Othmar Toifl

Othmar Toifl (born July 16, 1898 in Herzogenburg , Lower Austria , † July 1, 1934 in Berlin ) was an Austrian news agent. He became known as a spy and as one of the murdered people in the so-called Röhm Putsch .

Life

Youth and First World War

Little is known about Toifl's early career: Toifl was the son of the clerk Heinrich Toifl and a day laborer's daughter. His grandfather was a miller in the Waldviertel. After attending school, Toifl learned the bakery trade from 1913. In October 1917 Toifl was drafted into the Austrian army and assigned to the 21st Rifle Regiment. He spent the time up to the end of the war, however, due to stomach problems only in military hospitals and hospitals, especially in the garrison hospital in Brno . After the end of the war he came to Germany as an Austrian ensign : he worked briefly at a hotel on the Baltic Sea and then - after a temporary unemployment - as a private detective for an insurance company, only to eventually become unemployed again. In the spring of 1919 he finally entered the service of the "Anti-Bolshevik League" and the staff of the Guard Cavalry Rifle Division . At this point he began to earn his living as a spy and agent, a field of activity to which he would subsequently - with interruptions - devote the rest of his life.

On November 17, 1919 Toifl married Ida Helene Ranke († 1975), who came from a Berlin Social Democratic family. The marriage resulted in a daughter, Felicitas (born November 1920), and a son, Lucian (born December 20, 1921). The latter drowned in Mecklenburg in 1932 . As a private citizen, Toifl is portrayed as a mixture of petty bourgeoisie and domestic tyrant: on the one hand, he attached great importance to preserving the external form (meticulously cared for clothes and appearance when the family walks, etc.), on the other hand, he beat his wife and cheated on his children chastised (including with a hippopotamus whip).

Activity as a police spy (1920s)

In connection with his work as a spy / agent of the Anti-Bolshevik League and the Guard Cavalry Rifle Division, the accusation has repeatedly been made that Toifl had participated in various ways in 1919, uprisings and riots by members of left-wing groups - in particular Spartacists and Independent Social Democrats - to provoke in Berlin by mingling with them as supposedly like-minded people and inciting them to take appropriate actions in order to create a pretext for brutal action by police and military forces against the left parties and organizations to which they belonged.

In the first half of the 1920s Toifl worked for the investigative body of the Prussian Main Chamber of Agriculture, for which he was supposed to clear up farm fires. Toifl has been traceable in Berlin-Moabit since 1924, where he received a gun license as an investigative officer in 1925. In the second half of the 1920s he worked for the German land protection service before he became unemployed around 1930. At that time he was also said to have been wanted by the police for attacks on cattle dealers in Mecklenburg.

Assassination of the police spy Karl Blau (1919)

Toifl first drew the attention of the press during the trial of the murder of the police spy Karl Blau, which was tried in 1920 before the District Court II in Berlin:

From the end of 1918 / beginning of 1919, Blau had been an informant for police and military authorities, especially for the Anti-Bolshevik League, in Berlin. After the defeat of the Communist Soviet Republic, which had been established in Bavaria for a short time after the end of the First World War in the spring of 1919, he went to Munich, where he spent a few weeks as an informer for the espionage headquarters of the Oven Munich General Command, one of the military commandos who had taken control of the city, operated in Munich communist circles. Blau’s reports were u. a. forwarded to the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior and various police and military services.

On July 2, 1919, Blau was arrested on the grounds that he had passed a daily order from government troops into the hands of the communists. He was released from prison on July 22nd with the condition that he had to leave Bavaria. He then left for Berlin on July 29, 1919, accompanied by USPD functionary Franz Herm and two other men from Munich. At that time, Herm and other left-wing people were said to have had plans to kill Blau, who was recognized as a spy.

On the evening of August 1, 1919, Blau attended a communist meeting in Berlin, probably together with Herm. On this occasion he was accused of being a spy by the Communists present. In particular, a certain Franz Stolz - who was later identified as a police spy himself - confirmed that Blau was a spy when Blau, who knew him from his previous intercourse in Berlin's left-wing circles, asked him to speak in his favor. At this point, at the latest, some of the Communists present had plans to kill Blau. With reference to pride, it was later assumed that this blue, since he had become unpopular with his clients (allegedly because he had developed sympathy for the communists), had deliberately delivered the communists to the knife in order to kill two birds with one slap: on the one hand to get rid of an unpleasant and unreliable informant. And at the same time in this way another communist act of horror was supposed to have been triggered, which they wanted to use to fill the press with new alarming reports about communist atrocities in order to turn the public against the communist movement and ideology.

