Theodor Benn

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Theodor Benn (born December 10, 1891 in Sellin in der Neumark ; † 1981 ) was a German officer and paramilitary activist . It was mainly due to his involvement in a Fememord known in the 1920s.

Life

Benn was born as one of seven children of Pastor Gustav Benn. He was a younger brother of the writer Gottfried Benn . After attending grammar schools in Königsberg and Frankfurt an der Oder up to the lower level, he completed a commercial apprenticeship in order to join the 3rd Guard Regiment on foot in autumn 1913, with which he participated in the First World War from 1914 to 1918 .

Benn, who had retired from the regular army with the rank of lieutenant at the end of the war , became involved in the Freikorps movement before he found accommodation in the Black Reichswehr (SR). On June 4, 1923, his subordinates Stein, Schirrmann and Aschenkampf murdered Erich Pannier, member of the SR, who had deserted from the Black Reichswehr in Döberitz , but was arrested after a short time. In fact, it was one of those cases of vigilante justice by the paramilitary organized political right of the Weimar period, which later became known as fememicide.

From 1924 Benn worked as a clerk at the Schwerin District Federation.

After the judicial authorities became aware of Pannier's killing, the arrested Stein stated that Benn had ordered the murder. As part of the general persecution of the murderers that began at that time, Benn was charged with murder on February 2, 1926 and sentenced to death. In February 1927, Stein admitted at the Wilms trial that he had falsely accused Benn. Benn was - like many others convicted of murderers - pardoned to life imprisonment before he was released in December 1929 as a result of an amnesty. From then on, Benn earned his living at UFA , working his way up from a simple doorman to a commercial clerk.

Politically, Benn had been a member of the NSDAP since January 1, 1930 ( membership number 201.258). In 1932 he briefly distinguished himself in the party through his efforts, together with Wilhelm Radecke, to enforce Silvio Gesell's free socialist economic theories - in particular the concept of forced currency circulation to stabilize the economy and thus the overall economy - as the NSDAP's economic policy. Since Benn publicly turned against the official economic programmers of the NSDAP, Gottfried Feder and Walther Funk , as well as against Hjalmar Schacht , who was close to the NSDAP , at the turn of the year 1932/1933 a party exclusion procedure was initiated against him for "party-damaging behavior" January 1933 resulted in exclusion from the party. Benn was later, in March 1936, just like Radecke, however, due to a pardon from Adolf Hitler , accepted back into the NSDAP.

In 1958 Benn wrote a "kind of family story".

In 1969 Benn published a description of the feminine murders in the Reichswehr, which the historian Erwin Knauß assesses as "impressive and surprisingly objective". In a conversation in September 1973 Benn named him the "real culprits in this vigilante justice ", namely the higher ranks of the Reichswehr, including " Brockdorff , ... von Bock , von Schleicher ... and also von Seeckt ".

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The musicologist Eta Harich-Schneider , who was friends with Benn, later described him in a character sketch as a conspicuous personality, "distinguished by his beauty, gloom, individuality, talent for sport and poetry".

literature

  • Emil Julius Gumbel : From Fememord to the Reich Chancellery . Lambert Schneider Publishing House, Heidelberg 1962.
  • Werner Onken , Günter Bartsch: Natural economic order under the swastika. Adjustment and resistance . Specialized publisher for social economy, Lütjenburg 1997, ISBN 3-87998-441-7 .
  • Bernhard Sauer: Black Reichswehr and Fememicide. A milieu study on right-wing radicalism in the Weimar period . Metropol Verlag, Berlin 2004, ISBN 3-936411-06-9 (also dissertation, TU Berlin 2003).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Erwin Knauß: The Gießen Fememord Trial of 1927 . In: Eckhardt, Albrecht (Hrsg.): Festschrift for Friedrich Knöpp on his 70th birthday. Historical association for Hesse in connection with the Technical University of Darmstadt (= archive for Hessian history and antiquity, new series, 32nd volume 1974). Historischer Verein für Hessen, Darmstadt, pp. 557–620, here 590, footnote 58.
  2. ^ Bernhard Sauer: Black Reichswehr and Fememorde , p. 143.
  3. ^ Letter to Thilo Koch, 1958-03-11, in: Thilo Koch: Afterword 1970 , in: Thilo Koch: Gottfried Benn , Frankfurt am Main 1986, pp. 77-103, here p. 86.
  4. ^ Theodor Benn: Fememorde in the Black Reichswehr . In: Klüter Blätter . German collection , 20th year 1969, issue 8. Türmer, Munich 1969.
  5. ↑ Erwin Knauß: The Gießen Fememord Trial of 1927 . In: Eckhardt, Albrecht (Hrsg.): Festschrift for Friedrich Knöpp on his 70th birthday. Historical association for Hesse in connection with the Technical University of Darmstadt (= Archive for Hessian History and Archeology, New Series, 32nd volume, 1974). Historischer Verein für Hessen, Darmstadt, pp. 557–620, here 590, footnote 58.
personal data
SURNAME Benn, Theodor
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German officer and paramilitary activist
DATE OF BIRTH December 10, 1891
PLACE OF BIRTH Sellin in the Neumark
DATE OF DEATH 1981