Walter Weber (SS member)

Carl Oscar Erdmann Walter Weber (born May 1, 1895 in Berlin , † after 1969) was a German SS leader.

Live and act

Weber was a son of the merchant Gottfried Emil Otto Oskar Weber and his wife Minna Quanda Henriette, nee. Back home. After attending school and participating in World War I , Weber opened a drugstore in his hometown of Berlin. After he sold the drugstore on Lützowstrasse in 1931, he bought the “Blumeshof” restaurant with the proceeds from the sale.

On August 1, 1930 Weber joined the NSDAP ( membership number 289,485). He also became a member of the SS (membership number 13.141).

Immediately after the National Socialist " seizure of power " in the spring of 1933, Weber was given command of the six-person SS bodyguard of the newly appointed Prussian Interior Minister Hermann Göring , the so-called "Staff Guard Göring". In this capacity, Weber played a role that was repeatedly noted in research in the events surrounding the Reichstag fire of February 27, 1933: After Göring was informed of the fire late in the evening, he drove with Weber and his adjutant Friedrich-Wilhelm Jakoby to the Reichstag building . Weber was commissioned by Jakoby to check the underground corridor between the Reichstag building and the Reichstag presidential palace for traces of those responsible for the fire. According to Weber and Jakoby's later statements, Weber carried out this assignment with a few randomly selected police officers, although nothing particularly struck him in the corridor. At the end of the year Weber repeated this statement as a witness before the Reichsgericht in the context of the Reichstag fire trial .

Because of his role in the Röhm affair in the early summer of 1934, Weber, who was at the special disposal of the 6th SS squadron, was promoted to Obersturmführer on July 4, 1934. In 1935, according to an article in Spiegel from 1970, Weber had to leave the SS because he had campaigned for a Jewish company.

During the Second World War Weber worked as a bailiff for the General Representative for the Economy in Serbia in Belgrade . After the war Weber lived again in Berlin.

Weber and the Reichstag fire controversy

After the end of the war, Weber's activity and his credibility as a historical witness in the Reichstag fire were the subject of heated arguments in the context of the research controversy surrounding the Reichstag fire. Proponents of the single perpetrator thesis such as Fritz Tobias , Uwe Backes and Hans Mommsen consider Weber's statement that he was unable to find anything conspicuous in the corridor to be credible and see it as evidence that Marinus van der Lubbe, who was arrested in the Reichstag building, started the fire on his own and he had no National Socialist backers who penetrated the Reichstag building through the tunnel and fled undetected. Proponents of the thesis of National Socialist authorship for the fire such as Ernstgert Kalbe, Walther Hofer or Alexander Bahar do not want Weber to be credible as a witness. In particular, Hofer and the “International Committee for Scientific Research into the Causes and Consequences of World War II” also combined their criticism of Mommsen and Tobias' assessment of Weber with personally colored polemics. For example, Mommsen was accused of wanting to prove Göring's innocence in the Reichstag fire and that he gratefully took up Weber's statement as an “alibi for Göring”.

For Weber's credibility, there are glaring errors in a testimony that the magazine Stern presented against him in 1969 in the article "Company Reichstag fire" by Edouard Calic and Erich Kuby and which Der Spiegel was able to uncover in an article from 1970. In particular, Calic and Kuby presented a statement from grocer Elisabeth Kuttner, who stated that Weber and SS man Walter Simon had appeared three times on the evening of February 27 in the “Pariser Keller” pub where she worked and had “a few boxes Beer and several bottles of schnapps ”. Weber said on his last visit that they were celebrating because the red arsonists had been caught in the underground passage between the Reichstag and the presidential palace. Der Spiegel was able to refute Kuttner's assertions by pointing out that Simon did not enter Göring's service until April 1933, i.e. on February 27, he could not have been a bodyguard in the Reichstag Presidential Palace and went to fetch beer with Weber, which, moreover, could not have been Would have made sense, since Weber had his own pub where he could get beer. Der Spiegel was also able to refute the assertion made by Kuttner that Weber received a drugstore as a reward for his work, by showing that Weber owned a drugstore, but had bought it in 1919 and sold it in 1931.

Although it was not possible to shake Weber's credibility as a witness, the representatives of the National Socialist authorship of the Reichstag fire continued to insist that he could not be considered a witness. Walter Hofer even went a step further in the 1970s by attributing an active involvement in the arson to Weber:

"Goering's bodyguard Walter Weber apparently played a special role in the execution of the crime."

marriage and family

In 1939 Weber married for the second time in Schöneberg.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ List of names for the birth register of the registry office Berlin VIIb for the year 1897, p. 117: birth register entry no. 1107/1895
2. ^ " Voices in the tunnel ", in: Der Spiegel 4/1970.
3. ↑ Ernst Gert Kalbe: Freedom for Dimitroff, 1963 S. 62nd
4. ^ Gregoire: Der Reichstagbrand, p. 103.
5. ^ Walter Hofer: The Reichstag fire. A scientific documentation , Ahriman-Verlag, 1992, p. 314.
6. ↑ Schöneberg registry office: No. 4038/39.