Parchimer Fememord

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During the Parchimer Fememord , the German elementary school teacher and member of the right-wing extremist Deutschvölkische Freedom Party (DVFP) Walter Kadow (born January 29, 1900 in Hagenow ) was murdered on May 31, 1923 by members of the Roßbach working group . The act is one of a series of more than twenty known Fememorden that were committed within the ethnic-national scene in the early 1920s .

prehistory

Walter Kadow was born the son of a blacksmith . After attending school, he was trained as a primary school teacher at a preparatory institute , then initially joined the military and, after his release, became an assistant teacher in Roggenstorf . At the beginning of 1921 he joined the Roßbach Working Group on Gut Herzberg , a paramilitary organization that was part of the Roßbach Freikorps founded by Gerhard Roßbach after the First World War - a voluntary military unit that took part in civil war-like conflicts in Germany in the first post-war period - had emerged.

After joining the Roßbach working group, Kadow did not succeed in integrating well into it: he was much more unpopular. So - according to the statements of members of the working group in the later trial - he played himself as a lieutenant and borrowed money from comrades that he later did not repay. He is also said to have a communist attitude. In 1922 or at the beginning of 1923, Kadow was therefore excluded from this at the instigation of Martin Bormann , a leading member of the working group. As it turned out on this occasion, he had previously had an advance of 30,000 RM paid out for himself and other members of the study group without passing the money on to the other men. Bormann therefore urged that Kadow should work off his debts.

The murder of Kadow and its legal processing

When Kadow returned to Parchim on May 31, 1923 after a long absence , Bormann had changed his mind: He now declared that it would be pointless to let Kadow work off his debts and that it would be better to give him a "beating". As a result, some Roßbachers from the Neuhof and Herzberg estates - including the later commander of the Auschwitz concentration camp Rudolf Höß - seized Kadows by getting him drunk in a restaurant in Parchim and during the night to a forest near Gut Neuhof, where they initially dragged him away severely abused by beating. This culminated in the fact that one of the men, Emil Wiemeyer, cut the throat of the man lying on the ground, whereupon two others, Höß and Karl Zabel shot him in the head. Kadow, who died on the spot, was buried in the forest the next day by the perpetrators.

A few months later, seven of those involved were arrested. After the Schwerin public prosecutor's office initially assessed the case apolitically as a brawl among drinking buddies with fatal outcome, the prosecutor at the Reich Court in Leipzig Ludwig Ebermayer took the case on the basis of the law for the protection of the republic , so that jurisdiction was transferred to the state court for the protection of the republic passed in Leipzig. Before that, six of the men, including Höss, were charged with murder . A seventh, Bormann, was charged with a lesser offense.

In the subsequent trial, the defendants submitted to motivate their act that they had found a membership card of the communist youth as well as large amounts of Russian money at Kadow , which they took as evidence that Kadow was a communist informer who embezzled with them Funds from the working group wanted to go to the Ruhr area "to betray Germany to the French". Furthermore, they asserted that the shortly before execution of the former officer Albert Leo Schlageter , who had been sentenced to death by a French military court and shot dead by a French military court for bomb attacks on facilities of the French occupation administration in the Ruhr area , expressed their hatred of Kadow as a man, who had had the forehead to want to cooperate against the interests of the Reich with the “murderers” of such a “fatherland” -minded man as Schlageter. Rudolf Höß stated in a letter about the motivation and the course of the crime:

“ Now imagine our anger, 5 days ago Schlageter was shot. All the beatings we had received through the betrayal of this scoundrel [Kadow], through attacks by the Communists in poorly attended gatherings. We were all pretty drunk and we didn't even think about it. We drove out of Parchim in a wagon and to our house in Neuhof near Parchim. He was beaten badly along the way, but he still denied it. They stopped in a meadow and confronted him again. He denies and protests his innocence. Our anger turns into a frenzy, nobody pays attention to how or with what he strikes. [...] Then the terrible thing happened. One of them got a panic and fell like mad on the lying on the floor Kadow and cut his throat. Another shot him two times in the head. The next morning he is buried in the forest thicket. "

The assertion, widespread in literature to this day, that the Roßbachers did not just grudge Kadow because, after Schlageter's arrest and execution, he would have had the will to cooperate with the French as the murderers of the "national man" none of them believed that Kadow had anything to do with these two specific events personally - but because they had meant that he was personally the one who had "betrayed Schlageter to the French" can be proven for the first time in 1947 when Höß brought it up in his war crimes trial, while it does not appear anywhere in the 1924 trial files. They can therefore be seen as part of Höss' “justification strategy”.

