Richard from Loewis of Menar

Richard von Loewis of Menar (born November 14, 1900 in Alt-Wrangelshof , Livonia Gouvernement , † March 1931 in Africa) was a German political activist. He was best known for his involvement in the murder of the "President" of the autonomous Palatinate, Franz Josef Heinz, and two of Heinz's followers in January 1924 (so-called "Speyer Assassination"). In recent research, Loewis of Menar is believed to be the man who likely fired the fatal shots at Heinz.

Life and activity

Career up to the end of 1923

Loewis of Menar came from Livonia. Until 1912 he lived in his birthplace Alt-Wrangelshof. He was then sent to the state high school in Birkenruh near Wenden , where he stayed until 1915. After that he was taught at the Kollman private high school in Dorpat until the spring of 1918 . In the summer of 1918 Loewis of Menar then joined the Prussian army as a war volunteer, in which he took part in the final phase of the First World War .

After the German defeat in the war and the expulsion of his family from their Baltic homeland, Loewis of Menar joined the Baltic Landwehr , with whom he participated in the border fighting that raged in Eastern Europe until 1920. Later he belonged to the Upper Silesian Self-Protection . In the following years he was named Lieutenant a. D. Around 1920 Loewis of Menar made its way as an agricultural seleve in Pomerania.

Because of his involvement in a Fememord near Parchim , southeast of Schwerin , in the spring of 1923, Loewis of Menar has been wanted by the State Court since that time. At that time he went into hiding in the Munich area, where he made contact with the Consul organization led by Hermann Ehrhardt .

In March 1923 Loewis of Menar forcibly gained access to the office of the Cologne separatist leader Josef Smeets. He shot Smeets' brother-in-law and wounded him so badly that he died two years later as a result of his injury.

Loewis of Menars role in the Speyer assassination

The shot Franz Josef Heinz, police picture from the crime scene

At the turn of the year 1923/1924 Loewis of Menar was won as a member of a command group organized at that time by the lawyer Edgar Jung to carry out the task, the farmer and politician Franz Josef Heinz, the leader of the separatist movement that was then quite strong in the Palatinate to be eliminated by an assassination attempt. The separatist movement active in the Palatinate in the years after the First World War sought to separate the Palatinate from the German Empire and to transform it into an independent state under French protection. At the end of 1923 this project seemed to be within reach: Heinz's supporters had already proclaimed him president of the autonomous Palatinate and for the end of January 1924 his government was generally expected to be recognized by France. The opponents of Palatinate separatism feared that this international upgrading of the separatists would have pushed the actual separation of the areas on the left bank of the Rhine from the German Reich to a considerable extent. The regular security forces of the German Reich, the military and the police, had no opportunity to take action against the separatists, as the German armed forces were forbidden from entering the areas on the left bank of the Rhine by the victorious powers of the First World War due to the armistice conditions of the Versailles Treaty and the police have been in this territory since the French occupation of the Rhineland in the spring of 1923 was under French control. Jung and other anti-separatist activists therefore believed that they had to prevent such a development by all means. It was therefore decided to let a raid troop "infiltrate" from the area on the right bank of the Rhine to Speyer, where the separatist government was based, and to physically eliminate Heinz.

The command group, consisting of twelve men (including Otto Graf, who later became a member of the Reichstag ), crossed the Rhine on the evening of January 9, 1924 and advanced to Speyer. Four of the squad members, including Loewis of Menar, attacked Heinz in the dining room of the Hotel Wittelsbacher Hof, where he was having dinner, and shot him and two of his supporters: while the remaining separatists stood guard outside the hotel, Loewis of Menar and the commando group members Hannes Miebach and Muthmann entered the hotel, another member of the commando, Weinmann, who had already stayed a few days earlier as a hotel guest for observation and exploration purposes, was waiting for them and signaled which of the people present was their victim. According to the research of Gerhard Gräber and Matthias Spindler , Loewis of Menar was the one who fired the fatal shots at Heinz.

After the successful assassination attempt, Loewis of Menar fled with the other members of the commando squad again across the Rhine into the non-French occupied area of ​​the German Empire. However, two members of the group of assassins were killed on the streets of Speyer in clashes with the separatists who had been alerted by the gunfire in the Wittelsbacher Hof, so that the assassination company claimed five lives on January 9.

In later years Loewis of Menar moved to Africa, where he settled in the area of ​​the former province of German East Africa . He died of tropical fever in the spring of 1931.

literature

• Gerhard Gräber / Matthias Spindler: The Palatinate Liberators Anger and State Power in the Armed Struggle Against Palatinate Separatism 1923-24 , 2005, pp. 46, 57f. and 90.

Non-scientific literature

• Baltic monthly , vol. 62, p. 78 (obituary)