Werner Lass

Werner Lass (actually Werner Laß ; born May 20, 1902 in Berlin ; † February 6, 1999 in Karlsruhe ) was a German journalist, publisher, nationalist youth leader and head of the Reich Press Office in the Reich Press Office of the NSDAP .

Youth and youth movement

The son of a city veterinarian attended grammar school and then found a job as a volunteer in various Berlin bookshops until 1923. As a schoolboy he became a member of the Alt-Wandervogel (AWV) association, where he participated in the so-called Pachantei in the southeast of Berlin at the Spittelmarkt . He joined the Young Germany Federation in 1921. This federation was an overarching umbrella organization of the fatherland youth organizations. But here he failed with the attempt to enforce nationalist efforts more strongly.

Via Sepp Fürstenau, he made contact with the Austrian group of the Sturmvolk Youth League, Bund deutscher Jugend , which had existed since 1920. Following this example, Lass built youth groups out of AWV groups, so that in 1923 he was elected leader of the entire federation at a Bundestag session in Austria.

Building a nationalist youth group

From 1923 to 1924 he trained as a trainee at the Darmstädter und Nationalbank and then from 1924 to 1925 he worked as an assistant in a bookstore. His efforts to propagate a proletarian freedom movement could not be realized in the whole federation, so that in 1924 he separated his groups from the whole federation “Bund deutscher Jugend” and in January 1925 founded the follower federation Sturmvolk, Deutsche Jungenschaft .

In 1925, he began studying economics at the University of Berlin. He also attended a seminar for newspaper studies. He deepened his new knowledge in this subject from 1926 to 1927 as a volunteer and employee at the magazines Arminius and Standarte . With the participation in the gatherings of the Bundischen youth near Weißenstadt in the Fichtelgebirge in 1923 and the commemoration of the dead in the summer of 1924 he tried to form a "Hochbund" as an amalgamation of the youth associations, which however did not succeed.

Foundation of the Schill Youth

The former Freikorps leader Gerhard Roßbach had started in Salzburg in 1924 to build up a youth organization, the Schilljugend . Lass meanwhile leaned towards the idea of ​​a "military youth movement", so that in 1926 he affiliated the allegiance to the Schill youth. He laid out his concept in March 1926 in the text Wehrhaft Jugendbewegung . Lass was appointed second federal leader by Roßbach at the Bundestag of the Schilljugend, which took place in Friedberg (Hesse) .

But here, too, Lass was unable to realize his concept of the nationalist youth league, so that in 1927 at Whitsun in Rathenow he founded his own association, the Schill Freischar . While the Bund initially recruited its members from the Sturmvolk Bund and the Schill Youth, it soon expanded across the empire by joining similarly minded groups from the youth and military movement. The federal government carried out training trips, border trips and trips abroad and trained the members to be pre-military according to the manual Der Reibert .

National revolutionary contacts

This development gave rise to contacts with national revolutionary circles. From September 1927 Lass published the magazine Der Vormarsch - Blätter der Nationalist Jugend , from October 1927 to April 1928 together with Ernst Jünger , who was also the patron of the Freischar. When the Schleswig-Holstein rural people's movement carried out bomb attacks in Schleswig-Holstein in 1928, Lass was arrested together with his financial adviser Hans Gerd Techow , but released for lack of evidence. The arrest led to the "Freischar Schill" being banned from school. In the same year an international youth congress with 31 nations took place in Ommen / Netherlands, at which a world youth association was to be founded. With Hans Ebeling , Lass wrote an appeal for a declaration by the young nationalists in which they rejected this project.

Contacts to the NSDAP

Lass was already in contact with the NSDAP in 1926 and 1927 . He had been a party member since September 1928 (No. 97.154), but was expelled in August 1929 for failure to pay his membership fees. He took part in leadership conferences and met Ernst Röhm , Adolf Hitler , Rudolf Hess , Julius Streicher , Joseph Goebbels and Franz Pfeffer von Salomon . Baldur von Schirach offered him the leadership of the Hitler Youth in 1929 . After an agreement with Alfred Rosenberg , Lass was able to present his ideas in an article from May 1929 in the magazine Akademischer Beobachter under the title Kampf der Jugend or Kampf um die Jugend . But the contacts with the NSDAP did not lead to any rapprochement. After all marched in August 1929 on the Nazi Party nor a delegation of "Freischar Schill" to Adolf Hitler over, while also forward was present.

After that, the contacts with the NSDAP were broken off because the ideas about the youth movement proved to be incompatible. In order to strengthen educational work, which placed greater emphasis on a “new nationalism and German socialism”, the Confederation of Confederations was founded in September 1929 as the “Elderly Association of Schill Freischar”. Lass also made contact with the KPD and KPO through Arno Deutelmoser . From January 1930 to July 1931, he and Ernst Jünger published the weekly newspaper Die Kommenden , in which Karl Otto Paetel (1906–1975) took on the role of chief editor from April 5, 1931.

