Stanislaus von Nayhauß

Stanislaus Maria Julius Ferdinand Klemens Franz Karl Graf von Nayhauß-Cormons , pseudonym Clemens von Caramon , (born May 7, 1875 in Baumgarten , Silesia ; † June or July 1933 ) was a German officer and political activist .

Life

The stumbling block in Berlin's Stierstrasse. 4 is supposed to remind of Stanislaus von Nayhauß.

Early life and officer career

Nayhauß was the son of a long-time Reichstag member of the Center Party Julius Caesar von Nayhauß-Cormons and his wife Anna, née von Treskow. In his youth he was sent to a cadet institute for education and then pursued a military career with the Uhlans of the Prussian Army . In 1912 he temporarily resigned from the military. Instead, he worked as a lobbyist for German industrial companies in the Balkans. a. for the Krupp Group.

On the occasion of the outbreak of the First World War, Nayhauß was reactivated in August 1914 as an officer with the King's Uhlans in Hanover. He was initially stationed in Lille, Belgium, but was soon transferred to the German-Russian front . During his service there he was promoted to Rittmeister and awarded the Iron Cross of both classes. As a result of a serious shoulder injury, he spent six months in various hospitals and had to undergo four operations.

During a stay in his home hospital in Bad Kissingen in the summer of 1915, Nayhauß undertook a trip to Switzerland: According to his own statements, he became aware of ship passengers during the crossing over Lake Constance who suspiciously informed the crew about matters important to the war effort (e.g. the silk supply from Switzerland for the Zeppelin construction in Friedrichshafen and the anti-aircraft security of the Zeppelin works there). He then followed the men on the Swiss side and watched them visit the villa of the French military attaché in Bern. He then made the plan to convict the attaché of the espionage directed against the German Reich and visited him in turn, in order to lure the diplomat from his reserve, he was a willing informant who provided him with secrets about the German warfare could have spent. However, the Frenchman behaved in a reserved manner and referred him to the Russian attaché, who, however, also did not accept his lock offer. Instead, the diplomats reported him to the Swiss authorities, so that he was briefly detained by them, but was then allowed to leave for Germany. The extent to which these self-reports are correct has not yet been checked in the specialist literature.

After returning from Switzerland to his location in Hanover, Nayhauß was arrested by the military police and - since it was evidently not believed that by offering himself as an informant he was only exposing the enemy war espionage, but not actually providing secrets wanted to pass this on - charged with treason. In the first instance he was sentenced to death in Switzerland because of his contacts with the French and Russian military attachés. On appeal, the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. In a second appeal, the Reich Military Court finally acquitted him in April 1919 and declared him rehabilitated after spending almost four years in various prisons and a mental hospital.

Political activity in the 1920s and 1930s

In the 1920s, Nayhauß began to work as a political speaker. In the run-up to the Reich presidential election in 1925, he appeared as a speaker more than a hundred times at major events of the right-wing conservative German National People's Party in West Germany.

In 1931 Nayhauß, who was politically in the conservative camp, wrote an anti-Nazi warning brochure under the pseudonym Clemens von Caramon, which he titled Leader of the Third Reich! published. This brochure was a compilation in the form of an alphabetical register with data on the criminal past and in particular the criminal record of several dozen leading functionaries of the National Socialist German Workers' Party, which had been politically rising since 1930 . There Nayhauß stopped z. B. found that certain Nazi leaders had committed offenses such as assault, embezzlement, moral offenses (e.g. desecration of the cemetery) and debts. The personalities he pilloried in this way were primarily employees of the NSDAP party apparatus, who were important for the bureaucratic and organizational functioning of the same, but as individuals in the public were usually little known. There were, however, exceptions among the non-persons charged by him, such as the chief of staff of the National Socialist party army SA Ernst Röhm or the emperor's son August Wilhelm von Prussia , who also worked in the SA , who were well known and in the public eye.

Nayhauß distributed his brochure - which he constantly revised and expanded and republished several times in a correspondingly expanded form by November 1932 (a total of at least 5 editions with a total circulation of at least 60,000 copies) - in particular in the form that he could deliver it to the audience of political lectures which he held throughout the Reich, distributed. Furthermore, these brochures were accepted by parties and associations of various political stripes, such as the SPD, the Center Party, the Reichsbanner and the Stahlhelm-Frontsoldatenbund.

The purpose of these lectures was to warn the public about National Socialism and the dangerous consequences that Nayhauß believed that taking over state power would have. Accordingly, his brochure served the purpose of demonstrating that "criminal subjects" among the leading functionaries of the Nazi party were not exceptional, but that they were represented in it in an unusually high number and density one consequently had to reject this party in toto because of the composition of its leadership staff. An acquaintance, to whom he explained his objectives, summarized them in his diary with the words that Nayhauß wanted above all to show the former soldiers and officers who belonged to the NSDAP "what kind of gallows rabble" they would work with because "among the Nazi leaders, members of the Reichstag and Landtag" are all kinds of people who have already been in prison for "all kinds of offenses". He would deal with these individually in his brochure and print out the court judgments against them.

In the foreword of the brochure, he put it this way:

“In every other party, 'black sheep' disappear from the public scene after they are discovered. Only National Socialism tolerates unscrupulous at its head, in leadership position, often people who, in the truest sense of the word, have 'dirt on the stick' or no longer have a 'clean slate'. And in a number that would be simply impossible with any other party from right to left that insists on the impeccable ethical and moral attitude of its leaders. "

After the National Socialists came to power in early 1933, Nayhauss naturally fell victim to persecution. During a first house search of his Berlin apartment on March 7, 1933, a large part of his personal documents was confiscated, but he himself escaped arrest for the time being due to his absence due to travel.

On June 26, 1933, Nayhauß was arrested during a stay in the Breslau-Oppeln area. An official statement to his family said he was being held in protective custody. Afterwards there was no sign of life from him for a long time. On July 20, 1933, a fisherman discovered an unrecognizable male corpse in the Bammeloch pond at the Chaussee junction in the Upper Silesian Löwen-Falkenberg, the hands and feet of which were tied with wire and weighted down with a heavy stone. In August, the corpse was finally identified as Nayhauß based on the dead person's dental scheme published in a specialist journal - which was recognized by the Berlin dentist who treated him. Further investigations into the matter were suppressed later this month after the State Secret Police took the matter up. The body remained in the Stroschwitz cemetery in a grave for "the unknown dead". Submissions by Nayhauss widow to the Reich Ministry of Justice, the Reich Chancellery and other government agencies to clarify the case or to hand over the personal belongings of the deceased and an official death certificate as well as the granting of a survivor's pension were always rejected or not answered at all.

Since 2010, a stumbling stone in front of his last house on Stierstrasse 4 in Berlin has reminded of Nayhauß.

Marriage and offspring

In 1912 Nayhauß married Asta Brasch (* 1891) for the first time. The son Hubertus, born in 1913, emerged from this connection. She divorced him while he was imprisoned during World War I. He later married Erika von Mosengeil (born January 2, 1890, a descendant of Julius Mosengeil ), with whom he had two sons, including Count Mainhardt von Nayhauß , who became known as a journalist after 1945 .

Fonts

• Sentenced to death innocently: memoirs of a German equestrian officer , 1929
• Leader of the Third Reich! , 1931. ( digitized version) (under the pseudonym Clemens von Caramon)

literature

• Mainhardt Graf von Nayhauß: Chronicler of power. Autobiography , 2014.

Web links

• Stumbling stone biography on Nayhauß
• Article in the Berliner Morgenpost

Individual evidence

1. ↑ While the third edition was around 30 pages long, the sixth edition had grown to over 60 pages.