Otto Strasser

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Otto Strasser, DSU event 1957

Otto Johann Maximilian Strasser , also Strasser (born September 10, 1897 in Windsheim , Middle Franconia ; † August 27, 1974 in Munich ), was a German National Socialist politician. He also used the pseudonyms "Otto Bostrum", "Ulrich von Hutten", "Michael Geismaier" and the abbreviations "D. G. "and" G. D. “After a short membership in the SPD around 1920, he belonged to the NSDAP from 1925 to 1930 and to the German Social Union from 1956 to 1962 , and from 1931 to 1938 he headed the political fighting organization“ Black Front ”.

Life and Political Work

Career

Strasser joined the Bavarian Army as a 17-year-old war volunteer in August 1914 and was presented by Münchner Illustrierte as the “youngest war volunteer in Bavaria”. During the First World War he was wounded several times and in November 1917 was promoted to lieutenant in the reserve and awarded the Iron Cross, 1st class . During his time in the army he was nicknamed "the red lieutenant" because of his subscription to a social democratic magazine. In 1919, like his brother Gregor Strasser, who was five years older than him, as a member of the Epp Free Corps, he was involved in the suppression of the Munich Soviet Republic . In 2013, Armin Nolzen pointed out in his NDB article about Gregor Strasser that there is no reliable evidence of the brothers' membership in the Freikorps beyond their later self-portrayals. In the same year Otto went to Berlin to study economics .

In 1919 or 1920 he became a member of the MSPD . In resistance to the Kapp Putsch , he led a paramilitary group ("Rote Hundertschaft") in 1920 and resigned from the party in the same year due to dissatisfaction with the behavior of the social democratic party leadership in connection with the breach of the Bielefeld Agreement . After receiving his doctorate in political science in 1921 at the University of Würzburg , he joined the Reich Ministry of Food in Berlin as an assistant officer , where he worked until 1922 or 1923 and then switched to the private sector.

National Socialist activist

As the author of Vorwärts , Germania and Das Gewissen , Strasser advocated the thinking of Arthur Moeller van den Bruck and his “Central European idea of ​​the empire ”. After his brother Gregor moved into the Bavarian state parliament for the NSDAP substitute organization Völkischer Block in the spring of 1924, he became involved in the national movement and wrote numerous political articles. So he wrote under the pseudonym Ulrich von Hutten for the courier for Lower Bavaria.   In the same year his son Paul was born from his first marriage to Maria NN and his second marriage was the Englishwoman Ella Young, nee. Fassbender.

Otto Strasser joined the NSDAP on November 20, 1925 ( membership number 23.918) and together with his brother and Joseph Goebbels built a “left” wing of the party. The Strasser brothers dominated the Berlin party organization and developed an independent ideological profile vis-à-vis the southern German wing of the party around Adolf Hitler. They conceived - initially together with Goebbels, who worked as a close associate of Gregor Strasser in the Rhineland and Westphalia - an anti-capitalist , social revolutionary course for the party. This wing of the NSDAP also partially supported strikes by the social democratic trade unions and advocated the alignment of Germany with the Soviet Union . Nevertheless, the Strasser wing was shaped by anti- Marxism. He regarded Marxism and capitalism equally as "children of liberalism " and turned against the "half-heartedness" of the party leadership under Hitler, only to fight Marxism and the right-wing national bourgeois milieu such as the DNVP and thus the "leading circles of entrepreneurship and capitalism “To approach. At the same time they complained about the "Verbonzung" of the National Socialist leadership elite, which was understood as a result of this rapprochement.

