
Coordinates: 52 ° 31 '33.9 " N , 13 ° 24' 40.9" E