Walter Schaeffer

Josef Gottlieb Eugen Walter Schaeffer (born July 1, 1883 in Brieg ; † January 19, 1968 in West Berlin ) was a German politician ( DNVP ).

Live and act

Early life

In his youth, Schaeffer attended the Royal High School in Brieg, where he passed his Abitur at Easter 1903. He then studied law and political science as well as economics at the University of Wroclaw for six semesters . From April 1, 1903 to March 31, 1904, Schaeffer belonged to the Grenadier Regiment King Friedrich III (2nd Silesian) No. 11 in Breslau during his first two semesters. Later he was appointed lieutenant in the reserve in the 4th Silesian Infantry Regiment No. 157 in Brzeg by cabinet order of April 14, 1907.

At the end of his studies, Schaeffer passed the first state examination in law on June 2, 1906, before an examination committee at the Breslau Higher Regional Court. Also in 1906 received his doctorate in 1906 with a Schaeffer of Gretener Xaver Severin supervised work on the right to punish in Wroclaw for Dr. jur. He passed the oral doctoral examination on December 20, 1906.

After completing his dissertation, Schaeffer completed the legal preparatory service, which he began on December 12, 1906 at the Royal District Court in Canth. After the preparatory service, Schaeffer was referred to the Royal District Court in Hirschberg for employment. In 1908 he worked as a trainee lawyer at the regional court in Brieg. He passed the great state examination in 1911. By 1914, Schaeffer had made it to the state prosecutor in Schweidnitz.

From 1914 to 1918, Schaeffer took part in the First World War as battalion commander in Grenadier Regiment 11 . During the war he was given the rank of captain of the reserve in the 51st Infantry Regiment. After the war he took part in the border guard in Upper Silesia before retiring from the army at the end of April 1920.

Weimar Republic

After the First World War , Schaeffer joined the German National People's Party (DNVP). On May 4, 1924 he became a city councilor in Schweidnitz and on November 29, 1925 a member of the Provincial Parliament of Lower Silesia . In February 1926, Schaeffer entered the third Reichstag of the Weimar Republic , elected in December 1924, in the replacement procedure for his resigned party colleague Prätorius von Richthofen , in which he represented constituency 7 (Breslau) until the election in May 1928.

From May 19 to June 6, 1926, Schaeffer was a member of the Reichsfeme Committee, a parliamentary committee of inquiry that met in Munich and investigated the femicide of the early 1920s. The committee had undertaken to recognize the factual statements of the courts. In this body, Schaeffer was the opponent of the reporter Paul Levi . Schaeffer-Breslau assured the Cabinet Held I that it would support the Bavarian judiciary in its fight against "defamation and malice from homeless people" through press releases. A Prussian court chaired by District Court Director Julius Siegert had sentenced the murderers Paul Schulz and Peter Umhofer to death. Functionaries of the DNVP commissioned Walter Luetgebrune to represent the femicide in an appeal procedure. Walter Luetgebrune received confidential documents from the Feme Committee from Schaeffer-Breslau (DNVP) and wrote a brief in which he claimed that the composition of the jury in the first trial was illegal and that the murders were acts of self-defense.

Nazi era

On January 1, 1933, Schaeffer joined the NSDAP . He was finally excluded from this on August 5, 1943.

From 1933 to 1935, Schaeffer served as attorney general at the jury court in Breslau . He caused a sensation in the fall of 1934 when a number of SS members were indicted who had participated in the murder of the Waldenhausen town planning officer Kuno Kamphausen on the night of June 30th to July 1st, 1934 . This was the only case in which an indictment was brought before a German court during the Nazi era against people for a murder committed in the course of the political cleansing of June 30, 1934 . Schaeffer - himself an SS candidate at the time - had 22 SS members, including two SS Standartenführer , arrested on suspicion of murder, several of whom were sentenced to prison terms, in his capacity as Attorney General . Investigations that Schaeffer had initiated into six further murders committed by the SS in Silesia on July 1, 1934 (of four Jews in Hirschberg and two Communists in Landeshut) were finally resolved in September 1934 by an abolition decree issued by Adolf Hitler as head of state (and who exempted these killing acts), so dejected that he was not allowed to pursue the perpetrators any further.

In 1935 Schaeffer became president of a senate of the jury court in Breslau. His life in the following years has not been clarified with certainty: Schumacher knows as a possible trace for this time the treatment that took place on October 14, 1944, “a [es] Walter Schaeffer [s], whose identity has not been clarified”, in the infirmary To name the police station at Berlin Alexanderplatz.

post war period

In 1957, Schaeffer took part as a witness in the Osnabrück trial against Udo von Woyrsch and Ernst Müller-Altenau because of the murders carried out in Silesia in June and July 1934 in the course of the Röhm affair. Around 1960 Schaeffer can be traced back to Berlin-Dahlem. Until the 1960s, Schaeffer made himself available to historical researchers as a witness. B. 1966 Heinz Höhne , to whom he gave information about his perceptions as a public prosecutor in Breslau in the years 1933 to 1935.

Fonts

• The right to chastise , Breslau 1908. (Dissertation) ( digitized version )

literature

• Martin Schumacher (Hrsg.): MdR The Reichstag members of the Weimar Republic in the time of National Socialism. Political persecution, emigration and expatriation, 1933–1945. A biographical documentation . 3rd, considerably expanded and revised edition. Droste, Düsseldorf 1994, ISBN 3-7700-5183-1 .

Web links

• Walter Schaeffer in the database of members of the Reichstag

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Death register of the registry office in Zehlendorf for the year 1968: death certificate no. 1968/216.
2. ↑ Files on the negotiations on the investigation of the Feme organizations, etc. Feme murders (27th committee), 19 may au 6 juin 1926. SAPMO-Barch, R, R 101/101/1645, p. 222-296 p. 237
3. ↑ Peter Umhofer joined the NSDAP again immediately after his release from prison on December 1, 1929 ( membership number 176.579)
4. ↑ Rudolf Heydeloff, Walter Luetgebrune in the Weimar Republic, 49 S., S. 27
5. ↑ Heinz Höhne: The Order under the Totenkopf , 1967, p. 553.
6. ↑ Martin Schumacher: MdR , 1991, p. 176.