Walther Stennes

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Walther Stennes

Walther Franz Maria Stennes (born April 12, 1895 in Fürstenberg , Westphalia , † May 19, 1983 in Lüdenscheid ) was a German politician and SA leader.

Life

Youth and First World War

Walther Stennes was born in 1895 as the son of the bailiff and officer Fritz Stennes and his wife Louise, b. Bering, born. From the age of ten to fifteen he was educated in the cadet institute at Bensberg Castle near Cologne. In 1910 he moved to the Hauptkadettenanstalt Berlin-Lichterfelde , where Hermann Göring and Gerhard Roßbach were among his classmates.

After Stennes had passed his Abitur in the summer of 1913 , he was transferred to the war school . In August 1914, at the beginning of the First World War , he received his officer license and moved to Belgium as a lieutenant with the 3rd Westphalian Infantry Regiment No. 16 . He was wounded on August 23. In Flanders he witnessed the so-called Christmas Peace of 1914, in which German and British soldiers on the front fraternized to celebrate Christmas together. During the war he received several awards: in May 1915 he was awarded the Iron Cross 1st Class and in June 1917 the Knight's Cross of the House of Hohenzollern . In 1918 he received the Lippe War Merit Cross , the Hanseatic Cross and the Wound Badge in silver.

Freikorps, Security Police and Black Reichswehr (1919 to 1928)

In December 1918 Walther Stennes was retired from the army as first lieutenant. At the suggestion of Ewald von Kleist he placed a volunteer corps to the "Voluntary Company Stennes" which was composed of many former soldiers of the Infantry Regiment. 16th It was secretly trained at Varlar Castle near Coesfeld . This resulted in the Hacketau Freikorps, comprising around five hundred men . With this he went against uprisings and strikes by workers in Coesfeld, Dülmen , Bocholt , Münster and Düsseldorf . In Hamm he was able to suppress a workers' strike entirely.

During the civil war battles for the Ruhr area in March 1919, Stennes was deployed by the commanding General von Watter as military commander in Hamm town and country. His free corps occupied the Radbod , de Wendel , Saxony and Westphalia mines around Hamm . The Radbod colliery on strike was kept in operation by the troops, thus securing the gas supply for the city of Münster.

On July 19, 1919, Stennes was employed in the security police at the Berlin Police Headquarters : On August 1, 1919, he was given command of a hundred for special use (e.g. V.) of the Berlin Security Police , whose special task was to protect the government district and guard the Government should be in the event of civil war and civil unrest. During the Kapp Putsch in March 1920, the Hundred z. b. V. is not very loyal to the republican government: Instead of defending the government, it went over to the putschists and even provided guard duty together with soldiers from the Ehrhardt Marine Brigade in Charlottenburg, wearing the badge of the radical right-wing " Bund national-minded soldiers " wore. Nevertheless, Stennes was promoted to police captain on June 12, 1920.

After Stennes on August 22, 1921 from the leadership of the Hundred z. b. V. had been delivered, he was transferred to the internal office of the departmental command on December 1, 1921 and transferred to the staff of the Zehlendorf police department on January 1, 1922. Soon afterwards, on February 28, 1922, he left the police force entirely at his own request. In later years, many rumors circulated about Stennes' tenure at the Security Police: And he shall within the hundred a special unit called "ring men" have launched the political assassinations perpetrated and coup plans prepared against the Republic. In particular, the mysterious death of sergeant Buchholz , the treasury manager of the Hundreds, in 1920 was repeatedly blamed by the press on the wrestling men and attributed to the fact that he had discovered arms smuggling and was about to disclose it.

In autumn 1922 Stennes joined the " Black Reichswehr ". As the commander of Fort Hahneberg , he directed the illegal military training of young men from the various nationalist associations. In October 1923 Stennes took part in the Küstriner putsch of the "Black Reichswehr". Heavy police and Reich Defense units first had to be raised to persuade Stennes to give up Fort Hahneberg, where he had holed up with his heavily armed rebels.

In 1924, Stennes temporarily returned to the private sector: with the severance payment for his pension, he opened a power truck company in Tempelhof, which failed, however.

In the further course of the 1920s, Stennes continued to participate in conspiracies against the republic, involvement in female murders and the smuggling of arms, as well as assassination plans - especially against social democratic politicians - but none of these allegations could be proven. House searches of him and his followers between 1925 and 1928 were always unsuccessful.

In his contradicting double role as an officer in the security police and at the same time opponent of the Weimar Republic, Stennes made numerous contacts until around 1925, which soon made him one of the best-networked men on the political right . On the one hand, he worked closely with Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann , but at the same time he was in constant touch with opponents of the republic such as Waldemar Pabst , with whom he had been friends since 1920. However, Stennes maintained most of his political relationships with Kampfbund leaders as well as with newsmen like Hanns Reinholz or Herbert von Bose , the husband of his cousin Thea Kühne. Stennes had also met Adolf Hitler in 1920 - through Erich Ludendorff . However , in 1922 Hitler turned down Hitler's offer to take control of the Sturmabteilung (SA), the fighting formation of the Nazi movement. Instead, the pilot's captain Hermann Göring became the first leader of the SA.