On March 1, 1926, Strasser joined the " Kampfverlag " founded by his brother and headed by Otto Strasser, while his brother provided most of the journalistic articles. In addition to the Strasser brothers, Hans Hinkel was co-owner and temporarily editor of the publishing house . The publishing house initially acted as the mouthpiece of the left wing of the NSDAP and spread the ideas of a "national socialism" or "national socialism" based on Rudolf Jung . At the end of the 1920s he increasingly came into conflict with the party leadership, especially with the Berlin Gauleiter Joseph Goebbels, who suspected above all the independence of the platform. Otto Strasser did not accept Hitler's offer of May 22, 1930 to buy the publishing house for 120,000 Reichsmarks . As a result of the directional struggle in the NSDAP, which was intensified by Hitler and Goebbels in mid-1930, so that numerous Strasser supporters were disempowered, he instead left the party on July 4, 1930 and published his pamphlet The Socialists Leave the NSDAP . In it, he criticized, among other things, the lack of support from National Socialism for Mahatma Gandhi and the Indian struggle for freedom and made clear his rejection of the Munich party leadership. However, he was unable to achieve any great effect because his brother Gregor, who was far more popular within the party, remained in the party and purposefully expanded his internal power base until his overthrow in late 1932 . Gregor Strasser publicly distanced himself from his brother's move and assured Hitler of his full loyalty. According to Joachim Fest , the separation also meant the ultimately decisive weakening for his position in the party: “Otto Strasser's departure not only ended the socialist fundamental dispute in the NSDAP once and for all, it also meant a considerable loss of power for Gregor Strasser, who since then has had no house power and no newspaper. "

Otto now used the Kampfverlag for his own purposes and founded the "Kampfgemeinschaft Revolutionär Nationalozialisten" (KGRNS) with a few followers, including Bruno Ernst Buchrucker . With the organization, which initially only had around 800 members, Strasser tried to win over members and sympathizers of the KPD in addition to dissatisfied and disappointed National Socialists who did not want to support the party's legality course , and also appeared at discussion events by anarchists . Strasser's efforts turned out to be counterproductive, because instead of persuading nationally-minded communists to join his fighting community, many members, including leadership cadres like Bodo Uhse , converted to the KPD. In May 1931, the group, which then had around 6,000 members, was briefly joined by supporters of the failed Stennes putsch who had been expelled from the SA .

In 1929 Otto Strasser married his third wife Gertrud Schütz (1905–1978). The daughter Hannelore (* 1931) and the son Gregor (1935-2019), whom he named after his murdered brother, emerged from the marriage. Because of its insignificance after separating from the NSDAP, he had to close the Kampfverlag , which published a total of eight newspapers and magazines, on October 1, 1930. In September 1931, Strasser formed the KGRNS into the Kampfbund “ Black Front ”, named after its publication organ , with financial support from the former Freikorpsführer and Kapp putschist Hermann Ehrhardt . He made various attempts to re-establish his earlier publisher's publications under different names ( Der Nationale Sozialist , Die Deutsche Revolution , Die Schwarze Front ), all of which had no effect. The sheets never reached more than 10,000 buyers, despite temporary support from other right-wing factions.

Underground activity and flight

After the National Socialist “ seizure of power ”, the “Black Front” was banned by the Nazi authorities on February 15, 1933. Strasser first emigrated to Austria and later went to Prague. In Czechoslovakia, Strasser was under police protection. There were several assassination attempts on him by the Gestapo . Until the end of 1933, Strasser kept in contact with, among others, Rudolf Küstermeier from the left-wing socialist resistance group Red Shock Troop , which also specifically tried to activate opposition National Socialists for a coup. According to the third expatriation list , Strasser was expatriated from Germany on November 3, 1934 . From Prague he headed his resistance organization “Black Front”, which published newspapers and pamphlets and operated an underground station . This secret short-wave transmitter, which was located in the former Hotel Záhoří near Slapy nad Vltavou , was directed by the emigrated SA member Rudolf Formis , who was responsible for both the technology and the program. At the beginning of 1935, Reinhard Heydrich had the station, which was a thorn in the side of the National Socialists, switched off through a foreign operation. The SS men Alfred Naujocks and Werner Göttsch carried out an attack in the Prague hotel building on January 25, 1935, in which Rudolf Formis was murdered. The action caused a sensation, but the agents escaped to Germany. Diplomatic protests by Czechoslovakia had no consequences. Strasser was brought to court for operating the illegal channel and sentenced to six months in prison, but did not have to serve the sentence on the intervention of the Czechoslovak Justice Minister. In January 1935, he sent his pregnant wife and their three-year-old daughter to the Greek island of Samos for safety reasons , where they gave birth to their son Gregor Peter Demosthenes in May. In a telegram to Hitler, Strasser named his son "Gregor II".

