Otto Marloh

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Otto Marloh (born August 1, 1893 in Hildesheim ; † March 20, 1964 there ) was a German officer and civil servant . He became widely known as a defendant for the mass shooting of Republican sailors (1919) and for involvement in the Holocaust (1949).

Life and activity

After graduating from high school in 1912, Marloh, the son of a Hildesheim teacher, decided to become a professional soldier and joined the imperial army as a flag junior. From 1914 to 1917 he took part in the First World War, in which he was wounded several times. After the war he joined the Freikorps Reinhard of the later SS-Obergruppenführer Wilhelm Reinhard .

During the November Revolution in Berlin in the first months after the war, Lieutenant Marloh was commissioned by Colonel Wilhelm Reinhard to prevent an appeal for wages from the republican People's Navy Division, which was in the process of being dissolved, in the wake of the order to shoot by Reichswehr Minister Gustav Noske (SPD) on March 9, 1919 . The stipulation was "to make extensive use of the weapon". Marloh then selected every tenth of the soldiers who came together to be shot, one of whom survived the massacre. “They were fired at for minutes and the screaming and wailing that came up to us was appalling. Even a sergeant in the government forces ... tears came to their eyes. He said that he had fought on all fronts and had experienced a lot of terrible things, but he would not give himself up to such an executioner's work. "

Marloh successfully invoked the Noske shooting order and was acquitted of the manslaughter charge. The court had dismissed murder as an offense in advance. The verdict on the "Sailor murder in the Französische Strasse 32" was sharply criticized by the democratic media. In the grounds of the judgment it was stated that the shootings were "objectively unjustified", that the victims who had come with weapons had valid gun licenses, that "there were no looters present" and that Marloh's situation did not entitle him to use weapons. The court believed that he had believed that the Noske order was a valid service order.

Well-known voices such as Kurt Tucholsky , George Grosz , Harry Graf Kessler and Erich Mühsam (see below) were part of the response to the trial and judgment .

In 1925, Marloh entered the Stahlhelm . Since 1930 he was a member of the NSDAP . At a time that has not yet been determined, he also joined the Sturmabteilung (SA), the party army of the NSDAP, in which he also took on official duties from at least 1932 to 1934 - when he was a staff leader for a formation in Unterholstein.

In the wake of the Röhm putsch in the summer of 1934, which also fell victim to Marloh's accomplice in the counterrevolutionary shootings of 1919, Eugen von Kessel , Marloh was also erroneously reported abroad as having been murdered as part of the action.

In fact, Marloh remained unmolested and was appointed head of the prison in Celle in 1934, which he remained until 1939. In 1941 he took over the management of the prison in Gollnow .

From 1942 until the collapse of National Socialism he was provisional district administrator for the Wittgenstein district . In this function he tried to get the residents of the district categorized as " Gypsies " deported . At the beginning of March 1943, he headed the selection conference in the district town of Berleburg , with which the final step towards local deportation to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp was prepared. The conference excessively disregarded the underlying Auschwitz decree . 134 people, about half of them children, the youngest three months old, were deported. Nine of them survived.

In the last days of the war, Marloh gave the order to kill a US aviator that had jumped off (which was not carried out by the person in charge of this) before he went to a safe and well-equipped hiding place to roll over with other leading regional National Socialists from the front allow.

After the end of the Nazi regime, Marloh was arrested and interned by the British military government as charged with Nazi charges . It is said that during the internment he kept the following remark in his mouth: “We will not let us get down, whatever they do to us!” In 1949 he was allowed to commit crimes against humanity in the course of the “Berleburger Gypsy Trial” of the indictment have been found guilty and sentenced to four years in prison. The sentence was not served for health reasons. The legal costs were waived for Marloh because of alleged poverty. There had been a strong movement in the region against the proceedings against him and his co-defendants, headed by the Evangelical Reformed church community. They called for acquittals because they believed the accused were innocent. Any convictions considered these voices wrong. One of the exonerations that Marloh brought into the process was a letter from the national socialist artist Erich Klahn , a friend of Celle. He justified his support for Marloh with his "extraordinarily honest disposition and his outstanding masculine demeanor". M. have an "incorruptible character" and strive for "consciously a clear and uncompromising order among people, between international communities and states". He had “done exemplary things for his fatherland” and was “inviolable as a person”.

Marloh died in his native Hildesheim in 1964.

Contemporary voices on the 1919 trial

  • George Grosz in the title of M .: "What a swastika knight wants to become, ... practices with times" (1919/20)
  • Harry Graf Kessler : M. is a "murderous jointed doll" and "horrible caricature of Prussian militarism", the act an "unnatural inhumanity that can only arouse the utmost disgust". (Diary, 1919)
  • Erich Mühsam : “After the murderers of Liebknecht and Luxemburg were partly acquitted in a court farce, partly pseudo-punishments, after Mr Vogel ran off to Holland with the help of his“ judges ”, one now has the main culprit in the murder of the 32 sailors in the After having been allowed to enjoy his freedom for months, let him escape from the Französische Strasse. ”(Diaries, Ebrach prison, June 12, 1919)
“The victims of the white horror have increased enormously in the course of the year without the murderers having done anything bad. The trials against Marloh and his few murder companions, which were brought to justice in order to provoke the people through acquittals or silly sham judgments, are freshly remembered. ”(Diaries, January 14, 1920)
  • Kurt Tucholsky , process observer / meeting participant: "Incredible rawness" (see also: "Christmas", [2] , "Marloh process", [3] )