On the evening of August 2, 1919, several communists - namely the innkeeper Max Fichtmann and Erwin Hoppe as well as a few other unidentified men - lured Blau into the apartment of Willi Winkler (a childhood friend of Hoppe) at Großbeerenstraße 20. There, in the course of the In the evening a glass of wine mixed with morphine was given to drink. After Blau fell asleep, he was strangled with a noose. The morphine for anesthetizing the victim was made available to the men in Winkler's apartment on the same evening by a person who had remained unidentified. The body of Blau was wrapped in a blanket by the three men soon after his death and thrown into the Landwehr Canal, from which it was recovered on August 7, 1919. After Blau's body was found, a homicide squad was set up at the police headquarters on Alexanderplatz, which offered a reward of 5000 RM for clues that would lead to the investigation of the case. Fichtmann, Hoppe and Winkler were identified as suspects within a few days.

A preliminary investigation of almost ten months followed before the main proceedings for the murder of Blau at the jury court at Regional Court II in Berlin opened on June 7, 1920 ("criminal case against Fichtmann and comrades for the murder of inspector Blau"). Fichtmann and Hoppe were charged with deliberately killing Karl Blau together with other people and carrying out this killing with deliberation. Winkler was charged with knowingly assisting the accused in the commission of the crime. The trial lasted from June 24 to July 5, 1920. Theodor Liebknecht , Kurt Rosenfeld and Siegfried Weinberg acted as defense counsel for the defendants . These took the line that the accused had been manipulated into their act by right-wing police circles or by informers acting on behalf of such police circles. This was supported by indications that indicated that Blau's companion Franz Herm smuggled him from Munich to Berlin with the aim (or the assignment) of putting him there in a situation of bringing about his death there. Othmar Toifl acted as a witness in this process: He declared that he found Fichtmann in his inn the day after the crime and found him pale and disturbed. Toifl himself was identified by the defendants' defense lawyers and the left-wing press as a police spy and suspected of having been involved in the machinations that had led to Blaus's assassination and to have helped to manipulate the communists into their actions For example, on behalf of unidentified backers, to get rid of an unwelcome informer colleague - who was suspected of playing a double game - and at the same time to create an incident with this murder committed by communist hands, which one in the political opinion struggle of the population against the political left could present. In their plea, the defense lawyers put it as follows:

"They staged a torrent; pushed the annoying blue towards the communists as prey; they wanted to let them carry out a judgment that one had made themselves. Then you had two at once: you got rid of the blue and had new com - munist atrocities! ” .

Toifl was suspected by the defense attorneys to have been the unidentified person involved who had brought the perpetrators to the morphine to anesthetize blue on the evening of August 2, but he denied this in his testimony.

By the judgment announced on July 30, 1920, Erwin Hoppe was sentenced to six years in prison for aiding and abetting manslaughter and Willi Winkler to three years in prison for aiding and abetting manslaughter. Max Fichtmann was acquitted for lack of evidence.

The extensive coverage of the blue trial in the left press meant that Toifl was publicly exposed as a lure spy. He was listed as such in the communist spy almanac in 1924 . Due to this decuviation, Toifl's family is said to have moved constantly in the following years for fear of being stalked by political opponents.

Assault on the Orlowsky diamond dealer (1919)

