Walter von Mohrenschildt

Walter Erich von Mohrenschildt (born June 6, 1910 in Dresden , † July 1, 1934 in Berlin-Lichterfelde ) was a German SA leader.

Live and act

Walter von Mohrenschildt came from an old Baltic noble family. His father was the farmer and landlord Walter Constantin von Mohrenschildt. His older brother was the journalist Udo von Mohrenschildt . After attending school, Mohrenschildt was trained as a colonial landlord from 1929 to 1931/1932 at the Witzenhausen Colonial School. During this time he joined the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) in 1930 ( membership number 193.868), in which he belonged to the local group Witzenhausen in the Parteigau Hessen Nord until early 1932 . He also became a member of the Sturmabteilung (SA), the street combat association of the NSDAP.

For the first time, Mohrenschildt became responsible for the authorities, after he participated in an attack on a group of members of a Jewish migrant association in a barn on the night of August 4th to 5th, 1931, after a National Socialist meeting in Wendershausen, a village near Witzenhausen Wendershausen stayed overnight. Under the leadership of the leader of the Witzenhausen SA, Krumbügel, 30 to 40 National Socialists and supporters of the NSDAP - mostly students from the Witzenhausen colonial school - inflicted serious injuries on several attacked persons (including broken arms and head injuries) so that they had to be hospitalized. Mohrenschildt, who, along with Krumbügel and a certain Horst Otto, was seen as the ringleader of the attack, was subsequently charged with violating the peace together with 13 other people before the lay judge's court in Kassel. The later State Secretary in the Reich Ministry of Justice and chairman of the People's Court, Roland Freisler , acted as defense counsel in this trial, which took place on September 28 and 29, 1931 . The trial ended with acquittals for eight defendants, while five other defendants - including Mohrenschildt, Krumbügel and Otto - were each sentenced to four months in prison and the last two months. Mohrenschildt evaded punishment by fleeing abroad (including Brazil) before the start of the appeal hearing before the regional court on April 20, 1932.

Although Mohrenschildt was listed as a member of various local NSDAP groups after his return, his elimination as a party member due to his flight to Brazil was not withdrawn until January 1934. Mohrenschildt has been a member of the Groß-Gau Berlin since that time.

After his return from Brazil - which probably followed the amnesty for political offenses of December 1932 - Mohrenschildt quickly made a career in the storm department . Since 1933 he belonged to the personal circle of the leader of the SA group Berlin-Brandenburg Karl Ernst . On April 1, 1934, Gerhard Sudheimer was appointed official adjutant of the SA group Berlin-Brandenburg.

Due to Ernst's well-known homosexual tendencies, Mohrenschildt - whom the first chief of the Gestapo, Rudolf Diels , described as “young, handsome and red-cheeked” - had a reputation for maintaining homosexual relationships with his boss.

When Hitler politically disempowered the SA in the course of the cleansing wave of early summer 1934, known as the " Röhm Putsch ", Walter von Mohrenschildt, along with most of Karl Ernst's other close collaborators, such as Wilhelm Sander , Daniel Gerth , Gerd Voss and Veit Ulrich von Beulwitz , arrested by the SS. On 1 July 1934 he was in a barracks of the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler used Hauptkadettenanstalt Lichterfelde shot by an SS commando.

Mohrenschildt's urn was buried on July 21, 1934 at the Niesky forest cemetery.

Mohrenschildt and the Reichstag fire

Almost immediately after the shooting of Mohrenschildts, the foreign press claimed that he had been involved as adjutant to Karl Ernst in the setting on of the Berlin Reichstag on February 28, 1933. For years, the "Ernst Testament" served as evidence for this claim, a self-written declaration allegedly deposited by Ernst as "life insurance" abroad, which should be published in the event of his violent death and in which he allegedly openly admits his arson in the Reichstag fire, whereby Mohrenschildt is referred to as one of the participants. This document was later exposed as a forgery from the workshop of the communist publisher Willi Munzenberg.

Although historical research was able to identify the “Ernst Testament” as a forgery as early as the 1960s, Mohrenschildt was still associated with the event in the literature on the Reichstag fire for decades. The allegation that he belonged to an alleged raiding party that broke into the Reichstag building and started the fire, or that he had at least been informed of such a process by his boss Ernst, was made especially in publications by Walther Hofer , Edouard Calic and des "International committees for the scientific investigation of the causes and consequences of the Second World War" continued until the 1980s without any reliable sources.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ "Colonial Students. A denial and a court ruling ”, in: Frankfurter Zeitung of October 3, 1931; “The Nazi inanity in Wendershausen. The sneaky attack on migrant birds in court ”, in: Kasseler Volksblatt from April 20, 1932.
2. ↑ Bundesarchiv Lichterfelde: Party correspondence (PK) I 0123, image 482 ff.
3. ↑ Fuehrer's order of the Supreme SA Leadership No. 24 of May 2, 1934, p.
4. ↑ Rudolf Diels : Lucifer ante Portas. Between Severing and Heydrich. 1949, p. 232.
5. ^ Pierre Grégoire : The Reichstag fire. The provocation of the 20th century. Luxembourg 1978, p. 150.
6. ↑ Alexander Zinn: On the social construction of the homosexual National Socialists. The "Röhm Putsch" and the persecution of homosexuals in 1934/35 in the mirror of the exile press. In: Capri. No. 18, February 1995, pp. 21-48.
7. ↑ See for example Walther Hofer : The Reichstag fire. A scientific documentation. 1978; or Edouard Calic : Reinhard Heydrich. Key figure of the Third Reich. 1982.