Rudolf Steinle

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Rudolf Steinle (born August 31, 1911 in Ottweiler ; † August 12, 1941 near Terebez) was a German SA leader. Steinle is considered to be the murderer of the clairvoyant Erik Jan Hanussen .

Live and act

Steinle was born in 1911 as the second son of master confectioner Hans Steinle and Lina Müller. From 1917 to 1925 he attended secondary school in Wiesbaden . He then completed a three-year commercial apprenticeship in iron wholesaling at Josef Hupfeld GmbH in Wiesbaden. In addition, he was taught at the city business school.

After Steinle, claims to have, since 1927, the Hitler Youth had been a member (HJ), he took in August 1929 at the Nazi Party Rally of the NSDAP in part. At the same time he left his parents' house against the will of his parents, because they rejected his rapprochement with National Socialism . On September 1, 1929, Steinle joined the NSDAP (membership number 153.876) and its task force, the Sturmabteilung (SA).

In the following years Steinle was active in the Gau Greater Berlin. In February 1931, according to a résumé he had written himself, he was expelled from the SA on the orders of the then SA chief in Berlin , Hitler's renegade Walther Stennes , and only in April 1931 after the forces loyal to Hitler in the Berlin SA had prevailed against Stennes , resumed.

From April to July 1931 Steinle had to serve a three and a half month prison sentence. Shortly after his release, in August 1931, he was assigned to the staff of the SA sub-group in East Berlin led by Karl Ernst . Later he was taken over by the newly founded SA group Berlin-Brandenburg . From this he was transferred to the active formation in April 1933 as SA-Obersturmführer.

Participation in the murder of Erik Jan Hanussen (March 1933)

In March 1933, Steinle, according to Karl Ernst's own admission, was commissioned to shoot the famous Berlin clairvoyant Erik Jan Hanussen , to whom Ernst and other SA leaders owed and who also owed his knowledge of Nazi internals to him through his earlier work Friendship with Ernst and other SA groups had become known, on the one hand, and his Jewish descent, who had become known for a short time and compromised his National Socialist friends, on the other, had become unpopular. The details of Hanussen's murder have not been clarified. What is certain, however, is that a detachment consisting of Steinle, his superior Wilhelm Ohst and Kurt Eggert arrested Hanussen on March 17 in his Berlin apartment. They then probably took him to the Papestrasse SA prison . Shortly afterwards, Hanussen was shot. Steinle explicitly admitted in a letter dated July 25, 1933 that he was the one who carried out the shooting of the clairvoyant. He wrote that he had “received the order [received] from Karl Ernst, possibly with Wilhelm Ohst as mediator, to shoot the clairvoyant Hanussen. I obeyed this order and shot the Jew Steinschneider [= Hanussen] on the road between Zossen and Baruth. ”The clairvoyant's corpse was then deposited in a Berlin forest area.

Further life in the Nazi state

In the further course of 1933 Steinle was hired as a full-time criminal assistant candidate at the Secret State Police Office. In August 1934, however, following the Röhm affair, he left the SA and the police at his own request. SA disciplinary proceedings that had been initiated against Steinle because of his relationship with Karl Ernst in the summer of 1934 and which had the aim of determining whether he had misconduct in his cooperation with the Berlin SA chief who had been shot in the meantime in the course of the cleansing wave in summer 1934 to get into debt, was discontinued on December 11, 1934 by order of the SA special court on the grounds that it had become irrelevant because of his departure from the SA in October 1934.

After leaving the SA, Steinle joined the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler as SS-Scharführer instead , of which he belonged for almost a year until September 1935. In November 1935 Steinle joined the NSV Kurmark Gauamt , where he was employed as a full-time party leader. From September 21 to October 13, 1936 he took part in the 11th course in the Reichsschule of the NSDAP Main Office for People's Welfare in Blumberg near Berlin. In his assessment by the head of the school it says: "His excellent oratorical and academic talent, if he constantly takes himself into strict self-discipline, can still expect a lot from him."

In 1936 Steinle lived at Pestalozzistraße 100 in Berlin-Charlottenburg . On September 25, 1937, with the approval of the Race and Settlement Main Office of the SS, he married Margot Marie Olga Wedel, to whom he had been engaged since December 17, 1936. Details about his later life are missing.

In 1941 Steinle took part in the Russian campaign as a soldier . He died on August 12, 1941 as a member of a tank destroyer detachment with the rank of lieutenant in combat operations near Terebez ( Novgorod Oblast ).

estate

Personal documents on Steinle have been preserved in the Federal Archives in Berlin. Specifically, the holdings of the former BDC include an RS file (microfilm F 5511, images 1569), an SA file (SA microfilm 254-B, image 522) and an SA-P file (SA-P microfilm D 265 , Pictures 2827 to 2912) to Steinle. There is also a personal file of the NS-Volkswohlfahrt (NS 37/3176).

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Rudolf Steinle. at: Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge eV
  2. ↑ Shields: SA prison Papestrasse. 1996, p. 33.
  3. ↑ BA: NSV files on Rudolf Steinle (currently identified as NS 37/3176), p. 2 assessment sheet (reverse).
personal data
SURNAME Steinle, Rudolf
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German SA leader
DATE OF BIRTH August 31, 1911
PLACE OF BIRTH Ottweiler
DATE OF DEATH August 12, 1941
Place of death at Terebez