Strasser grossly overestimated himself as the “German government in exile” when he founded his “Action Committee of the Germans” in Czechoslovakia. On the other hand, the dangerousness of his organization for the regime was apparently also overestimated on the part of the Nazi leadership, which devoted a great deal of energy to persecuting him in the 1930s. Goebbels is said to have called Otto Strasser “Hitler's number one enemy”; However, no independent evidence from Strasser's own reports can be found for this often rumored saying. According to many observers, Strasser's leadership style on the “Black Front” shows that he was not up to the task of leading an underground resistance organization. The Prague headquarters had been weakened by internal conflicts since 1933 and remained defenseless against external attacks, not least due to the infiltration of the leadership cadre by Gestapo agents. The head of the organization, Friedrich Beer-Grunow , saw the causes mainly in Strasser's grandiose manner. In 1938 he broke away from Strasser and was murdered by the Gestapo shortly afterwards. This seemed to mean the end of the organization.

In the same year Otto Strasser, together with Weltbühne author Kurt Hiller, published the Prague Declaration , a national revolutionary manifesto that spoke out against the Hitler state and in favor of a new Germany. In autumn 1938 Strasser had to leave Prague and moved via France to Switzerland, where his family had been since mid-1935. Here, too, the Swiss police prevented two attacks on him. In 1939 he was wrongly accused by the National Socialists of having commissioned Georg Elser to assassinate Adolf Hitler together with the British secret service . Strasser went into hiding with the support of the unofficial Swiss intelligence service Bureau Ha under Hans Hausamann and the social democratic Zurich National Councilor Hans Oprecht and got through France and Spain to Portugal, where he was with the help of his brother Paul (1895-1981), who belonged to the Benedictine order and with the name of the order P. Bernhard was called, found shelter in a monastery. He left his family in Switzerland. From 1940 to 1946 he was in a relationship with the German- Spanish Margarita Senger, the wife of the health minister of the Spanish Popular Front government Juan Planelles (1900–1972), who had fled to the Soviet Union . In 1941 he emigrated to Canada via Bermuda with the help of British agents .

Exile and return to Germany

From his exile, he attacked the rule of the NSDAP in Germany in books, magazines and leaflets. His double journalistic strategy consisted of, on the one hand, raising awareness abroad about Hitler's person, the practice of rule and political objectives (for example, he supported American secret services in creating a psychogram of Hitler) and, on the other hand, smuggling subversive material into Germany. He himself continued to advocate the political model of socialism on a national basis (based on his essay Construction of German Socialism , published in 1932 and supplemented in 1936 ) and accused Hitler of betraying the actual National Socialist idea and the murders - especially that of his brother Gregor As part of the so-called Röhm Putsch . In Canada he founded the “Free German Movement”, which campaigned among exiles and Germans abroad for the armed struggle against the Nazi regime, but adhered to an anti-Semitic program and was therefore not supported by the Allied governments.

After the war, Strasser dissolved the “Free German Movement” and founded the “Bund für Deutschlands Erneuerung” in 1948, with which he advocated a return to Christian values ​​and a professional parliament. Otto Strasser has now published his memoirs of the party's internal wing battles from before 1933 in German under the title Hitler and I (1948), after he had initially written them in French and published them in 1940 under the title Hitler et moi at the Grasset publishing house in Paris . For a long time Strasser tried in vain to get permission to return to Germany, which was only made possible by a decision of the Federal Administrative Court in November 1954. Strasser only set foot on German soil again on March 16, 1955. Attempts at renewed political activity - for example in the 1957 Bundestag election with the German Social Union (DSU) party, which opposed the West German ties - were unsuccessful. After that Otto Strasser increasingly withdrew into private life. With his family, whom he had met again in Wetzwil near Herrliberg (near Zurich ) after his return from Ottawa in 1955 , he only had sporadic visiting contacts. According to his son, who saw him “more like an uncle”, he was “very one-sided in politics and history, but little interested in other things.” In the 1960s he lived “in a room crammed with files, books and newspaper clippings” in an apartment on Ainmillerstraße in Munich- Schwabing , which his sister Olga (* 1899) made available to him.