SA leader (1928 to 1931)

In May 1927, Stennes joined the National Socialists. He initially took over the management of the SA in the Berlin district. On September 30, 1927, he was appointed OSAF East, d. H. as regional commander-in-chief of the SA in East Germany, with the expansion of which he was entrusted: In this capacity, the SA units of Berlin, Brandenburg , East Prussia and Pomerania , which made up a third of the entire SA, were subordinate to him . In addition, from that time Stennes was deputy of Franz Pfeffer von Salomon , the chief of staff of the SA as a whole organization.

On the occasion of the Reichstag election in 1930 , Stennes urged Hitler to give more consideration to SA leaders on safe list positions, which was not taken into account. A further deterioration in Stennes' relations with Hitler and the NSDAP resulted, on the one hand, from the material hardship that prevailed in large circles of the SA and, on the other hand, from fundamental tactical differences that were becoming increasingly clear: During Stennes, a government takeover Since the failure of his coup in 1923 , Hitler had committed himself to gaining power exclusively by legal means by winning a parliamentary majority in elections. Stennes flatly rejected a number of demands that Stennes made of Hitler (to put a large number of SA men on the list of candidates for the Reichstag of the NSDAP, payment of SA guards for hall security services, etc.). Stennes reacted to this by having his SA men occupy the Berlin headquarters of the NSDAP and the editorship of the Berlin party newspaper The Attack on August 30, 1930 (so-called first Stennes mutiny). The SS guards were beaten up on this occasion. Gauleiter Joseph Goebbels , just in Breslau, called on Hitler for help and hurried back to Berlin himself. Hitler, who was only able to persuade Stennes to give in temporarily, then deposed Pfeffer von Salomon, who had shown himself incapable of keeping Stennes in check, as chief of staff of the SA and appointed Ernst Röhm in his place . In addition, Stennes was closely monitored and spied on, for example by the Hitler-loyal doctor Leonardo Conti , who was assigned to the Berlin SA as a medical officer.

In 1931, the conflicts between Stennes and the party leadership escalated in the so-called Stennes Putsch : Stennes acted openly in response to an order issued by Hitler on February 20, 1931, which demanded that the Berlin SA should provisionally comply with an emergency ordinance of the Brüning government and no longer take part in street fighting repugnant. Hitler saw his legality course at risk, including the possibility of a renewed party ban. On March 31, 1931, Stennes was dismissed from his position as OSAF-Ost by Hitler and Röhm and transferred to the Munich party headquarters, which was practically the same as a demotion. Stennes decided to violently oppose his removal: On April 1, he had the party's office and the editorial office of the attack occupied by his supporters, in the hope of splitting the Nazi movement and taking over the majority of the SA Swing in course. He brought out the number of the attack the following day himself. The relocation of the premises could only be achieved with the help of the Berlin police. In the following weeks, Stennes appeared publicly as a promotional speaker on his own behalf: He justified his actions by denouncing the extravagance and boncentre of the party leaders as well as the betrayal of the socialist principles of the party program of the NSDAP . Although he met with strong echoes with slogans such as “What is more important: the soles of the SA or a palace for the party bosses?”, Stennes was only able to persuade about a third of the Berlin SA to openly revolt against Hitler. Hitler immediately had Stennes deposed as head of the Berlin SA. In practice, his power was broken by the acting Berlin SA chief Paul Schulz , the Berlin SS leader Kurt Daluege and Edmund Heines . Stennes later stated that if charisma played a role in quelling his revolt, it was Schulz's charisma, not Hitler's. In the period that followed, all of Stennes' sympathizers were expelled from the NSDAP .

Instead, Stennes founded the National Socialist Struggle Movement in Germany (NSKD).

Political rival of the NSDAP (1931 to 1933)

Politically, Stennes fought against the NSDAP until 1933. So he got involved in the election campaigns of 1932 against the party and at the end of 1932 offered the then Chancellor Kurt von Schleicher to make his organization available to him in a new election campaign for the dispute with the NSDAP. In spite of considerable differences in content, Stennes also maintained close contacts with Otto Strasser and other “renegade Nazis” who turned against them after they left the Nazi movement. Stennes later stated that he was only interested in the SA and never in the party. He rejected Hitler's legality course, which aimed at gaining power in the state with the help of a party within the given political system. Instead, he sought a restructuring on the basis of a popular popular movement and without a party, which he saw as a concession to the existing system.

When the Prussian state government decided on a special fund to protect democracy in April 1932, its finance minister Otto Klepper also worked to support the "Black Front", especially that of Walther Stennes. In the days before the “ Preußenschlag ” he was brought by Klepper to a meeting with Heinrich Hirtsiefer and Carl Severing and he knew how to present the information from the Reichswehr Ministry that Franz von Papen had gone to Neudeck, “to give von Hindenburg powers of attorney for a coup d'état allow". When the evidence had solidified, Klepper proposed to the ministry three days before the coup that Stennes should lead a hundred people for special use who were to arrest anyone who entered the ministry without authorization; even a counterattack on the head of the Reich seemed legitimate to him if necessary. Only Hirtsiefer supported him.