Separation from the confederates and end of the "Freischar Schill"

From September 1931 to mid-February 1933 Lass published the magazine Der Umsturz - Kampfblatt für die German Socialist Revolution as an organ of the "Freischar Schill". The voices of radical nationalists, revolutionary activists and radical socialists of all directions should have their say. Contributions etc. a. published by Otto Bickel, Heinz Gollong , Erich Müller-Gangloff , Hans-Joachim Firgau , Arno Deutelmoser and Hans-Gerd Techow.

The starting point for this group formation was a meeting in December 1930 of the leaders of the “Confederation” and the “Freischar Schill” near Northeim in the Levershausen youth hostel . The motto of this conference was: "New Nationalism and National Socialism". The evaluation of the results of the deliberations was published in the journal Das Junge Volk in issue 1/2 of 1931.

As a result of this meeting, the Confederates and the "Freischar Schill" separated themselves from each other with their tasks. In 1932 Erich Holberg took over the management of the "Freischar Schill". Lass took a stand against the NSDAP in February 1933 after the National Socialist " seizure of power ", whereupon the magazine Der Umsturz was confiscated and banned. The "Freischar Schill" was excluded from the Reich Committee of German Youth Associations and then banned by Heinrich Himmler until May 1933. Several leading forces from the "Confederation of Confederations" (including Arno Deutelmoser and Otto Bickel) subsequently joined the resistance group around Friedrich Hielscher and the associated "Independent Free Church" Hielscher.

Activity in the Nazi press

Lass now had to reorient himself professionally and became the chief editor of several newspapers. Then, with the concentration of the press in the hands of the NSDAP, he was active in the entertainment service for so-called “Führerbl Blätter” in Dessau, Magdeburg, Bayreuth, Gera and Dresden. From 1935 he was head of the Reich Press Office in the Reich Press Office of the NSDAP . On August 29, 1936, he married Gerda Lennoch. On May 1, 1937, he was re-admitted to the NSDAP (No. 5.410.048). He was head of the Gau main office at the Reichsstatthalter of Braunschweig and Anhalt Rudolf Jordan and spell leader in the HJ regional staff in Dessau . In 1938 he moved his residence to Vienna and took over the management of the press office of Gauleiter Josef Bürckel . During the war he was also the chief editor of the Ostmark-Woche and the front-line magazine “ Voice of the Homeland” .

Lass was exempted from military service in March 1943 as "indispensable". On September 1, 1943, he received the War Merit Cross, 1st Class. Towards the end of the war he volunteered for the Volkssturm and was slightly wounded in the Battle of Berlin . In mid-May 1945 he managed to escape to Kabelitz .

Post-war activities

After the war, Lass worked in a variety of professions, for example as a forest worker, peat cutter , cowherd, corpse bearer and hotel manager. At times he headed the news office of the German sewing machine industry and worked as a correspondent for the Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung . Then he returned to the job he had learned and took the position of sales manager at Deutscher Buchverlag . Until 1969 he headed the Dettmar publishing house in Essen . Until 1974 he advised advertising agencies and worked as a freelancer and agent in the publishing industry. In 1975 he retired. Most recently he lived in Grötzingen .

Publications

• One way. Newsletters. Published by the Bund “Sturmvolk, deutsche Jungenschaft”, Magdeburg, Tauentzienstr. 8, 1925.
• with Karl Klaus Krebs: Tent castles of youth. We besiege and conquer Magdeburg. Voggenreiter, Potsdam 1937.
• (Ed.): Landser laugh. Front humor of this war. 8th edition. Central publishing house of the NSDAP Eher, Berlin 1944.

literature

• Stefan Breuer, Ina Schmidt: The coming ones. A magazine of the Bündische Jugend (1926-1933). Wochenschau Verlag, Schwalbach / Ts. 2010.
• Hinrich Jantzen: Names and Works - Biographies and Contributions to the Sociology of the Youth Movement , Volume 4. Frankfurt / Main 1977.
• Werner Kindt (Ed.): The German youth movement 1920 to 1933. The Bundische Zeit . Eugen Diederichs, Düsseldorf 1974 (documentation of the youth movement III).
• Armin Mohler : The Conservative Revolution in Germany 1918–1932 . Ares-Verlag , Graz 1999, ISBN 3-902475-02-1 .
• Ina Schmidt: Bündische Jugend between right and left. Werner Laß, the Freischar Schill and the Confederates in the Weimar Republic . Wochenschau-Verlag, Schwalbach / Ts. 2017, ISBN 978-3-7344-0477-1 .

Web links

• History of the Schill Youth 1924-1933 ( Historical Lexicon of Bavaria )
• Literature by and about Werner Lass in the catalog of the German National Library