In 1962 he wrote a summary of his political activities under the title Fascism . In this book, Strasser outlined the world views of Hitler and Mussolini and set his own “socialism” apart from their “ fascism ”. In 1969 he published a book with the all-important title Mein Kampf at Heinrich-Heine-Verlag in Frankfurt (with a foreword by Gerhard Zwerenz ). The book, which was marketed as a political autobiography, contained a revised version of the self-published Strasser text Exil, which had already been published in 1958 . In 1971 Strasser went on a lecture tour to the United States, where he spoke to a total of 10,000 people and met with great media interest. In 1973 he married his last wife, Hilde-Renate Möller (* 1939), with whom he had lived for several years. After his death in Munich he was born in Witten a. d. Ruhr buried.

Philosophical classification and effect

In contrast to numerous other prominent National Socialists, Strasser's publications do not focus on anti-Semitism , but rather on his idea of ​​a national socialism , which he called " solidarism " after 1945 . According to the Israeli historian Robert S. Wistrich , he and the left wing of the NSDAP were “no less racist and anti-Semitic than the right wing led by Hitler”. The historian Christian Striefler writes that it was the fundamental difference between the class struggle of the communists and the racial struggle that Strasser had in mind, "which prevented Otto Strasser from completely converting to the communists". His article "Fourteen Theses on the German Revolution", published on August 1, 1929 in the National Socialist Letters , formulated radical anti-Semitism and warned against the alleged paternalism of "alien Judaism ".

In 1936 Strasser weakened his hostility to Jews . In order to provide an example for the participation of German Jews in the resistance fight, he persuaded and berry-Grunow the Jewish youth Helmut Hirsch of Stuttgart, which to them as a former member dj.1.11 of Eberhard Koebel had been conveyed to bomb the Nuremberg Nazi Party Rally Grounds to perpetrate. A Gestapo agent revealed the planned action, Hirsch was caught, sentenced to death by the People's Court and executed in June 1937. In the Prague Declaration published in 1938, Strasser suggested either “placing Jews under noble minority rights” or “treating them as Germans with equal rights without compromise” when they profess their commitment to the German nation. Co-author was Kurt Hiller , a Jewish pacifist and fighter for the rights of sexual minorities, who had already expressed his admiration for Italian fascism and the "power guy Mussolini" in 1926. The term “National Socialism” always had a positive connotation for Strasser. In his book Europe of Tomorrow , published in Switzerland in 1939 , he portrayed Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk as the original Czech National Socialist.

Karl Otto Paetel and Erich Müller described Otto Strasser as a national Bolshevik . Louis Dupeux protested against such a classification : “Otto Strasser and his close friends were never 'National Bolsheviks'; only the radical tone of their revolutionary confessions and their temporary rapprochement with the communists explain the erroneous assumption. ”In the background, the question is to what extent the drawing of the Strasser brothers as“ national Bolsheviks ”, which is still represented in literature today, ultimately serves this purpose can downplay their identification with National Socialism. In a superficial view - supported by the idealizations and legends that Otto Strasser himself spread about his murdered brother - it is sometimes misunderstood that Otto and Gregor Strasser pursued different strategies: While Otto waged a hopeless private war against Hitler after his separation from the NSDAP, His brother, by far more influential in the party, did not distance himself from the regime and, according to some contemporary witnesses and authors, could temporarily hope for rehabilitation and participation in power. The ZEIT author Rolv Heuer summed up the contrast within the brothers in 1969 as follows: "Gregor lacked Otto's courage, Otto lacked Gregor's power."