The justifications put forward by the perpetrators in 1924 that Kadow was communist and that he wanted to make himself available to the French in some way can possibly be defensive claims constructed after the fact. Orth therefore evaluates the act as a manslaughter with affect, whereby the intention was merely to beat him up, escalated from the anger over Kadow's money embezzlement and the drunkenness of the perpetrators into an originally unintended killing:

“ Ultimately, the decisive factor for the murder was that they incited each other, each trying to outdo the other in word and deed. The radicalizing beating orgy - five men hit the sleeping and half-drugged Kadow with their fists, rubber truncheons, a walking stick, and finally with a branch - culminated in Höss's demand that Kadow should be "buried in the forest" for him Give a "coup de grace". Before Kadow was actually shot twice, one of the murderers cut the neck of the man lying unconscious and covered in blood with "a penknife" on the floor. "

The court could not determine what Kadow died of and who is to be regarded as the real murderer. The decisive factor is that the perpetrators acted together and willingly, so that no one wanted to stand aside in this "vein court": "They were all, if not legally, then morally Kadow's murderers."

The Leipzig court found the defendants guilty: On March 15, 1924 , Höss was sentenced to ten years in prison for grievous bodily harm and manslaughter . As a result of an amnesty , he was released on July 14, 1928. Bormann, who had tried to remove the traces after the murder, was given a year in prison for aiding and abetting . The other participants Bernhard Jurisch, Karl Zabel, Georg Pfeiffer, Emil Wiemeyer and Robert Zenz received prison sentences of between nine and a half and five and a half years in prison for serious bodily harm and manslaughter. Six other defendants (Bruno Fricke, Eberhard Hoffmann, Bernhard Thomsen, Bernhard Mackensen, Walter Wulbrede, Ludwig Richter) were sentenced to several months' imprisonment for favoritism.

In September 1938, Bormann was awarded the " Blood Order " for his imprisonment .

reception

The murder and the process was in 1969 in the SDR - documentaries Contemporary History in court: Fememord (screenplay: Johannes Hendrich , directed by: Theo Mezger ) processed.

The murder is also re-enacted in the feature film From a German Life (1977). Rudolf Höß is portrayed in the film as "Franz Lang". Höß had used this name after the end of the war to build a new life for himself.

literature

  • Lew Besymenski : The last notes by Martin Bormann. A document and its author. Translated from the Russian by Reinhild Holler. DVA, Stuttgart 1974, ISBN 3-421-01660-7 (on the Kadow case: p. 23 ff., 296-308).
  • Mario Niemann : The Kadow Case - a Fememord in Mecklenburg 1923 . Ingo Koch Verlag, Rostock 2002, ISBN 3-935319-52-5 .
  • Ralph Martini: Auschwitz trace to Mecklenburg. In: Schweriner Blitz am Sonntag, No. 4/24. Volume, January 26, 2014.
  • Karin Orth : The concentration camp SS. Social structural analyzes and biographical studies. 2nd Edition. Wallstein-Verlag, Göttingen 2013, ISBN 978-3-8353-2030-7 (eBook).
  • Maximilian Scheer : career of an organizer . In: Die Neue Weltbühne 1938 I, p. 77 ff.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Lew Alexandrowitsch Besymenski : The last notes of Martin Bormann. A document and its author. DVA, Stuttgart 1974, ISBN 3-421-01660-7 , p. 300 ( limited preview in the Google book search).
  2. ^ Hugo Beer: Moscow's ace in the battle of the secret services: the role of Martin Bormann in the German leadership. 2nd edition. Verlag Hohe Warte, Pähl 1984, ISBN 3-88202-311-4 , p. 19 ( limited preview in the Google book search) Note publisher profile, Ludendorffer
  3. ↑ Karin Orth: The Concentration Camp SS, 2013, p. 110.
  4. ↑ chroniknet.de Retrieved December 20, 2012
  5. ^ Anonymous ( Carl Mertens ): The Fememorde . In: Die Weltbühne from November 17, 1925 II, p. 750 ( online ).
  6. ^ Letter from Höß to HH dated June 15, 1924, quoted from: Orth: Concentration Camp SS, p. 111 f.
  7. ↑ Orth: Concentration Camp SS, p. 111, footnote 64.
  8. ↑ a b Orth: Concentration Camp SS, p. 112.
  9. ↑ Horse without Sunday . In: Der Spiegel . No. 9 , 1962, pp. 42-50 ( Online - Feb. 28, 1962 ).
  10. ↑ Martin Bormann in the Munzinger archive ( beginning of article freely accessible)
  11. ↑ Fememord (1969) in the Internet Movie Database (English)
  12. ↑ television. This week: "Contemporary history in court: Fememord" . In: Der Spiegel . No. 12 , 1969, p. 190-192 ( Online - Mar. 17, 1969 ).