Walter Gempp

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Walter Gempp (born September 13, 1878 in Rodach near Coburg ; † May 2, 1939 in Berlin ) was a German engineer and from 1922 to 1933 the sixth head of the Berlin fire department . He personally led the fire fighting work on the Reichstag fire in 1933 and was of the opinion that the fire could only have been started by several arsonists. His person and his statements are still part of the Reichstag fire controversy today .

Life

Origin and education

Gempp was born the son of a pharmacist and attended the humanistic high school in Coburg up to and including the lower secondary school . After training as a craftsman, he completed the technical center in Hildburghausen and then studied mechanical engineering and electrical engineering at the Technical University in Karlsruhe . After completing his military service as a one-year-old, he worked for three years at Siemens-Schuckertwerke in Berlin as a graduate engineer .

In the service of the Berlin fire brigade

In 1906, Gempp was commissioned to carry out attempts to automate the Berlin fire brigade, which at that time gradually converted its fire engines from horse-drawn vehicles to motorized units, but preferred electric fire engines. Since 1908 at the latest, Gempp was in the service of the Berlin fire brigade as a fire chief. He was later appointed technical director of the Berlin fire brigade. In this position he was responsible for the management of the technology and telegraphy departments of the fire brigade.

In 1922, Gempp was appointed as the successor to Maximilian Reichel as chief fire director and thus head of the Berlin fire department. In this capacity, he was initially entrusted with the further development of a fire brigade for the whole of Berlin, the creation of which had been decreed by the Greater Berlin Act passed in 1920 and the main features of which had already been prepared by his predecessor Reichel. As a result, Gempps' early term in office was shaped by the work on combining the capital's 15  professional fire departments and 65  volunteer fire departments . In addition, the technical expansion of the Berlin fire brigade was the focus of his work. According to the fire brigade itself, Gempp implemented the "introduction of uniform hose couplings", the "telecommunications connection of all departments to the fire brigade's network" and the "introduction of uniform extinguishing tactics". Politically, Gempp is said to have belonged to the German Democratic Party (Leber) and the German People's Party (Bracher), according to different information .

Reichstag fire in 1933 and dismissal proceedings

Extinguishing work during the Reichstag fire

During the Reichstag fire on the night of February 27-28, 1933, Gempp personally directed the extinguishing work in the Reichstag building .

On March 20, 1933, according to the wording of his announcement, Gempp prohibited "holding political meetings, holding political propaganda speeches and any provocation of politically dissenting people" within the Berlin fire brigade - a measure that is based on the so-called Reichstag Fire Ordinance of February 28 and the election success of the NSDAP on March 5, 1933 directed against the political agitation of the National Socialists. On March 24, 1933, he was relieved of his position as head of the Berlin fire department and on leave. Gustav Wagner was his successor .

On October 14, 1933, Gempp appeared as a witness in the context of the Reichstag fire trial before the Reich Court in Leipzig . He testified that he had seen liquid fire material in the Reichstag building and was of the opinion that the fire could only have been started by several perpetrators. Gempp was not retired until 14 months after his leave of absence on May 31, 1934, based on the reference to the law for the restoration of the civil service . In the dismissal procedure, he was accused, among other things, of "tolerating hate speech and rooting out work carried out by the communist party in the fire brigade" and of having "reset national fire service officers to those with a Marxist [= social democratic] attitude". According to the Berlin historian Wolfgang Wippermann , Gempp's proceedings were “clearly and exclusively politically motivated”, and “one of the longest proceedings that were carried out under the 'Law for the Restoration of Professional Civil Service” ”.

Allegations of corruption

In the course of the so-called Minimax affair, which started in 1932 after a labor court case brought by a former employee of the Minimax company, Gempp was also questioned by the public prosecutor's office from November 8, 1933. Specifically, he was accused of having taken advantage in an inadmissible manner by accepting perks and bribes from the director of the extinguisher manufacturer Minimax, Friedrich Gunsenheimer , in his position as head of the Berlin fire brigade (passive corruption). For 14,400 Reichsmarks (RM), which he had received over ten years, Gempp was able to prove that he had received it for reports that he had prepared for the company and articles that he had written for the company's magazine. However, the court considered these fees to be excessive. In addition, he was unable to prove any expert or article fees for RM 1,200 - the total amount of money he had received after the investigation was RM 15,600. In addition, Gempp reported his secondary activities to the responsible city councilor Ahrens only orally and did not pay tax on all amounts. In the judgment delivered on 1 July 1938 judgment in this case Gempp was found guilty and a prison sentence of two years and the loss of civil rights sentenced for three years. A total of seventeen of eighteen senior fire service officials accused from Berlin, Cologne , Munich and other cities were convicted. Gempp appealed the judgment against him.