After 1945 Otto Strasser tried to stylize himself as a kind of "resistance fighter No. 1 against Hitler". Also Claus Wolfschlag , an author of the Junge Freiheit , emphasized in his book Hitler's right-hand opponent (1995) Strasser's opposition to the Nazi regime. On this basis, some supporters of the New Right attempt to present Strasser as an acceptable ideological model that is unencumbered by the negative political legacy of National Socialism. According to the opinion of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution of the State of Thuringia, Strasser's “national revolutionary” theories, like Ernst Röhm's ideas, exert a considerable influence on the ideas of no less contemporary neo-national socialists (neo-Nazis) . In the NPD there has been a strong Strasserist tendency for a long time, whose ostensible social criticism and socialist rhetoric based on Strasser's example has met with resonance, especially in eastern Germany . For “ Free Comradeships ” and “ Autonomous Nationalists ”, both Strasser's theoretical views on “revolutionary National Socialism” and the aesthetics of his self-portrayal play a major role. Abroad, right-wing extremists in England (especially at the British National Front ), but also in France, the USA and Russia, often refer to Strasser.

Fonts

  • Development and importance of the German sugar beet seed cultivation o. O. o. J. DNB 571267017 (Law and political science dissertation University of Würzburg 1921, 92 pages).
  • Building German Socialism . Wolfgang-Richard-Lindner-Verlag, Leipzig 1932.
  • The German Bartholomew Night . Reso-Verlag, Zurich 1935.
  • Where is Hitler going? Presentation of the situation and development of the Hitler system in 1935 and 1936 . Heinrich Grunov Publishing House, Prague I 1936.
  • Hitler steps on the spot. Oxford versus state totality. Berlin - Rome - Tokyo. New key in Vienna. NSDAP sweepstakes in Brazil . The Third Front, Volume 1937.6. Grunov, Prague 1937.
  • Is it going to war? (= Periodical series of the "German Revolution" , Volume 3), Grunov, Prague 1937.
  • Europe of tomorrow. Masaryk's goal . In: Weltwoche , Zurich 1939.
  • Hitler and I (= Asmus books , volume 9). Johannes-Asmus-Verlag, Konstanz 1948.
  • Fascism. History and Danger (= Political Studies , Volume 3). Olzog, Munich (among others) 1965.
  • My fight. A political autobiography (= Streit-Zeit-Bücher , Volume 3). Heinrich Heine Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1969.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Otto Strasser . In: Online catalog of the German National Library.
  2. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j Gerhard J. Bellinger , Brigitte Regel-Bellinger : Schwabings Ainmillerstraße and its most important residents: A representative example of Munich's city history from 1888 to today. 2nd, reviewed edition, BoD , Norderstedt 2013, p. 354 f. in Google Book Search.
  3. ↑ Rainer Dohse: The third way. Efforts to achieve neutrality in West Germany between 1945 and 1955 . Holsten-Verlag, Hamburg 1974, ISBN 3-87356-001-1 , p. 167.
  4. ^ Armin Nolzen :  Strasser, Gregor. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 25, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-428-11206-7 , p. 478 f. ( Digitized version ).
  5. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j Armin Nolzen:  Straßer, Otto. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 25, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-428-11206-7 , pp. 479-481 ( digitized version ).
  6. ↑ a b c Otto Strasser 1897–1974 (tabular curriculum vitae). In: LeMO , accessed April 11, 2017.
  7. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j Dietmar Gottfried: Nazis against Hitler . In: Telepolis , September 23, 2012.
