Walther Sommer

This article deals with the lawyer Walther Sommer. For other people see Walter Sommer .

Fritz Rudolf Walther Sommer (born July 9, 1893 in Rudolstadt ; † July 4, 1946 in the USSR , executed) was a German lawyer and worked in the party chancellery of the NSDAP with the rank of SS Oberführer .

Education and career

Walther Sommer grew up as the son of the notary Paul Sommer and his wife Elise geb. Zimmermann in Rudolstadt, where his father worked on the city council and later as a national liberal member of the state parliament of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt . Summer attended the local high school Fridericianum.

Walther Sommer studied history and German from 1912 to 1914, then law in Göttingen . He joined the fraternity and later fraternity Frisia . In 1914, after the outbreak of the First World War, Sommer entered as a volunteer. In January 1917 he was seriously injured. He passed the state examinations in 1919 and 1922 respectively, was appointed to the Interior Ministry of the State of Thuringia , appointed to the government council in 1925 , promoted to senior government councilor in 1932 and to ministerial councilor in 1933. He took over the chairmanship of the Thuringian State Administrative Court and the Thuringian Disciplinary Court. In April 1934 he had drafted a “law on Reichsgau Thuringia” commissioned by Gauleiter Fritz Sauckel .

Sommer was a member of the Pan-German Association between 1912 and 1922 , was a member of the German People's Party from 1919 to 1924 and of the NSDAP since 1928 (membership number 101.505).

Service in the "Staff of the StdF"

In May 1934 Walther Sommer was given leave of absence from state service and worked on the staff of Rudolf Hess 's deputy leader . In 1935 a post as Ministerial Director was created for him there. Sommer was the main consultant for all matters that came to Hess "in his capacity as Reich Minister". As head of Department III (Constitutional Law Department) worked on state legislation and represented the interests of the NSDAP there. He was responsible for the correspondence between ministries and his office and - in cooperation with Gauleiter Adolf Wagner - for the "entire area of ​​the Reich reform".

Through his office until the end of 1939, Walther Sommer was involved in all major legislative proposals and ordinances directed against Jews . Sommer, who himself had embarked on a career as a career civil servant, turned out to be an “outspoken opponent of the ministerial bureaucracy”: civil servants had to “manage to disregard laws that do not conform to National Socialism […]”. He did not skimp on strong expressions and dubbed speakers from Reich ministries as "intellectual allotment gardeners". After the beginning of the Second World War , from December 1939 he was also general adviser to the Deputy Leader for the occupied eastern territories.

Discharge

In January 1941 - still under the direction of Hess - Martin Bormann wanted to fill the "State Affairs" department because Sommer was allegedly "no longer up to the demands of his office in terms of health." The historian Dieter Marek assumes that Sommer's verbal injuries and tactically unskillful attacks had become detrimental to the reputation of the agency and that Bormann wanted to deport him without losing face. Walther Sommer was appointed President of the Reich Administrative Court, newly established in 1941 . This court had been set up in place of the Prussian Higher Administrative Court and other higher administrative courts of the federal states and was given little influence by the regime.

His office as president led to complaints, so that Bormann and Hans Heinrich Lammers did not want to leave him there because of “factual and, above all, personnel policy decisions”. Because of an affair with an employee and another relationship with a married woman, Sommer was forced to request his dismissal, ostensibly for "health reasons". He resigned from the judicial service and lost his party rank without trial. To avoid disciplinary proceedings, in September 1942, Sommer asked to be released from the SS , in which he had been Oberführer since November 1936.

In 1942, Sommer tried to get a post in the occupied eastern territories, but Bormann signaled to the East Ministry that his assignment there was undesirable.

Sommer had been living as an early retiree with his family in Munich since the autumn of 1942, moved to Rudolstadt in September 1943 and divorced his wife in 1944. With his second wife, his former secretary, he moved to Jena and was drafted into the Volkssturm in spring 1944 . After the end of the war he was an American prisoner of war.

death

There are different statements in the literature about the further fate of summer. After Stolleis , Walther Sommer was imprisoned in the Soviet Union in 1946 and died there. According to other sources, Walther Sommer was arrested during a visit to Rudolstadt on October 19, 1945, imprisoned in the Weimar military prison and by the Soviet military tribunal of the 11th Panzer Division on May 24, 1945 as a "serious war criminal." “Sentenced to death. According to this, on July 4, 1946, Sommer was executed in the Soviet Union .

literature

• Helge Dvorak: Biographical Lexicon of the German Burschenschaft. Volume I: Politicians. Volume 8: Supplement L – Z. Winter, Heidelberg 2014, ISBN 978-3-8253-6051-1 , pp. 294-295.
• Dieter Marek: Walther Sommer (1893-1946) - The career of a Thuringian lawyer in the Third Reich. In: “Oldest preserves with faithfulness, friendly conceived new.” (Festschrift for Volker Wahl on his 65th birthday), Rudolstadt 2008, ISBN 978-3-00-024781-1 , pp. 505-522
• Klaus-Dieter Müller, Thomas Schaarschmidt, Mike Schmeitzner, Andreas Weigelt: Death sentences of Soviet military tribunals against Germans (1944–1947). A historical-biographical study . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2015, ISBN 978-3-525-36968-5 , short biographies on the enclosed CD, there pp. 666–667.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Klaus-Dieter Müller, Thomas Schaarschmidt, Mike Schmeitzner, Andreas Weigelt: Death sentences of Soviet military tribunals against Germans (1944-1947). A historical-biographical study , Göttingen 2015, p. 666
2. ↑ Peter Longerich : Hitler's deputy ... Munich et al. 1992, ISBN 3-598-11081-2 , pp. 20-22.
3. ↑ Peter Longerich : Hitler's Deputy ... , p. 21.
4. ↑ Dieter Marek: Walther Sommer (1893-1946) - The career of a Thuringian lawyer in the Third Reich. In: “Oldest preserved with faithfulness, friendly conceived new.” Rudolstadt 2008, ISBN 978-3-00-024781-1 , p. 511.
5. ↑ Dieter Marek: Walther Sommer ..., p. 512.
6. ↑ Klaus-Dieter Müller, Thomas Schaarschmidt, Mike Schmeitzner, Andreas Weigelt: Death sentences of Soviet military tribunals against Germans (1944-1947). A historical-biographical study , Göttingen 2015, p. 666f.
7. ↑ Michael Stolleis : History of Public Law in Germany Volume 3: Constitutional and Administrative Law Studies in the Republic and Dictatorship 1914 to 1945. Munich 1999. ISBN 3-406-37002-0 , Volume 3, p. 364 in note 72 - notation there “Walter”, dates of life match. on the Internet
8. ↑ Dieter Marek: Walther Sommer ..., p. 519.
9. ^ So with Marek and also with Ernst Klee : Das Personenlexikon zum Third Reich. Update Edition Frankfurt / M. 2005, ISBN 3-596-16048-0 .