literature

  • Heinrich Hannover : Political Justice 1916-1933 , Frankfurt am Main 1966
  • Friedrich Karl Kaul , justice becomes a crime. The Pitaval of the Weimar Republic, Berlin (GDR) 1953, pp. 11–49
  • Dieter Noll , twenty-nine red sailors. Lieutenant Marloh, in: Structure. Kulturpolitische Monatsschrift, Vol. 10, H. 1, pp. 253–260
  • Ulrich Friedrich Opfermann : Siegerland and Wittgenstein under National Socialism. People, data, literature. A handbook on regional contemporary history (= Siegen contributions, special volume 2001), Siegen 2000
  • Rikarde Riedesel / Johannes Burkardt / Ulf Lückel (eds.): Bad Berleburg - Die Stadtgeschichte , Bad Berleburg 2009
  • LG Siegen, March 9, 1949 . In: Justice and Nazi crimes . Collection of German criminal judgments for Nazi homicides 1945–1966, Vol. IV, edited by Adelheid L Rüter-Ehlermann, CF Rüter . Amsterdam: University Press, 1970, No. 127, pp. 309–327 Trial of Otto Marloh for crimes against humanity. Four years in prison.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Dieter Noll , Twenty-Nine Red Sailors. Lieutenant Marloh, in: Structure. Kulturpolitische Monatsschrift, Vol. 10, H. 1, pp. 253–260, here: p. 253.
  2. ^ Friedrich Karl Kaul, Justice Becomes a Crime, Berlin (GDR) 1953, p. 17.
  3. ↑ Andreas Wirsching, From World War to Civil War? Political extremism in Germany and France 1918–1933 / 39, Munich 1999, p. 130. Mostly in the literature as a "brigade", deviating from the - otherwise apologetic - article in the Munzinger archive: "Regiment", see: [1]
  4. ↑ Gustav Radbruch , Reichstag speeches, Vol. 19, edit. von Volkmar Schöneburg, Julius Gumbel , Heidelberg 1998, p. 150f .; Four years of murder, Berlin 1922, p. 21.
  5. ↑ Volker Ullrich, Die Revolution 1918/19 (Beck's series), Munich 2009.
  6. ^ Heinrich Hannover : Political Justice 1916-1933 . Frankfurt (Main) 1966, p. 43ff.
  7. ↑ Quoted from: Emil Julius Gumbel , Vier Jahre political Mord, Berlin 1922, p. 22. See also: PDF .
  8. ^ Ulrich Friedrich Opfermann: Siegerland and Wittgenstein under National Socialism. People, data, literature. A handbook on regional contemporary history , Siegen 2000, p. 239.
  9. ↑ So in the white book about the shootings of June 30, 1934 , 1934, p. 87 and in newspaper reports.
  10. ↑ Ulrich Friedrich Opfermann, Berleburg im National Socialism, in: Rikarde Riedesel / Johannes Burkardt / Ulf Lückel (eds.), Bad Berleburg - Die Stadtgeschichte, Bad Berleburg 2009, pp. 215–246, here: pp. 223–226.
  11. ↑ Ulrich Friedrich Opfermann, Berleburg in National Socialism, in: Rikarde Riedesel / Johannes Burkardt / Ulf Lückel (eds.), Bad Berleburg - Die Stadtgeschichte, Bad Berleburg 2009, pp. 215–246, here: pp. 238, 246.
  12. ↑ Heinz Strickhausen, Berleburg. A small town in the post-war period, Bad Berleburg 2002, p. 123.
  13. ↑ Ulrich Friedrich Opfermann, Berleburg in National Socialism, in: Rikarde Riedesel / Johannes Burkardt / Ulf Lückel (eds.), Bad Berleburg - Die Stadtgeschichte, Bad Berleburg 2009, pp. 215–246, here: p. 238.
  14. ↑ Regional personal encyclopedia on National Socialism in the old districts of Siegen and Wittgenstein, article Otto Marloh .
  15. ↑ The drawings are printed in: Ulrich Friedrich Opfermann, Genozid und Justiz. Closing the line as "state policy objectives", in: Karola Fings / ders. (Ed.), Gypsy persecution in the Rhineland and Westphalia 1933–1945. History, processing and memory, Paderborn 2012, pp. 315–326, here: p. 323.
  16. ↑ Harry Graf Kessler, Das Tagebuch. Seventh volume. 1919–1923, Stuttgart 2007, p. 283.
  17. ↑ All information according to: Regional dictionary of persons on National Socialism in the old districts of Siegen and Wittgenstein, article Otto Marloh .
predecessor Office successor
Heinrich Jansen District Administrator of the Wittgenstein District
1942–1945 		Sloppy
personal data
SURNAME Marloh, Otto
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German officer and civil servant
DATE OF BIRTH August 1, 1893
PLACE OF BIRTH Hildesheim
DATE OF DEATH March 20, 1964
Place of death Hildesheim