On May 2, 1939 in was remand taken Gempp found dead in his cell. In literature, on the one hand, his death is viewed as a murder by the National Socialists. A connection to the events of the Reichstag fire is particularly often established. In contrast, other authors assume that Gempp took his own life in order to secure his family's pension rights, which would have lapsed if the judgment passed against him had become final.

The Reichstag fire controversy

In the post-war period, Gempp was rated differently. Annedore Leber included him in a collection of biographical sketches of resistance fighters against the Nazi system , in which she identified him as an expert with an "incorruptible conscience" who corrected the official statements about the fire after the Reichstag fire and the National Socialists I made unpleasant "statements". Karl Dietrich Bracher came to a similar assessment of the person Gempp in his essay "Stages of totalitarian synchronization" from 1956. Bracher and Leber saw Gempp's impeachment in his straightforward attitude, incompatible with National Socialism, and his rejection of the official claim of communist authorship of the Reichstag fire justified. They consider him to be a victim of the "cleanup for the so-called restoration of the civil service ". Correspondingly, Bracher and Leber take the view that Gempp was later persecuted, arrested, compromised in a “constructed trial” and murdered in custody because he “stuck to his professionally and factually substantiated statements in the Reichstag fire trial”.

Fritz Tobias in particular turned against this , who in his study on the Reichstag fire of 1962 paints a very negative image of the fire chief and considers his removal from office to be an apolitical, purely factually motivated measure. Tobias argued that Bracher and Leber's statements and interpretations were based on the Communist Brown Book of 1933, which provided completely inaccurate information about Gempp and wrongly portrayed Gempp as a worthy man and a victim of National Socialist intrigues. Tobias considered the legal prosecution and conviction of Gempps to be substantiated with reference to the files on the Minimax proceedings that he found. At the end of the 1980s, Wolfgang Wippermann rejected Tobias' thesis of the lawful conviction of an alleged criminal. The files showed that the core of the corruption allegations were problems related to the “secondary employment of an official”. Tobias' assessment is based on "a remarkably uncritical assessment of the role of the judiciary in the 'Third Reich'". For Wippermann, Gempp is a "victim of the National Socialist regime".

More recently, Wilfried Kugel and Alexander Bahar questioned the negative balance that Tobias drew on Gempps in his book after a renewed consultation of the original files. Among other things, they pointed out that “the indictment and verdict on various occasions reveal a negative bias towards Gempp”, and that the principle in dubio pro reo was “turned into its opposite” by the judges in the proceedings against Gempp.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Wippermann: Oberbranddirektor Walter Gempp , p. 212.
  2. ↑ Chief Fire Director Walther Gempp (1922 to 1933). In: berliner-feuerwehr.de. Retrieved March 30, 2016 .
  3. ^ Wippermann: Oberbranddirektor Walter Gempp , p. 219f.
  4. ^ Wippermann: Oberbranddirektor Walter Gempp , p. 223.
  5. ^ Wippermann: Oberbranddirektor Walter Gempp , p. 222f.
  6. ^ Wippermann: Oberbranddirektor Walter Gempp , p. 223ff.
  7. ^ Wippermann: Oberbranddirektor Walter Gempp , p. 227.
  8. ^ Tobias: Reichstag fire , p. 289.
  9. ↑ Bracher: “Steps”, p. 37; Bahar / Kugel: Reichstag fire , p. 237f.
  10. ^ Tobias: Reichstag fire , pp. 289 and 292; Eckart Lottmann: Berlin fire brigade. On the turntable ladder of history , Berlin-Brandenburg 1996, p. 87.
  11. ^ Liver: "Gempp", p. 106.
  12. ↑ Bracher: "Steps", p. 37.
  13. ↑ Tobias: Reichstag fire , p. 281f.
  14. ^ Tobias: Reichstag fire , pp. 288-291.
  15. ^ Wippermann: Oberbranddirektor Walter Gempp , p. 228f.
  16. ^ Bahar / Kugel: Reichstag fire , p. 237.
personal data
SURNAME Gempp, Walter
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German engineer and head of the Berlin fire brigade
DATE OF BIRTH September 13, 1878
PLACE OF BIRTH Rodach near Coburg
DATE OF DEATH May 2, 1939
Place of death Berlin