On July 31, 1919 Toifl participated in the attack by a group of communists on a diamond dealer Orlowsky, which served to raise funds for the propaganda work of the KPD: For this purpose three communists disguised as members of the Reichswehr lurked - the innkeeper Max Fichtmann, Manske and Toifl - Orlowsky on his way home from his shop at the whey market. The plan was to "arrest" Orlowsky (who used to carry large sums of cash and diamonds on his way home), pretending that they were an official patrol, and take him to an undetected location to rob him. The "patrol" succeeded when their leader Toifl appeared, and Orlowsky and a companion (one of the Communist sympathizers) to provide. They arrested him on the pretext that he was suspected of having illegal weapons. They escorted both of them to the Jannowitzbrücke station, from where they took the train to the Hirschgarten station. Then it went on foot to the Chaussee to Friedrichshagen, where they searched Orlowsky for an agreed sign and took his wallet: They looted 1990-2000 marks. A little later, Orlowsky managed to escape his arrest, where he suffered a severe head wound from a blow with a rifle butt. Toifl, Fichtmann, Manske and two other participants (Woldi and Jenzen) shared the booty among themselves, the first receiving 450 marks each and the last two each receiving 300. Each of them then paid 50 RM into the KPD's propaganda fund.

The following day, Toifl filed a complaint with the Reichswehr through a liaison officer about the incident: In the subsequent trial before the extraordinary court martial of Regional Court II in Berlin, which took place in October 1919, Toifl appeared as a witness. The court, which rated the act as "attempted robbery of the most dangerous kind" with the conscious acceptance of the loss of a human life, Fichtmann was sentenced to five years in prison for attempted extortion and ten years for attempted murder. Both sentences were combined into a total sentence of twelve years. Manske received two years and six months in prison, with his youth and immaturity as well as apparent repentance credited to him. No charges were brought against Toifl after he identified himself as a "government agent2" and stated that he had been forced by the Communists to take part in the attack on Orlowsky and that he was therefore "forced" to participate in the operation to avoid suspicion aroused and exposed as a government agent. Due to this "situation", Toifls had been refrained from "in the absence of justified suspicion of criminal participation in the prosecution".

Involvement in the Herbert Norkus case (1932)

Politically, Toifl joined the Nazi movement at the beginning of the 1930s: On September 1, 1930, he joined the NSDAP (membership number 312.782).

After the suppression of the so-called Stennes revolt , an uprising by parts of the Berlin SA against the leadership of Adolf Hitler, parts of the Berlin NSDAP and SA split under the leadership of the deposed Berlin SA chief Walter Stennes as the "National Socialist Combat Group of Germany" (NSKD) from the NSDAP. A relatively large group from this split was concentrated in Berlin's Beussel-Kiez. Toifl also belonged to this group in 1931 and 1932 - at least externally. In the research it is assumed that he acted as an informer for the Berlin SS intelligence service among the Stennes supporters in the Beussel neighborhood at the latest since the end of 1931, although he was either on behalf of the Berlin SS chief Kurt Daluege or on his own initiative in the sense of Daluege, acted. For a corresponding operation speaks u. a. a letter from Daluege from 1934, in which he writes that Toifl had been secretly active in the intelligence service since July 1931 for Heinrich Himmler and since October 1931 for him, Daluege, and SS Section III / SS Group East.

During the trial of the death of the Hitler boy Herbert Norkus , who was fatally injured by members of the Hitler Youth on January 24, 1932 when a Communist attacked a leaflet distribution campaign, Toifl stood as a witness against the four because of Norkus' death accused communists and six accused Stennes supporters. The Stennes people from Beussel-Kiez were involved in this incident, which outwardly had been a clash between KPD and NSDAP supporters, because on the evening of January 23, 1932, they told the Communists about the upcoming advertising undertaking by the Hitler boys Acknowledged and encouraged them to break it up by force. Toifl also testified that members of the Stennes group held an alcoholic victory celebration with the communists after the crime, and that Stennes staff had drawn up murder lists with the names of political opponents and prepared violent attacks on SA units. He also accused Stennes' staff leader Herbert Jantzon of being a police spy. According to Toifl, he acquired the relevant knowledge due to his presence in the meeting room of the Stennes supporters on the day in question or due to work in the office of the Stennes staff at that time.

In the communist press, which reported on the Norkus trial, Toifl was described as a NSDAP lure who had been smuggled into the Stennes group and who, together with the Stennes employee Gundel, targeted the attack of January 24, 1932 through manipulation and intrigue with the intention that this could lead to injuries and deaths in order to discredit the communists in public in this way and so the recent killing of two communists by SA people in an SA attack on the arbor colony Felseneck from the consciousness of the population through a new bloody act, in which now instead of the SA the murderers and the communists the victims, the communists the perpetrators and the Nazis the victims. For example, the headline of a relevant article said: “Ugh, the Toifl. The sensational background of the Norkus trial ”.

