Paul Edmund von Hahn

Paul Edmund Baron von Hahn (* June 20 ^{. Jul} / 2. July  1899 ^greg. In Castle Post ends in Talsi , Kurland , † unknown, probably 1934) was a Baltic German journalist and writer.

Live and act

Hahn came from the German-Baltic noble family Hahn and grew up in the Baltic States . After the Russian Revolution, according to Oskar Maria Graf , he is said to have worked as a spy for the Bolshevik government in the Baltic States. In the 1920s he moved to the German Reich , where he earned his living as a freelance journalist and novelist.

After Hahn had published serial novels in newspapers for a number of years , he began to reissue some of his works in book form in the early 1930s.

In March 1933, a few weeks after the National Socialist seizure of power in the spring of that year, Hahn was given the provisional management of the Munich newspaper Knorr & Hirth-Verlag as a favorite of Heinrich Himmler together with Leo Hausleiter . Hahn had previously made sure that the editor-in-chief of Münchner Neuesten Nachrichten, Stefan Lorant , was arrested. As directors, they took over de facto control of the daily newspaper Münchener Neuesten Nachrichten (MNN) and some other papers that the house published. Heinrich Himmler was able to gain direct influence on the newspaper house through "his" directors - who had already done spy services for the NSDAP as freelance editors for the Munich Latest News before 1933 - and in this way succeeded in the first parts of the Bavarian press in March / April Equalize the sense of National Socialism. At that time, Hahn's friend Alfred Rosenberg , also a German- Baltic, took over the editing of the MNN .

In the weeks after he took up his position as director at Knorr and Hirth, Hahn systematically combed the editorial offices of the MNN and the affiliated newspapers Süddeutsche Sonntagspost and Münchener Telegramm Zeitung for opponents of the regime and threw more than fifty editors and employees who did not show his benevolence on them in the event of mass layoffs Street, so z. B. the journalist Erwein von Aretin . Hahn and the head of the house also received blank arrest warrants that they only had to fill out in order to have people they disliked arrested.

Despite their cooperation in bringing the Knorr and Hirth newspapers into line, Hahn and house manager rivaled and watched each other. For example, the manager of the house, who feared that Hahn had intended to poison him, had the MNN canteen examined by the police after he was served a coffee in which he had discovered a strange taste.

Arrest and imprisonment in a concentration camp

In May 1933 Hahn was targeted by the political police for reasons that were not fully understood. House manager first tried to get his employee, who also knew about stressful things, across the border into Switzerland to safety. When the two found on the drive to Lindau that another car was following them, they gave up the attempt and returned to Munich.

Shortly afterwards, on May 12, 1933, Hahn was arrested by an SA member in Heinrich Himmler's anteroom at the Munich police headquarters when he was about to visit the SS chief for a meeting. Aretin later suspected that the house manager had arranged for Hahn to be arrested in order to silence him before he reached Himmler after the attempt to push him across the border had failed.

When searching for motives for Hahn's arrest, other sources voiced the suspicion that Hahn was guilty of espionage against the Nazi regime. In contrast to this, Oskar Maria Graf presented in an essay written in exile for the Weltbühne the version that Hahn was arrested due to Hahn's alleged espionage for the Bolsheviks in the Baltic States in the period after the First World War which the National Socialists only learned in the course of 1933. He wrote about this:

“It turned out that this Baltic baron, in addition to a few cheating on the side, had once, under the von der Goltz government , spied in the Baltic for the Russian Bolsheviks. Hahn was arrested immediately and taken to Ettstrasse [Munich police prison].

If Graf's version were to be correct, Hahn's arrest would not have been a punishment for an act against the Nazi state, but was a measure taken for fundamentally ideological reasons: In this case Hahn would have been in the eyes of the National Socialists made irreversibly guilty for all time through an earlier cooperation with the communists, so that, in the opinion of the National Socialists, sanctions were still justified even after all these years.

After his arrest, Hahn was first taken to the Stadelheim prison. From there he was later transferred to the Dachau concentration camp, where he was held in solitary confinement in the so-called bunker of the camp, along with some other “special cases”, separated from the other camp inmates. From a memory report by Julius Zerfaß from 1936 it is known that Hahn, together with three other isolation prisoners - the communists Stenzer and Fruth and the former Frontbann leader Paul Röhrbein - were only taken out of the detention building for short walks under SS guard:

“Stenzer and Fruth, Röhrbein and von Hahn, four tall men. When they were carried out, one was like the other. The flower of death bloomed pale in the dark wreath of her notch beards. "

Disappearance and death

Edmund von Hahn has been missing since the spring of 1934. Some sources suggest that he was somehow discreetly put to death while in concentration camp without this having become publicly known. As early as 1936, for example, the book The German People Accused, published by the anti-Nazi German exile press, stated that Hahn had been "murdered on suspicion of espionage" in Dachau.

