Walther Ilges

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Franz Walther Ilges (born May 31, 1870 in Breslau ; † February 21, 1941 in Berlin ) (also often: Walter Ilges , F. Walther Ilges and under the pseudonym Hardefust ) was a German writer and SS leader. In historical research, Ilges was primarily considered the first Jewish advisor to the security service of the Reichsführer SS (SD).

Live and act

After attending school, Ilges studied German . From 1914 to 1918 he took part in the First World War, in which he reached the rank of major.

During the Weimar Republic , Ilges earned his living as a writer. He placed the focus of his work on dramatic plays. His best-known work as an author was the drama Die Laterne, set during the French Revolution .

In 1930 Ilges joined the NSDAP (membership number 283.738) and shortly afterwards the SS (membership number 36.239). Politically, he had already positioned himself strongly to the right through his membership in the Pan-German Association, of which he temporarily headed the Cologne local group. After joining the NSDAP, Ilges began to work intensively in the interests of the NSDAP. Partly under his real name and partly under the pseudonym Hardefust, he published various brochures that looked at the political events of the day and the recent history of Germany since the First World War in terms of the national worldview. So he put z. In April 1934, for example, he presented the brochure High Treason of the Center on the Rhine , in which he dealt with the separatist efforts in the Rhineland at the beginning of the 1920s and attacked the later Federal Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, among others .

Shortly after the National Socialists came to power in the spring of 1933, Ilges was accepted into the security service of the SS (SD). Around the summer of 1933 he was given a position in the SD office in Munich , which at that time was the predecessor institution of the SD main office as the headquarters of the SD. Michael Wildt identifies Ilges as head of subdivision IV / II ("Jews, pacifists, atrocity propaganda, emigrants abroad") of the SD office for the years 1933 to 1935. It is noteworthy that in this position Ilges was the first head of a department responsible for “Jewish affairs” in the SD later decisively involved in the planning and implementation of the persecution and extermination of Jews during World War II . A memorandum drawn up for Heydrich in May 1934 comes from Ilges' time as head of the Department for Jews; it has attracted greater research attention as a document for the genesis of the development towards the Holocaust. In this memorandum - which, according to Wildt, was probably written by Ilges - the demand is made that the “goal of Jewish policy [of the Nazi state] must be complete emigration” , which in fact was the guiding principle of the Jewish policy of the SD was.

Ilges colleague Werner Best described Ilges after the Second World War as a “Cologne Tünnes” , who was considered a “somewhat strange figure” in SD circles and “was not taken very seriously” . Neuberger ties in with this statement with the assessment that Ilges' work “found little recognition” from his colleagues in the SD headquarters. In contrast, Shlomo Aronson judged in his study on the early history of the SD in the 1960s that Ilges was "undoubtedly the most important" employee of Heydrich in the SD headquarters in 1933/1934, alongside Wilhelm August Patin and Julius Plaichinger, due to the SD's strong ideological focus "because his" subject areas "were given priority after 1933".

In his monograph on the history of the SS, Heinz Höhne referred to Ilges as the "author of a liquidation list" according to which some of the rolling commandos had directed their murder activities during the Röhm affair in the summer of 1934 and cited Ilges for the days before the putsch as saying:

“Do you know what bloodlust means? I feel like I'm allowed to wade in blood. "

In the course of the gradual relocation of the SD headquarters from Munich to Berlin in 1934/1935, Ilges seems to have left it. According to Wildt, Leopold Itz Edler von Mildenstein took over as head of the Department for Jews in July 1935. At the beginning of 1937 Ilges was promoted to SS-Obersturmbannführer and retired.

Ilges son, Wolfgang Ilges was a member of the SS Tilsit Task Force in 1941 . He was sentenced in 1957 by the Stuttgart Regional Court to four years in prison for aiding and abetting murder.

Fonts

Works as a writer

  • The lantern. A shadow play , 1925.
  • Babylon. The drama of the end of the world , 1925.
  • The Devil's Game by Princess Borghese , 1925.
  • Countess Dubarry. A tragic comedy , 1927.
  • The white kitten. A comedy of jealousy , 1927.
  • The Turkish Cabinet. An erotic comedy , 1929.
  • Casanova pays back! Comedy in four acts , 1937.

Political brochures

  • Revolution! Who made the revolution? Who paid for the revolution? What did the revolution bring? , slea [Berlin 1932]. (published under the pseudonym Hardefust)
  • What did Bolshevism cost us? , Munich 1932. (published under the pseudonym Hardefust)
  • High treason by the Center and the Bavarian People's Party 1919–1933. The planned division of Germany , 1933.
  • High treason of the center on the Rhine. New documents about the true leaders of the separatists , Berlin 1934. (together with Hermann Schmid)

Historical work

literature

  • Helmut Neuberger: Freemasonry and National Socialism. The Persecution of German Freemasonry by the Volkish Movement and National Socialism 1918–1945 , p. 41.
  • Michael Wildt: The Jewish policy of the SD 1935-1938 - a documentation . Oldenbourg, Munich 1995, ISBN 3-486-64571-4 , pp. 14-19.
  • Michael Wildt Ed .: Intelligence Service, Political Elite, Murder Unit - The Security Service of the Reichsführer SS . Hamburger Edition, Hamburg 2003, ISBN 3-930908-84-0 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Date and place of birth according to the Deutsches Bühnen-Jahrbuch. Theater history year and address book ; Wildt: Die Judenpolitik des SD , 1995, gives the same year of birth (without an exact date) and the same place of birth; Neuberger: Freemasonry and National Socialism , p. 41 deviates from Cologne as the place of birth, but the date of birth corresponds to the stage yearbook .
  2. ^ Date and place of death according to: Helmut Neuberger: Freemasonry and National Socialism , 1980, p. 41; The year 1942 appears as an alternative year of death in the Deutsches Bühnen-Jahrbuch. Theater History Year and Address Book , Vol. 54, 1942, p. 121.
  3. ↑ Manfred Faust: Socialist truce in the First World War. Socialist and Christian workers' movement in Cologne , 1992, p. 330.
  4. ↑ Wildt: Die Judenpolitik des SD 1935–1938 , p. 15.
  5. ^ Neuberger: p. 41.
  6. ↑ Shlomo Aronson: Heydrich and the beginnings of the SD and the Gestapo , 1967, p. 189. Aronson incorrectly identifies Ilges - probably as a result of an erroneous decipherment of a handwritten source - as "Illies" and could not yet determine a first name, so his research zu Ilges inevitably ended with the result that “there was nothing documentary about this”. In the revised new edition of his book from 1972, Aronson was finally able to present Ilge's first name and the correct spelling of his family name.
  7. ↑ The Order under the Skull. The history of the SS, in: Der Spiegel from October 31, 1966.
  8. ^ "LG Cologne May 4, 1957". In: Justice and Nazi crimes . Collection of German convictions for Nazi homicidal crimes 1945–1966, vol. XIV, ed. by Irene Sagel-Grande, HH Fuchs and CF Rüter. Amsterdam: University Press, 1976, No. 444, pp. 105-134
personal data
SURNAME Ilges, Walther
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer and SS leader
DATE OF BIRTH May 31, 1870
PLACE OF BIRTH Wroclaw
DATE OF DEATH February 21, 1941
Place of death Berlin