In the August 1932 settlement of the Greater Berlin Gau, Toifl was nevertheless deregistered from the NSDAP on the grounds that he was a Stennes supporter and then deleted from the Reich index as excluded. Toifl himself claimed in 1933 that this was done on the orders of Himmler. It is unclear whether Himmler actually thought he was a Stennes supporter or whether he knew of Toifls' work for Daluege and only made this accusation as a pretext to take action against him for other reasons.

Further activity until 1933

In the course of 1931 Toifl took over the management of Dalueges's personal intelligence service as a confidante: From then on, he provided the SS leader with information about communists, social democrats and center people. Toifl allegedly led his intelligence work from a front company located in Bahnstrasse 24 (today's Crellestrasse) in Berlin-Schöneberg , which operated under the name of "Ingenieur-Büro-Berthold" (or Berthhold). Walther Hofer quotes a letter from Daluege according to which the secret service work that Toifl carried out on Daluege's behalf for the NSDAP in general and the SS in particular dragged on from October 1931 to summer 1933.

Activity from 1933 to 1934

After the National Socialists came to power , Toifl's news office is said to have increasingly started collecting news about high-ranking figures of the NSDAP such as Reinhard Heydrich . For the spring of 1933 Toifl is also associated with the fire in the Reichstag, in which, according to some sources, he was involved as a "technician" on Dalueges staff. However, this view is extremely controversial and is decidedly rejected by other authors.

In the summer or autumn of 1933, through Daluege's mediation, Toifl received a position as a trainee detective with the Gestapo .

Also through Daluege's mediation, Toifl received a position in 1934 in the Columbiahaus , the Berlin concentration camp of the SS, in which - despite his rather low SS rank - he temporarily served as the de facto commandant of the guards. At the time, the Columbiahaus was notorious as a brutal torture site where prisoners were subjected to severe abuse (blows with a stick, stake bandages, etc.). Eugen Kogon wrote about this in his book Der SS-Staat that “probably the worst atrocities [were] perpetrated in this camp that human imagination can imagine”. The first head of the Gestapo, Rudolf Diels, confirmed this description of the situation in his memoirs, expressing himself specifically with regard to Toifl, about whose alleged role as chief torturer he wrote:

“The most inadequate place was the Columbiahaus. In terms of the system of tortures, it surpassed the SA's torture caves. It was a completely independent domain of the SS. Only gradually did we hear rumors about the true nature of this enterprise. As if to symbolize, a man named Toifl was the leader. He had gained his dominant position by nothing but zeal and sadism . Eliminating all levels and ranks, those in these hell quarters ruled those who were not only able to impress victims under the greatest physical pressure here, but also deeply impress their cronies with their unrestrainedness. "

The surviving judgments about Toifl and his activities are largely devastating: Hans Bernd Gisevius, who was employed in the Secret State Police and the Reich Ministry of the Interior from 1933 to 1935, described Toifl as a man “who was certainly a devil”: “Previously convicted, bloodthirsty, smeary […] one of the most depraved [from the intelligence service milieu] ”.

assassination

On July 1, 1934, Toifl was shot in the course of the Röhm affair . Allegedly SS-Scharführer Berger is said to have lured him to a nightly meeting in Bülowstrasse . A few hours later, his body is said to have been thrown from a moving car in Herthastrasse in Grunewald. Gisevius states that Toifl was in hiding on June 30th, but then came home that evening, where he received a call from the State Police Office to come to the office immediately, they had an urgent assignment for him. Whether Gisevius' assertion that Daluege was indignant about Toifl's murder is correct can no longer be clearly clarified. It is certain that Toifl's body was picked up on July 1st by Ernst Otto, a laboratory technician at the morgue in Hannoversche Strasse, on behalf of the SS in Herthastrasse. According to Otto's information from the post-war period, he found a pool of blood at the point on Herthastrasse to which the dispatch was made, roughly in the middle of the street. From this a bloody dragging trace led to a thorn bush at the roadside, under which Toifl's body, guarded by several SS members, was lying. When he was rescuing the dead man, Otto found at least one gunshot wound in Toifl's back. He then transferred the body to Hannoversche Strasse, where it - unseen and unsecured - was locked up in a corpse cell in the cellar of the house until a few days later it was picked up by an SS truck and taken to the Wedding crematorium for cremation .

