Otto Stucken

Otto Stucken (born December 13, 1896 in Einbeck , † July 1, 1934 near Breslau ) was a German paramilitary activist, fememicide and SA leader.

Life and activity

Early life

From 1914 to 1918 Stucken took part in the First World War, in which he reached the rank of lieutenant. In the post-war years he was active in the free corps movement. During this time he was involved in a fememicide .

The murder in which the stucco was involved did not come to light until the latter half of the 1920s. After his capture, he was sentenced to six years in prison for accessory to murder and then served three and a half years in prison. Like most murderers, he was stylized as a martyr in the propaganda of the extreme political right in the Weimar Republic. The leader of the NSDAP parliamentary group in the Reichstag said in a speech in January 1928:

"Above all, we demand the amnesty and immediate release of the real German men, whom the Jewish press decried as so-called fememicide, Lieutenant Schulz, Sergeant Klapproth, Umhofer, Fuhrmann, Georg Pfeiffer, Stucken and 11 of the others."

In 1928 Stucken was released again in the course of the de facto, if not yet officially granted amnesty (the Reichstag only issued a formal amnesty in autumn 1930). He reported on his imprisonment in an essay for the anthology published by Hartmut Plaas , Wir klagen. Nationalists in the dungeons of the bourgeoisie .

On August 1, 1928, he joined the NSDAP (membership number 95.494).

Career in the Nazi movement before 1933

In 1930 Stucken took a leading position in the party army of the NSDAP, the Sturmabteilung (SA). In the same year he took over the leadership of the SA in Magdeburg as SA Oberführer .

Stucken caused a public sensation through his participation in the propaganda campaign in favor of the popular initiative against the Young Plan : The content of the popular initiative was a referendum submitted by the parties and organizations of the political right, which stipulated that the German Reparation obligations to the victorious powers of the First World War between the imperial government and the victorious powers, the Youngplan should be declared an act of treason and the government should be forbidden to implement it under threat of punishment.

As part of the propaganda campaign with which the right-wing parties campaigned for its acceptance in the months before the vote on the referendum, Stucken publicly attacked a government decree as a speaker that prohibited officials from agitating in favor of the referendum. Among other things, he accused the Prussian government of operating a secret informal system and of having broken the constitution. In April 1930 he was found guilty by the district court in Schönebeck. His appeal was negotiated on August 28, 1930: Stucken and his lawyer Kuhlmey used the court date to organize a propaganda circus . The social democratic newspaper Volksstimme wrote in its report on the trial that the men had appeared in court not actually to overturn the judgment of the previous instance, but to overturn the Weimar system, "at least rhetorically". Stucken was eventually fined 200 Reichsmarks.

On September 11, 1930, Stucken was punished by the investigative and arbitration committee of the NSDAP Reich leadership with a warning for tactless behavior, impolite behavior and false accusations. In 1931, Stucken got into trouble within the party: on October 26, 1931, an application was filed against him at the Supreme Party Court of the NSDAP for behavior that was harmful to the party, which was justified by the fact that, as the responsible SA leader, he had financial irregularities in the cash register of the SA kitchen not taken seriously in Magdeburg and removed a subordinate who was investigating the matter from service in order to cover up embezzlement that had occurred there. In addition, he had encouraged SA leaders to stand up against the representatives of the party's political organization and thus promoted differences between the two organizations. He also did not pay the rent for rented rooms and gave a misrepresentation of the nature of debts he had incurred with a lady friend. In this way, Stucken came in particular into opposition to Gauleiter Loerper, who accused him of unsound administration, superficiality and untruthfulness. On November 27, 1931, the Supreme Party Court of the NSDAP ruled that Stucken was guilty of a violation of Article 4, Paragraph 3a of the party statutes: He was punished with a severe reprimand and was given the right to exercise a party office and a public office for two years Appearance as a speaker denied. Due to the appearance of the leader of the Saxon SA, Manfred Killinger , Stucken refrained from being excluded from the party. The SA chief of staff, Ernst Röhm , removed him from the leadership of the subgroup in Magdeburg in December 1931.

Via Killinger, Stucken submitted a pardon to Hitler. On April 1, 1932, he was pardoned and appointed leader of an SA subgroup in Saxony, which he remained until the end of 1932.

In 1933 Stucken was transferred to Silesia, where he was from then on as leader of the SA Brigade 116 in Cosel . Since then he has been subordinate to Edmund Heines with the rank of SA Brigade Leader in the SA Group Silesia .

assassination

On June 30, 1934, Stucken was arrested by the SS in the course of the Nazi government's wave of political cleansing in the summer of 1934 ( Röhm Putsch ) and taken to the Breslau police headquarters. On the night of July 1, 1934 , the Silesian SS commander Udo von Woyrsch Stucken together with six other men (including Hans Ramshorn , Eberhard von Wechmar and Karl Belding ) from their cells in the Breslau police headquarters and brought by an SS commando to a wooded area outside the city. There the men were shot dead by a peloton of SS volunteers in the early hours of the morning.

The corpse of Stucken, like the rest of the people who were shot, was initially buried on the spot. She was later exhumed and cremated in the Breslau-Gräbschen crematorium.

On July 3, 1934, the shooting of Stuckens, like the killing of the other people killed on June 30 to July 2, was subsequently formally declared legal by a special law passed by the Reich government.

Archival tradition

In the Bundesarchiv Berlin, various personal documents have been preserved in the holdings of the former Berlin Document Center , such as a file from the Supreme Party Court of the NSDAP (OPG microfilm J 14, images 2601-2900) and a file in the inventory of party correspondence (PK microfilm M 89, images 2076-2110).

literature

• Henning Grunwald: Courtroom to Revolutionary Stage. Performance and Ideology in Weimar Political Trials , 2012.
• Bernhard Sauer : Black Reichswehr and Fememordies: a milieu study on right-wing radicalism in the Weimar Republic , 2003.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Entry for Otto Stucken in the database of loss lists from the First World War of the Verein für Computergenealogie e. V. Accessed December 4, 2018.
2. ↑ Klaus Schönhoven / Hans Jochen Vogel (eds.): Early warnings before National Socialism , 1998, p. 86.
3. ^ Henning Grunwald: Courtroom to Revolutionary Stage. Performance and Ideology in Weimar Political Trials , 2012, p. 160; citing the article “Nazi in court - Stucken fined 200 marks - nonsensical motions by defense attorney”, in: Volksstimme, 1st supplement of August 30, 1930.