Stuttgart cable attack

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In the Stuttgart cable attack, four young Stuttgart communists destroyed a radio cable that was used to broadcast a speech by Hitler when he was in Stuttgart on February 15, 1933 . After the war, the legend spread in Stuttgart that Hitler never visited the city again because of this "attack".

procedure

During the election campaign before the Reichstag elections on March 5, 1933 , Hitler visited Stuttgart to give a speech. He spoke in the town hall, but the speech was also broadcast on the market square and on Süddeutscher Rundfunk (SÜRAG) in Stuttgart and on Südwestdeutscher Rundfunk (SÜWRAG) in Frankfurt a. M. sent. Towards the end of the speech (which was supposed to last from 8:15 p.m. to 9:25 p.m.) at 9:17 p.m., the transmission was interrupted because an above-ground radio cable in a courtyard entrance at Werderstrasse 20 was broken through.

The deed was carried out by four young workers, Wilhelm Breuninger, Alfred Däuble, Hermann Medinger and Eduard Weinzierl. They probably received the suggestion for this from Kurt Hager , who later became a member of the SED Politburo in the GDR. According to Harald Stingele, however, the idea came from the postal worker Theodor Decker. The four of them had already tried to get to the cable at another point, but had been approached by SA guards. In Werderstrasse, Breuninger and Weinzierl distracted passers-by by engaging them in conversation. Däuble meanwhile got on Medinger's shoulders and cut through the cable about four meters above the ground. The four escaped undetected.

Aftermath

Those responsible at Süddeutscher Rundfunk were able to determine immediately that only damage to the transmission cable could be responsible for the interruption, and they went to Hitler to plead their innocence. In the end, three post officials were held responsible because the post office was responsible for the radio cables at the time. The three officers were given short leave, but were able to resume work in February. The member of the state parliament, Johannes Fischer , had been very committed to her in a small question.

The four workers stayed in Stuttgart, met there in pubs and had probably also bragged about their deed. Because of “tavern talk” they were finally arrested in 1935/36 and sentenced to prison terms of between 21 months and two years. The public prosecutor demanded a punishment for high treason , but the court said that the KPD was not yet banned at the time of the offense, and also saw as mitigating that the defendants were angry that their party was banned from "election agitation" on the radio. Däuble, one of the convicts, was imprisoned several times. a. with Kurt Schumacher in the Heuberg camp . In 1942, as a soldier in Saloniki, he was able to evade the Gestapo thanks to the intercession of his captain .

Matthäus Eisenhofer , the founder of the Süddeutscher Rundfunk, claimed in his memoir Mein Leben im Rundfunk that Hitler never gave another speech in Stuttgart after that, despite another speech by Hitler in the Stuttgart city hall during a one-day short visit on April 1, 1938 .

The story of the cable attack is still popular in Stuttgart today and is still passed down orally.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ State capital Stuttgart (Ed.): Stuttgart in the Third Reich. The seizure of power. From the republican to the brown city. An exhibition of the contemporary history project . Stuttgart 1983, p. 295.
  2. ↑ Harald Stingele, Theodor Decker , May 2009 at www.stolpersteine-stuttgart.de
  3. ^ State capital Stuttgart (Ed.): Stuttgart in the Third Reich. The seizure of power. From the republican to the brown city. An exhibition of the contemporary history project . Stuttgart 1983, p. 297.
  4. ↑ In a report in the newspaper Der Kinzigtäler on April 2, 1938, it is mentioned that Hitler had not been in Württemberg or Stuttgart for "almost three years".