Period of exile (1933 to 1949)

After the National Socialists came to power in the spring of 1933, Stennes emigrated with his wife and daughter . The information about the circumstances of his escape / departure differ considerably: while Hans Graf von Lehndorff , a doctor from East Prussia close to the conservative resistance, reported in his memoir Menschen, Pferde, Weites Land that his mentor, the Nazi opponent Carl von Jordans , Who helped Stennes to flee abroad in a “night and fog” campaign, there are also letters in Stennes' estate in the Institute for Contemporary History that suggest that Stennes after a temporary detention - some sources speak of four months of solitary confinement - in Columbiahaus was released thanks to the intercession of his uncle, the Archbishop of Cologne, Cardinal Karl Joseph Schulte , and the papal nuncio Cesare Orsenigo, as well as the protection of Göring. Goering had made him promise to leave the country immediately and not to settle in Switzerland.

Stennes then emigrated to China via the Netherlands and England . On November 19th, Stennes and his wife arrived in Shanghai on board the steamer Ranchi . In China, Stennes worked as a military advisor for Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang movement until 1949 . His efforts were aimed at reorganizing the army and police forces of the Chinese nationalists along the lines of the Prussian armed forces. He also commanded Chiang Kai-shek's two thousand-man bodyguard.

Stennes remained unmolested by German diplomats and secret service agents during his stay in China. He even had almost friendly relations with the Gestapo representative in Japan, Josef Meisinger . Nevertheless, Stennes is said to have constantly feared National Socialist attacks on his life. He refused to obey several requests to return to Germany, which reached him after the outbreak of World War II . Jay Taylor even assumes that Stennes had ties to the Soviet spy at the German embassy in Tokyo, Richard Sorge , who informed him in 1941 of the impending German attack on the Soviet Union . Stennes is said to have passed this message on to Chiang, who leaked it to Josef Stalin through Zhou Enlai .

After Japan occupied large parts of China , Stennes narrowly escaped arrest. Conversely, after the war the Americans briefly demanded his extradition after he refused to denounce former Nazis in Shanghai who had collaborated with the Japanese army . Chiang Kai-shek saved him from this fate by appointing him to the Chinese military commission.

Return to Germany

After his return to Germany in 1949, Stennes tried his hand at regional politics in Lower Saxony, where he took over the organization of the German Social Party of Agriculture Minister Günther Gereke for the state elections in May 1951 . Then Stennes withdrew into private life. He filed an application for recognition as a victim of the National Socialist tyranny, which was rejected by the Federal Court of Justice in 1957 . In a testimony for the court proceedings in 1949, Otto Klepper described Stennes' services as valuable and personally risky and, in a letter from April 1954, added his assessment that Stennes had fundamentally turned away from the ideology of National Socialism . In his later years he lived in Bruges , a district of Lüdenscheid .

family

In 1930 Stennes married Hildegard Borkenhagen in Berlin. The couple had a daughter.

Fonts

  • Westphalia is more than just a rain canopy. In: Rainer Schepper (Hrsg.): Westphalia among themselves about themselves. Frankfurt 1978.

literature

  • Charles Drage : When Hitler went to Canossa. Biography of Walther Stennes. Berlin 1982 (Original: The Amiable Prussian. London 1958).
  • Karl-Heinz Janßen : The warrior Walther Stennes. In: Ders .: ... and tomorrow the whole world. German History 1871–1945, Bremen 2003, pp. 155–176.
  • Karl-Heinz Janßen: The warrior. The life of an uncomfortable subordinate: Walther Stennes. In: The time . November 30, 1979 and December 7, 1979.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. both spellings appear in the literature Walter and Walt h he as spellings of names on Stennes. While Stennes' first name is written Walter (without h) in his birth certificate, he himself practiced the spelling Walther (with h). See e.g. E.g. the letter from Stennes to Thilo Vogelsang dated February 16, 1957, in which he gives his first name in the letterhead as Walther (with h) (see IfZ: Zeugenschrifttum Stennes 1, p. 11 ( available in digital form on the IfZ website ).
  2. Inscribed marginal note on Stennes' birth certificate. In the literature, May 18, 1989 is often mistakenly given as the date of death and Fürstenberg as the place of death.
  3. Malcolm Brown: Christmas Truce. 1984, p. 129 and passim.
  4. cf. Horst Conrad: Municipal archives of the district of Siegen and the Hochsauerland district, private archives in Rheda and Hamm - activity report, May 1979 – May 1980. In: Archive maintenance in Westphalia and Lippe. No. 14, December 1980, p. 13 ff.
  5. a b c Astrid von Pufendorf: Otto Klepper (1888–1957). German patriot and citizen of the world. Oldenbourg Verlag, Munich 1997, pp. 128, 130 u. 134.
  6. Kurt Schilde: Columbia House. Berlin concentration camp 1933–1936. 1990, p. 194, assumes August 1933 as the most likely time for Stenne's release from the Columbia house.
  7. Jay Taylor: The Generalissimo. Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China. 2009, p. 181.
  8. Jean Michael Plamier: Weimar in Exile. 2006, p. 220.