Paul Röhrbein

Paul Oskar Röhrbein (born November 27, 1890 in Charlottenburg , † July 1, 1934 in Dachau concentration camp ) was a German right-wing extremist activist in the wake of the long-time leader of the Sturmabteilung (SA) Ernst Röhm .

Live and act

Youth and First World War

Röhrbein was the son of the railway operations manager a. D. Carl Oscar Adalbert August Röhrbein and Marie Luise Heyde were born. After attending school, he embarked on a career in the Prussian army , where he made it to captain . After the First World War he retired from military service. Almost nothing is known about his career in the following years.

Weimar Republic

In the mid-1920s, Röhrbein took on leadership roles in the right-wing extremist fighting organization Frontbann, which was founded by Ernst Röhm . In particular, Röhm - with whom he is said to have had homosexual relationships - made him head of the so-called “Frontbann-Nord”, the Berlin section of the organization. At the same time, Röhrbein had the reputation of being the “official representative of Ludendorff in Berlin”. Röhrbein won the members of the Frontbann Nord from the German gymnastics club, the Bund Wiking , the Black Reichswehr and the border guards . He chose young Karl Ernst , who later became head of the SA in Berlin-Brandenburg, as his adjutant . Ernst, who was also said to have homosexual relationships with Röhrbein, earned the nickname "Frau Röhrbein" or "Frau von Röhrbein".

In the first edition of his memoirs, The Story of a High Traitor from 1928, Röhm praised Röhrbein as "the model of a German officer and loyal comrade". Furthermore, Röhm stated that Röhrbein had been named “one of the best and most fearless fighters for Hitler” and that “without Röhrbein's energy” the SA “would never have succeeded in conquering] Berlin.” In the second edition of the book from 1933 the explanations at Röhm are missing.

Little is known about Röhrbein's relationship with Hitler : A left-wing publication reported that in Berlin homosexual pubs such as the Kleist Casino , the Internationale Diele and the Silhouette, where Röhrbein was a regular at the time, “every hustler” was “lively” by the (alleged) “lively” Relationship of the friend Röhrbein about Röhm to Hitler ”. This is only hearsay, however, which may have been based on exaggerated information Röhrbeins.

According to Waldemar Geyer , Röhrbein was no longer accepted into the SA (or at most into a lower rank) because Hitler recognized him as a “man and soldier”, but at the same time considered him unsustainable for the Nazi movement. After Ernst Röhm took over the post of chief of staff of the SA at the beginning of 1931, Röhrbein was nevertheless part of the inner circle of his old friend for a while: Together with Karl Ernst and Edmund Heines , he was considered the nucleus of the so-called "homosexual gang" in the SA leadership. Röhrbein's hope, cherished at the end of 1930, after the appointment of his friend Röhm as Chief of Staff to be appointed Supreme SA Leader in the area around Berlin (Osaf Ost), however, was not fulfilled, nor were ambitions to be head of the Munich SA Leadership School or liaison man Röhms to Austria.

An incident on June 27, 1931 caused a sensation when supporters of the Stennes group in the SA - which were directed against Röhm, Röhrbein and the rest of the "homosexual clique" - surprised Karl Ernst and Röhrbein in the Halenseer Hütte restaurant on Kronprinzendamm: They surrounded the restaurant, so that Ernst had to call Sturm 12 to save him and Röhrbein, who were called "gay swine" by the besiegers. Relations with Ernst seem to have continued: at the end of 1932, Karl Ernst was denounced by a former SA leader named Fischer to Hitler because of his homosexual relations with Röhrbein.

Period of National Socialism and Death (1933–1934)

In the summer of 1933 Röhrbein was taken into " protective custody " for unknown reasons . In the literature, the unsubstantiated claim often appears in this connection that Röhrbein had something to do with the Reichstag fire of February 1933, and possibly even was a member of a squad that entered the Reichstag building through an underground tunnel and infected it. In addition, the suspicion was expressed that Röhrbein, as the leader of an SA roll command, murdered the DNVP politician Ernst Oberfohren on May 7, 1933 , who is said to have collected incriminating material about the Reichstag fire via the National Socialists, and then disguised the act as a suicide. This claim goes back to the former editor-in-chief of the Munich Sunday newspaper , Walter Tschuppik , who declared in 1934 in exile in the Austrian (or Czech) newspaper Der Morgen that he had met Röhrbein as a fellow prisoner in 1933 in the Löwengrube police prison. Röhrbein confessed to having killed Oberfohren on Göring's behalf.

As far as it could be reconstructed, Röhrbein was initially housed as a "protective prisoner" in Berlin's Moabit prison after his arrest and then transferred to the detention area of ​​the Munich police headquarters. From there, according to Tschuppik, he was taken to the Dachau concentration camp for a while after he had tried to smuggle letters out of custody with which he wanted to inform Hitler and Karl Ernst of his fate. These letters are said to have been intercepted and sent to Röhm, who immediately ordered Röhrbein's criminal transfer to Dachau.