  8. ↑ a b c d Rolv Heuer: More “Krull” than “Tell” . In: Die Zeit , April 18, 1969 (issue 16/69).
  9. ↑ Joachim Fest : Hitler. A biography. Ullstein-Verlag, Berlin 1973, ISBN 3-549-07301-1 . P. 394.
  10. ↑ Horst Blume: National revolutionaries from an anarchist point of view . In: Black thread . No. 9 , 1982, pp. 51-58 . on-line
  11. ↑ Dennis Egginger-Gonzalez: The Red Assault Troop. An early left-wing socialist resistance group against National Socialism. Lukas Verlag, Berlin 2018, pp. 26, 67.
  12. ↑ Michael Hepp (ed.): The expatriation of German citizens 1933-45 according to the lists published in the Reichsanzeiger. Volume 1: Lists in chronological order. KG Saur Verlag , Munich, New York a. a. 1985 (Reprint 2010, ISBN 978-3-11-095062-5 ), p. 5.
  13. ↑ Kateřina Čapková; Michal Frankl: Insecure Refuge - Czechoslovakia and its refugees from Nazi Germany and Austria 1933–1938 . Böhlau, Cologne 2012, ISBN 978-3-412-20925-4 . P. 90.
  14. ↑ a b c d Jörg Krummenacher: The vanishing point Switzerland and Hitler's enemy number one . In: NZZ , November 8, 2008, accessed on April 12, 2017.
  15. ↑ Peter Koblank: Were Secret Service and Otto Strasser the sponsors of Georg Elser? Online edition Myth Elser 2005.
  16. ^ Herbert Elzer: Bonn or Paradise? The federal government, the SPD party executive and the controversial return of the Nazi dissident Otto Strasser from Canada (1948–1952) . In: Yearbook Extremism & Democracy , 24th year 2012, Nomos, Baden-Baden 2012, pp. 72–101.
  17. ↑ a b Otto Strasser. In: Der Spiegel 2/1955, January 5, 1955, p. 34.
  18. ↑ Otto Straßer and solidarism . In: Arbeiter-Zeitung . Vienna January 12, 1949, p. 2 ( berufer-zeitung.at - the open online archive - digitized). top right.
  19. ^ Robert S. Wistrich: Who was who in the Third Reich. Supporters, followers, opponents from politics, business, military, art and science . Harnack-Verlag, Munich 1983, ISBN 3-88966-004-5 , p. 264. On Strasser's basic anti-Semitism see also the glossary of right-wing extremism from the Brandenburg State Center for Political Education ( Memento from February 21, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
  20. ↑ Christian Striefler: Struggle for power. Communists and National Socialists at the end of the Weimar Republic . Propylaen-Verlag, Berlin 1993, ISBN 3-549-05208-1 , p. 110.
  21. ↑ Kurt Hiller: Mussolini and ours . In: The world stage . Weekly for politics, art, economy , January 12, 1926, ZDB -ID 7607-7 , OBV .
  22. ^ A b Karl Otto Paetel: On the history of the German national Bolshevism. Musterschmidt Verlag, Göttingen 1965.
  23. ↑ Louis Dupeux: "National Bolshevism" in Germany 1919-1933: Communist strategy and conservative dynamics , German by Richard Kirchhoff. Beck, Munich 1985, ISBN 3-406-30444-3 , p. 407.
  24. ↑ Marlène Laruelle: The European Origins of Eurasianism. In: Martin Aust and Daniel Schönpflug (eds.): Learning from the enemy: Hostilities and cultural transfers in Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries. Campus, Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 170.
  25. ^ Peter D. Stachura : Gregor Strasser and the Rise of Nazism. Allen & Unwin, London a. a. 1983, ISBN 0-04-943027-0 , p. 123.
  26. ↑ Constitutional Protection Report Thuringia 2003 (PDF), p. 21.
  27. ^ The Swiss René Sonderegger was the publisher of Reso Verlag .
personal data
SURNAME Strasser, Otto
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Strasser, Otto Johann Maximilian (full name); Strasser, Otto; Geismaier, Michael (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION National Socialist politician
DATE OF BIRTH September 10, 1897
PLACE OF BIRTH Windsheim , Middle Franconia
DATE OF DEATH August 27, 1974
Place of death Munich