Richard Aster

Richard Arthur Aster (born March 11, 1900 in Breslau ; † May 6, 1945 there ) was a German SA leader, most recently with the rank of SA group leader .

Life

Youth, World War I and Freikorpszeit

Aster was the son of a postal assistant. After attending a secondary school , which he left with the upper secondary qualification, he completed a two-year agricultural apprenticeship.

In September 1918 Aster volunteered to take part in the First World War , in which he fought with a storm battalion on the Western Front until the armistice was reached . He then worked in the border guard in Poznan , with whom he took part in several German-Polish border fights, in which he was repeatedly injured. During the Kapp Putsch , Aster joined the Aulock Freikorps . At the beginning of 1921 he joined the Freikorps Rossbach in Upper Silesia , with whom he took part in fighting in Upper Silesia until 1922 . He was then taken over into the Rossbach Working Group, with whom he worked as an agricultural worker in larger comradeship associations on various estates in the east. The background to this type of employment was that the former volunteer corps members were to be held together in the event of a favorable opportunity for a violent uprising against the state. In addition, he was a member of the German National Guard and Trutzbund from 1919 to 1922 . From 1923 Aster worked in the steel helmet , in which he led a local group until around 1927. He was also a member of the Greater German Workers' Party . Professionally, he found a livelihood as a traveling salesman for photographic articles.

Career in the later Weimar Republic and in the Nazi state

Aster remained politically inactive from 1927 to mid-1930. In July 1930 he joined the NSDAP . Soon after, in February 1931, he also joined the SS , in which by the end of 1931 he had already achieved the rank of Sturmführer . In October 1932 Aster moved from the SS to the SA, which was promoted step by step. So he reached the rank of Standartenführer in November 1934 and in 1942 the highest rank of his career when he was promoted to Gruppenführer.

On July 5, 1934, Aster was entrusted with the command of the SA Brigade 117 Upper Silesia North, based in Opole , which he led until September 15, 1934. From September 15, 1934 to May 1, 1935, he then officiated as staff leader of the SA Brigade 17 Upper Silesia. On May 1, 1935, he was appointed to lead this brigade, and he was appointed permanent leader on April 20, 1936. He held this position for almost six years until January 31, 1942.

In the Reichstag elections of March 21, 1936 and April 10, 1938 , Aster ran unsuccessfully on the respective NSDAP unified lists (list position 763) for a seat in the politically insignificant Reichstag .

During the Second World War , Aster was first used as a sergeant and then as an officer in an anti-tank unit. In 1941 he was transferred to the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories . In this he was used in the administration for occupied Estonia and later as area commissioner for this area.

In the SA, Aster was meanwhile commissioned with the leadership of the SA group Silesia with effect from February 1, 1942, and was appointed its regular leader on April 1, 1943. He retained this position until the end of the war.

In the spring of 1945 Aster took part in the defense of the city ​​of Wroclaw, declared a fortress, against the Red Army . He died just before the end of the war when, on May 6, 1945, he ran across a Russian minefield at the Schießwerder Bridge with SA-Obergruppenführer Otto Herzog .

Bruce Campbell, in his study of the sociology of the SA leadership corps, interprets Aster as a typical representative of what he considered to be a "serial activist" who, in the period between the First World War and the Nazis' accession to power, was at times paramilitary and ethnic organizations, in order to withdraw from the political-paramilitary turmoil in between during the phases of domestic political calm and then to emerge again from oblivion in the morning breeze of the right: like many exponents of this type, he had started his way in the old imperial army to then to join various military as well as paramilitary and ethnic organizations, before he withdrew from the paramilitary scene in the good years of the Weimar Republic , in which the military associations and the ethnic organizations had a difficult time, to finally retire in the years of agony of the W eimar state to join the NSDAP and its fighting organizations.

Promotions

• 1931: SS-Sturmführer
• November 9, 1934: SA Standartenführer
• April 20, 1936: SA Oberführer
• January 30, 1937: SA Brigade Leader
• January 30, 1942: SA group leader

literature

• Bruce Campbell: The SA-Generals and the Rise Of Nazism , 2004, p. 96f.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Birth and death dates according to: Andreas Schulz: Die Generale der Waffen-SS und der Polizei , 2008, p. 201.