Röhrbein's admission to the Dachau concentration camp is officially recorded in the registry book "Transfer of prisoners to KL Dachau, June 3 - August 19, 1933" (pp. 91 and 92) as being on August 10, 1933. Both Tschuppik and Erwein von Aretin , who claims to have been Röhrbein's cell neighbor on the 4th floor of the Munich police headquarters in 1933, later stated that Röhrbein was kept in the dark in Dachau day and night and was chained to the ground. Tschuppik links this to the assumption that Röhm initiated this type of detention in the hope that Röhrbein would not survive the torture in dark detention and commit suicide, as most of the inmates who had been treated similarly had done.

On September 13, 1933, Röhrbein was finally taken from Dachau to the Löwengrube prison - allegedly at the instigation of Karl Ernst and other Berlin friends - and from there to the Stadelheim prison at the end of the year . Aretin saw him there as a "desperado nature that was heavily deprived of alcohol". Röhrbein then came to Stadelheim, where he, Aretin, saw him again in early 1934. When Röhrbein was to be brought back to Dachau at the beginning of 1934, he cut his wrists, knowing what Dachau was and to prevent his transfer. After he was healed, he was still brought to Dachau. His second posting in Dachau is registered on February 27, 1934 (No. 5278). In Dachau, Röhrbein was held in solitary confinement in the so-called “bunker” of the camp, separated from the other prisoners in the camp.

On the night of June 30 to July 1, 1934, Röhrbein was shot dead by members of the Dachau SS camp guard during the Röhm affair . In addition to him, four other men were killed who had been held for a long time as “protective prisoners” in Dachau ( Julius Adler , Erich Gans , Walter Häbich and Adam Hereth ). Röhrbein is said to have been shot together with the journalist Fritz Gerlich, who was brought to Dachau specifically for his shooting, at the Dachau shooting range, illuminated by the headlights of the motor vehicle. The official death certificate from the Prittlbach registry office stated that the time of death was 3:00 a.m. It remains unclear whether his shooting was due to an order from Berlin or whether it was an unauthorized act by Theodor Eicke's camp management .

In his will of January 20, 1934, Röhrbein named the student Herbert Schade and the Berlin Schillergymnasium as his heirs. After the grammar school rejected the inheritance, Röhrbein's estate was transferred to Schade in 1937. Before that, there was a protracted legal dispute in which Röhrbein's will was challenged by a third party as immoral. Röhrbein had used Schade as an inheritance because of homosexual relationships, which were illegal under Section 175 of the Criminal Code at the time . The Berlin Regional Court finally rejected this argument.

Hans Rudolf Wahl characterizes Röhrbein as an exponent of a group of "right-wing radical leaders" who "have almost disappeared today in the darkness of history", but who, through their work in the 1920s, created the prerequisites for the rise of the National Socialists to rule.

estate

Some estate files on Röhrbein are kept in the Landesarchiv Berlin (Landesarchiv Berlin: A Rep. 342, No. 17757, 18910 and 20243), for detention in the Moabit prison see LAB A Rep. 366.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Bernhard Sauer: Black Reichswehr and Fememorde: a milieu study on right-wing radicalism in the Weimar Republic , 2004, p. 43.
2. ↑ Werner Boldt (Ed.): Carl von Ossietzky. All writings. Oldenburg edition , 1994, p. 496.
3. ↑ Wolfgang Ribbe: Berlin-Forschungen , 1988, Vol. 3, p. 200.
4. ↑ ^{a b} Scientific-Humanitarian Committee: Communications of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee , p. 359.
5. ↑ Ernst Röhm: History of a High Traitor , 1928.
6. ↑ Bernhard Sauer: Black Reichswehr and Fememorde: a milieu study on right-wing radicalism in the Weimar Republic , 2004, p. 44.
7. ↑ Andreas Dornheim: Röhm's man for abroad , p. 77.
8. ↑ Alexander Zinn: The social construction of the homosexual National Socialist , 1997, p. 45.
9. ^ Bernhard Sauer: Black Reichswehr and Fememorde. A milieu study on right-wing radicalism , 2004, p. 295.
10. ^ Bundesarchiv Lichterfelde, Graf Helldorf personal file, letter dated November 1, 1932.
11. ^ Lothar Gruchmann: Justice in the Third Reich 1933-1940. Adaptation and submission in the Gürtner era , p. 440.
12. ↑ Hans-Günter Richardi: School of Violence , 1983, p. 181.
13. ↑ So with Julius Heydecker / Johannes Leeb: The Nuremberg Trial. Balance of the Thousand Years , 1958, p. 132. Röhrbein's fellow inmate Erwein von Aretin: Fritz Gerlich. A martyr of our time , 1949, p. 127, states that he bragged to his fellow prisoners in prison that he had set fire to the Reichstag and committed female murders.
14. ^ Julius Zerfass: Dachau , 1936, p. 97 .; Alexander Bahar : The Reichstag fire: how history is made , 2001, p. 634.
15. ↑ "The murder of Oberfohren. A mysterious prisoner in the lions' den ”, in: The morning of January 15, 1934.
16. ↑ Erwein von Aretin: Fritz Michael Gerlich: A martyr of our days . Schnell & Steiner, Munich 1949, p. 127.
17. ↑ Augustin Niedermeier: A fighter for truth and law. Fritz Gerlich , 1995.
18. ↑ Hans Rudolf Wahl: "National Pederasts? On the history of the Berlin SA leadership 1925-1934, in: Zeitschrift für Geschichtswwissenschaft 56 (2008) Issue 5, 2008, pp. 442–459.