In contrast, other sources indicate that Hahn was released from custody in Dachau at the beginning of 1934 - with the requirement to report to the police every day - and then went into hiding without even having reported to the police once . In part, this is linked to the assumption that he escaped abroad soon after his release from Dachau: For example, the rumor got around that Hahn's old rival house manager, who as chairman of the Bavarian protective custody commission, had to decide on dismissals, was now in one of him second attempt helped to escape across the border to Austria. What speaks against Hahn's survival and successful escape, however, is the fact that he did not reappear - as would actually be expected after a successful crossing of the border (especially with a person who earned their money by writing), but remained permanently and even after Did not reappear in 1945.

In this sense, Zerfaß dealt directly with the rumor of Hahn's successful escape in his brochure about Dachau: He stated that he was certain that Hahn had been murdered and that the claim that he had successfully escaped was incorrect. Rather, this was probably launched by the National Socialists themselves to deliberately conceal a murder that had taken place. He had heard in this matter that the latest "camouflage trick of the mercenaries to legally disappear prisoners killed in the bunker" was to write them out for a search after their murder in order to conceal their deaths and give the impression that they were still alive somewhere outside the camp in secret. Logically, on April 14th, a search report was brought to Hahn in the German criminal police gazette, in which it said that Hahn had been released from protective custody, had gone fleetingly and probably abroad to spread atrocity news there. Zerfaß commented on this information, referring to the accusation of treason , which was also made against Hahn in the complaint, with the sarcastic comment: "As if they would then have released him from custody!" It is also noticeable that the criminal police sheet two days earlier, on 12 April 1934, brought an almost identical wanted report to the Dachau prisoner Albert Rosenfelder , who, according to the wanted report , had also been released from custody in Dachau shortly before and then went into hiding, and who, like Hahn, has been missing since 1934.

Shortly after Hahn's "disappearance", his partner Ernestine Zoref was arrested on suspicion of having learned confidential internal information from him and was the first woman in the history of the camp to be deported to Dachau. After she was briefly released in May, Zoref was picked up again by the SS on June 30, 1934, brought back to Dachau, and there - probably as an annoying confidante and probably on Heydrich's instructions - shot by members of the camp guard.

Fonts

• Legs and bandits . Knorr & Hirth, Munich 1931.
• I would love to come! Knorr & Hirth, Munich 1932.
• Grunewald car park . Drei Masken Verlag, Berlin 1932.
• That tip the way . Drei Masken Verlag, Berlin 1932.
• Sun again tomorrow. A novel about the Zugspitze . Knorr & Hirth, Munich, 1933.
• The eyes of the unknown soldier . Pechstein, Munich 1933. Was placed on the list of literature to be segregated in the Soviet occupation zone after the end of the war .
• The white pack. Winter sports and detective novel , 1933. (published in newspaper continuations)

Web links

• Literature by and about Paul Edmund von Hahn in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Entry in the baptismal register of the municipality of Talsen (Latvian: Talsi)
2. ↑ Stefan Lorant: I Was Hitler's Prisoner , 1935, p. 117 calls him an adviser to Himmler.
3. ^ Oskar Maria Graf: Essays from Exile , 1989, p. 42. However, Graf's next sentence is demonstrably incorrect: “According to a rumor, he was supposed to have been hanged immediately. That might sound medieval but is absolutely possible. "
4. ↑ Julius Zerfrass: Dachau , 1936, p. 98.
5. ↑ Maximilian Scheer ed. The German people accuses. Hitler's war against the peace fighters in Germany , 1936, p. 271; again Laika, Hamburg, 2012, ISBN 978-3-942281-20-1 .
6. ^ Richardi: School of violence
7. ↑ As a reason to report murdered prisoners as missing, Zerfaß and other authors suggest that the number of "suicides" and "those shot on the run" in Dachau had increased in the previous months to such an extent that the camp management informed the public and the Justice needed new tricks to cover up murders. The report of a murdered person as having escaped / released and then missing had another attraction from the perspective of the camp management: This report enabled the camp administration to avoid the investigation of the death by the judicial authorities and the unpleasant questions related to it with relative ease. At that time, a death within the camp usually led to an investigation by the public prosecutor, including taking the body and examining it by forensic doctors to check the specified circumstances of death. If, on the other hand, you declared a murdered person as released and disappeared, you avoided the unpleasant obligation of handing the corpse over to third parties - including all associated complications - since in this case a corpse did not exist and could simply dispose of the body after the act.
8. ^ Julius Zerfaß: Dachau , 1936, p. 213.
9. ↑ http://www.polunbi.de/bibliothek/1946-nslit-h.html