Toifl's surviving dependents, his wife and daughter, received a monthly pension from April 1935 at Heinrich Himmler's instigation "for reasons of equity".

The motive for Toifl's murder has not yet been clarified with absolute certainty: Representatives of the thesis that the Reichstag fire in February 1933 was started by the National Socialists, like Walter Hofer and Edouard Calic , repeatedly claimed that Toifl was a technical expert on the alleged arson company involved and was liquidated on the occasion of June 30th as an “inconvenient confidante”. In contrast, Uwe Backes referred to a message from Toifl's widow Helene from 1967 that her husband had "let out something about Heydrich's supposedly non-Aryan descent". It fits in with the fact that Toifl received two letters from June 1934 in which he asked Daluege for an interview because he had something "important" to tell him. In Toifl's party personnel sheet there is also the underlined reference “Stennes supporter!”, Which suggests that Toifl could have been suspected of being a supporter of Walther Stennes even at the time of his murder .

Archival material

• Files on the blue trial, in: Landesarchiv Berlin: A. Rep. 358-01, No. 386, Vol. 1–12
• Files relating to the proceedings against Stolt u. a. because of the murder of the Hitler Youth Norkus, in: Landesarchiv Berlin A Rep. 358-01, No. 9.
• Federal Archives Berlin: BDC personal files for Toifl and ZfB 7131 A.5

literature

• Frank Flechtmann: “Casanova, Vidoq, Toifl, Mauss. A contribution to the cultural history of the spy ”, in: History. Politics and their didactics , 1998, volume 3/4.
• Alexander Harder : Kriminalzentrale Werderscher Markt. The history of the "German Scotland Yard" , Bayreuth 1963.
• Joseph Roth : MPA The Communist Trial. Names and fates , in: Joseph Roth: Unter dem Bülowbogen, Prosa zur Zeit , Cologne 1994, p. 85f. (Section "The Spy") (Court report originally published in the Neue Berliner Zeitung on July 3, 1920)
• Eduard Trautner : The murder of the police agent Blau , Berlin 1924 (= outsider of society, volume 3).
• Bernhard Sauer : Othmar Toifl (1898–1934). Kurt Dalueges mysterious news man , in: Zeitschrift für Geschichtswwissenschaft 64, 2016, pp. 833–853 ( digitized version ).

Individual evidence

1. ^ A roommate belonging to the Stennes group of one of the Hitler boys who took part in the leaflet campaign, a certain Rudolf Gundel, had his sympathetic friends on the evening of January 23, 1932 at a meeting in the local pub of the Stennes people in the Beussel-Kiez, the pub in Schulze in Beusselstrasse 44. One of those present, who was hostile to one of the HJ people involved (Mondt), then expressed the wish to wipe out the Hitler boy by thwarting the action and letting those involved miss a rub: one was sent for this purpose Boten went to the Marx pub in Oldenburger Strasse, where many communists frequented, and informed them (especially the local KPD leader Georg Stolt) about the imminent Hitler Youth venture. Equipped with this knowledge, a group of about fifty Communists was able to surprise the Hitler Youth during their action the following morning.
2. ↑ Gisevius: Ende, 1960, p. 179 claims that Toifl became known to him in 1933 as a member of the SS intelligence service. However, I attribute him to Heydrich's employees and not to Daluege.
3. ↑ Walther Hofer: Der Reichstagbrand , 1978, p. 328.
4. ↑ In a letter of recommendation to the Gestapo chief Rudolf Diels at the time , Daluege praised Toifl as one of his “most capable communications officers”.
5. ^ Rudolf Diels: Lucifer ante Portas , 1950, p. 256.
6. ^ ^{A b} Gisevius: Until the bitter end , 1960, p. 179. Gisevius, however, attributes him to Heydrich's employees.
7. ↑ Uwe Backes: Reichstag fire, Enlightenment of a historical legend , 1986, p. 279.
8. ↑ Bernhard Sauer: Black Reichswehr and Fememorde: a milieu study on right-wing radicalism in the Weimar Republic , 2004, p. 296.