Walter Kreiser

Walter Kreiser (born February 10, 1898 in Heilbronn , † 1958 in Maringá , Brazil ) was a German aircraft designer and journalist . Because of an article in the magazine Die Weltbühne , which dealt with the secret establishment of a German air force, he was sentenced to 18 months in prison in the Weltbühne trial in 1931 .

Life

Activity as an aircraft expert

The reasoning behind the verdict on the Weltbühne trial shows that Kreiser was born the son of a master butcher. His father died in 1903. After attending elementary school in Heilbronn for three years, Kreiser switched to the upper secondary school there , which he left in December 1914 to join the Lower Saxony foot artillery regiment No. 10 in Strasbourg as a volunteer . During the First World War he was deployed on the western, eastern and Balkan fronts as an artillery observer in field aviation detachments. He was wounded twice and was gas poisoned. In 1919 he resigned from the army as a deputy sergeant and lived again with his mother in Heilbronn.

Since he had been awarded his Abitur certificate during the war , Kreiser wanted to study and become an engineer after the war. For several years he worked as a fitter in larger plants before he began studying aircraft technology at the Technical University in Stuttgart in 1923 . At the same time he took part in glider flights on the Wasserkuppe in the Rhön and worked in the flight technology association in Stuttgart. However, he gave up his studies for financial reasons in the spring of 1924, as his family had lost their fortune in the inflation . Instead, he became a journalist, where he continued his aeronautical research. Kreiser was one of the pioneers of helicopter development in Germany in the 1920s . Together with Walter Rieseler , he designed various models that were also patented in 1926 . From 1926 he worked in an aviation department that was affiliated with the German Transport Association , and later took over its management. In the spring of 1929 he was one of the co-founders of the Petrel , a "flight association of the working people". He also worked for a while at the airfield in Berlin-Johannisthal . In 1930 Rieseler and Kreiser went to the USA for the Pennsylvania Aircraft Syndicate Ltd., which was managed by aviation pioneer E. Burke Wilford . There, the successful test flight took place on August 5, 1931 of a gyrocopter instead of four-bladed rotor, which bore the designation TRC Gyroplane (= Wilford-Rieseler-Kreiser-Gyroplane). Because of the negotiations on the world stage process, Kreiser returned to Germany in 1931.

Activity as a journalist

After dropping out of his studies, Kreiser turned increasingly to journalism. First he worked as a sports reporter in Stuttgart and wrote from Ludwigsburg for the Stuttgarter Tageblatt and other newspapers in Württemberg and the Rhineland . On the recommendation of Erich Schairer , the editor of the Sunday newspaper , Kreiser went to Berlin in 1925. There, too, he reported on sporting events for the Berliner Tageblatt and other newspapers. At the same time he made contact with pacifist organizations. In a letter from August 1925, he described himself as the "only one in pacifist circles who has a precise understanding of aviation". He therefore worked for the German League for Human Rights as an expert on aviation issues. From 1926 on, Kreiser was co-editor of the German military correspondence . From 1925 to 1927 he also published numerous articles on aviation policy in the Berlin weekly Die Weltbühne and in Schairer's Sunday newspaper under the pseudonym Konrad Widerhold . Because of his participation in the work The German military policy since 1918 , proceedings against him for treason and betrayal of military secrets were initiated in 1926, but these were discontinued in 1928. In 1929 Kreiser joined the SPD , which he no longer belonged to by 1931 at the latest.

The world stage process

On March 12, 1929, Kreiser published the article "Windy things from German aviation" in the Weltbühne under the pseudonym Heinz Jäger . In the extensive, five-and-a-half-page article, Kreiser first dealt with general questions about the situation in German aviation, before finally devoting the last one and a half pages to the connections between the Reichswehr and the aviation industry. From this section it emerged that the Reichswehr was apparently operating the secret establishment of an air force together with Lufthansa . According to his research, Lufthansa operated a coastal flight department and at the Johannisthal-Adlershof airfield there was a secret department M for military at the German Aviation Society. These efforts were a blatant violation of the Versailles Treaty and put Germany and the Reichswehr in the wrong. The article made the magazine known around the world, and the article writer and editor were sentenced to prison. Because the Reichswehr initiated a process, the so-called Weltbühne trial , against the magazine, which ended three years later with the conviction of Kreiser and Weltbühne editor Carl von Ossietzky to 18 months imprisonment for betraying military secrets . In contrast to Ossietzky, however, Kreiser evaded imprisonment. Eight days after the verdict was announced on November 23, 1931, Kreiser fled to France .

In France, he then published details of the process in the nationalist newspaper L'Echo de Paris . Ossietzky strongly disapproved of this approach. Because the Reichsgericht , citing the espionage paragraph, had ruled that no details from the proceedings were allowed to be made public. In a letter to Justice Minister Franz Gürtner , Ossietzky distanced himself from Kreiser's approach. However, he could not prevent excerpts from Kreiser's reports from appearing in the pacifist magazine Das Andere Deutschland . From April 1932 on, Kreiser also published a series of revelations about the Reichswehr in L'Echo de Paris , presumably in connection with the pacifist Friedrich Wilhelm Foerster . On March 29, 1934, the Deutsche Reichsanzeiger published the second expatriation list of the German Reich through which he was expatriated .

On the run

Kreiser himself later went from France to Switzerland , and in 1941 to Brazil . To flee to South America, he joined the so-called Görgen group. This group was headed by the Saarland politician Hermann Mathias Görgen and consisted of 48 people for whom Görgen had obtained Czech passports. The later Prime Minister of the Saarland, Johannes Hoffmann, and the writer Ulrich Becher also fled to Brazil with Kreiser. Görgen is said to have described Kreiser as the most endangered member of his group. In Becher's play Samba , Kreiser is embodied by the figure of "Parisius".

According to Becher's wife Dana Roda Becher, he first spent his early days in Brazil in Juiz de Fora (state of Minas Gerais ) and later in Rio de Janeiro . According to Görgens, Kreiser was brought to the Rolândia ( Paraná ) refugee settlement by Johannes Schauff in the 1940s . He is also said to have helped build the city of Maringá (Paraná). In Umuarama (Paraná) a street is named after him. In 1958 Walter Kreiser died in Maringá.

literature

• Carl Mertens , Otto Lehmann-Rußbüldt , Konrad Widerhold (eds.): German military policy since 1918 , Berlin 1926

• Walter Bussmann et al. (Ed.): Files on German foreign policy. 1918-1945. Series B: 1925-1933. Volume XIX. October 16, 1931 to February 29, 1932 . Goettingen 1983
• Madrasch-Groschopp, Ursula: The world stage. Portrait of a magazine. Book publisher Der Morgen, Berlin 1983. Reprint: Bechtermünz Verlag in Weltbild Verlag, Augsburg 1999, ISBN 3-8289-0337-1
• Izabela Maria Furtado Kestler : The exile literature and the exile of the German-speaking writers and publicists in Brazil . Peter Lang Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1992

Web links

Wikisource: The verdict on the Weltbühne trial in  full - sources and full texts

• Helicopter from 1931, whose plans also include Kreiser's patents, on the Russian homepage aviastar.com.
• Website about Walter Rieseler with a lot of information about Walter Kreiser

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Michael Hepp (ed.): The expatriation of German citizens 1933-45 according to the lists published in the Reichsanzeiger . tape 1 : Lists in chronological order. De Gruyter Saur, Munich / New York / London / Paris 1985, ISBN 978-3-11-095062-5 , pp. 4 (reprinted 2010).