SS-Hauptreitschule Munich
The SS main riding school in Munich was founded in 1937 on the Fegeleins' equestrian estate and reports to the Reichsführer SS and chief of the German police, Heinrich Himmler . The driving force behind the Reiter-SS was Hermann Fegelein , who is considered to be its founder. The SS main riding school in Munich was not only a training center for leaders of the equestrian SS, but also a competitive sports center for SS equestrian sports.
Locations and purpose
The SS main riding school was located in Munich, divided into two locations, the equestrian estate of the Fegelein family and the Riem racecourse.
In the SS main riding school in Munich, new cavalry regiments were trained and existing regiments were prepared for the coming war. The cavalry should be deployed on a large scale, either as "cavalry brigades" connected to other regiments, or directly as "cavalry regiments". The cavalry was used both as a mobile support for the infantry and for reconnaissance purposes. The horse enabled increased mobility of the troops and replaced a lack of motorization.
In addition, the SS main riding school was deliberately set up as a competing institution for the army cavalry school in Hanover. Both the best SS riders and the best horse material should be concentrated here in order to reach the national top in both show jumping and dressage riding.
Riem Racecourse
After the SS main riding school in Munich was founded on the Fegeleins' equestrian estate in 1937, the Riem racecourse became part of the SS main riding school in the same year . The racetrack is located outside of Munich East. It was used both for the main riding school and as the venue for the annual international horse race for the Brown Ribbon of Germany (from 1934 to 1944). The winners of the horse race received a bonus of 100,000 Reichsmarks and the "Brown Ribbon" sash, which was designed by the graphic artist and artist Richard Klein . The organizer of the horse races was the Munich NSDAP councilor Christian Weber , who had been a member of the NSDAP since 1921 and had headed the NSDAP city council faction since 1934.
Place in the SS structure
| SS main offices | |||||||||||||
| Inspection of the SS cavalry | Inspection of the SS riding schools | ||||||||||||
| SS-Hauptreitschule Munich | |||||||||||||
The SS main riding school in Munich was last in the SS structure. At the top was the SS main office, subordinate to it were the inspection of the SS cavalry and the inspection of the SS riding schools, which was equivalent to this. The SS-Hauptreitschule in Munich was subject to both inspections and was therefore accountable to both instances and bound by instructions.
Nuremberg Trials
The Reiter-SS is the only SS organization that was not classified as criminal by the Allies after the Second World War at the Nuremberg Trials . Great Britain had advocated excluding the Reiter-SS from later convictions and classifying them as an elitist equestrian club, since the equestrian standards of the SS from 1940 only appeared in documents.
literature
- Berno Bahro: SS sport - organization, function, meaning. Schöningh, Paderborn 2013 (= dissertation, University of Potsdam 2012), ISBN 978-3-506-77288-6 .
Web links
- Horses used by the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS on bundesarchiv.de
- Rennbahn Riem, from 1937 also SS-Hauptreitschule on ns-dokumentationszentrum-muenchen.de
- Schutzstaffel (SS), 1925–1945 on historisches-lexikon-bayerns.de
Individual evidence
- ↑ Rennbahn Riem, from 1937 also SS-Hauptreitschule ( Memento of the original of March 31, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. at ns-dokumentationszentrum-muenchen.de
- ↑ File: Organizational structure of the Schutzstaffel and the police in the German Reich 1941.svg
