Wilhelm Murr

Wilhelm Murr

Wilhelm Murr (born December 16, 1888 in Esslingen am Neckar , † May 14, 1945 in Egg ) was a German National Socialist politician and SS-Obergruppenführer . From February 1928 until his death he was Gauleiter of the NSDAP in Württemberg - Hohenzollern , from March to May 1933 also President and then until 1945 Reich Governor in Württemberg .

Life

Murr grew up in poor conditions in Esslingen and lost his parents at the age of 14. He attended elementary school up to 7th grade. After commercial training and employment, he completed his military service from 1908 to 1910 and then worked as a commercial clerk at the Esslingen machine factory . In the First World War he was deployed on all fronts, rose to the rank of deputy sergeant and was injured in the hospital in Cottbus at the end of the war in 1918 .

Murr was involved in the German National Handicrafts Association (DHV), a right-wing conservative and anti-Semitic white - collar union that he had already joined before the war. There he came into contact with the writings of the anti-Semite Theodor Fritsch , whose views he largely made his own. At the same time he was a member of the Deutschvölkischer Schutz- und Trutzbund . He joined the NSDAP in the summer of 1923 and, after the party was temporarily banned, again in August 1925 ( membership no . 12.873). At his place of work, the machine factory in Esslingen, he eagerly recruited new comrades in arms. A workers' newspaper criticized in September 1927 that Murr's only job there was to “smuggle swastika workers into the company”. His acquaintance with Richard Drauz , who later became the NSDAP district leader in Heilbronn , whom Murr later often sponsored, also dates from this time .

After violent internal party quarrels, the Esslingen NSDAP local group leader Murr, who attracted attention here and later through ruthless and unscrupulous methods, was finally able to oust the incumbent NSDAP Gauleiter Eugen Munder from power. In February 1928 Hitler appointed him Gauleiter of the NSDAP in Württemberg-Hohenzollern. One of his rivals, whom he was able to get out of the boat, was the later Prime Minister of Württemberg Christian Mergenthaler , to whom Murr later repeatedly succumbed in power struggles. Through strict bondage to Hitler and the party leadership, Murr succeeded in consolidating his position in Württemberg. In the 1930 Reichstag election , in which the NSDAP achieved a breakthrough for the first time with an increase in the share of the vote from 2.6 to 18.3%, Murr was elected as a Reichstag representative of the NSDAP for constituency 31 (Württemberg). In October of the same year he gave up his activity in the Esslingen machine factory and started working full-time for the party. The number of members and the financial situation of the NSDAP in Württemberg improved. From the beginning of 1931 Murr was able to publish his own propaganda sheet, the NS-Kurier , in which he published numerous leading articles until 1945, which did not attract attention through intellectual brilliance, but faithfully reproduced the official party line.

On January 30, 1933, the day the seizure of power , Murr announced on Stuttgart's Schloßplatz : “We will deal with our opponents: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. But not just an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, we shall break the jaw of anyone who knocks a tooth in one of ours, and whoever knocks one of ours in the eye we will cut off his head. In March 1933, under National Socialist pressure, the Württemberg Landtag elected him President of Württemberg and successor to his political enemy Eugen Bolz . Murr also took over the Ministry of the Interior and Economics. On May 6, 1933, Murr was appointed to the newly created position of Reich Governor in Württemberg ; the office of the Württemberg state president was abolished, the state parliament deprived of all functions. His rival Mergenthaler, who had been President of the Landtag since the spring of 1932, became Prime Minister, Minister of Culture and Minister of Justice. Murr's obvious intellectual deficits were disguised as closeness to the people, and the Reichsstatthalter was presented in propaganda as a "man from the people". Joseph Goebbels, on the other hand, referred to Murr in a diary entry from July 31, 1933 as “ Parvenu ”. After his appointment as Reich Governor, Murr received honorary citizenship of numerous cities and communities in May 1933; in Böblingen he had been an honorary citizen since March 1933. On September 9, 1934 he was honorary for SS-group leader (SS no. 147545) appointed.

When Murr learned in 1938 that the Bishop of Rottenburg , Joannes Baptista Sproll , had not taken part in the referendum on the annexation of Austria on April 10, he staged a campaign against Sproll with newspaper articles and organized demonstrations, which gave the authorities the opportunity to to expel the bishop from the country and expel him to Bavaria.

At the beginning of the war in September 1939, Murr was appointed Reich Defense Commissioner in Military District V, which gave him an increase in power. Important areas of the military and civil administration were now directly under him or had to come to terms with him de facto. Without the consent of Murr or his agents, practically nothing could happen in Württemberg. The murder of the Jews and the mentally ill could go ahead smoothly because of Murr's unconditional execution of the orders of the Fiihrer and Party in Württemberg.

At the end of January 1942 he was promoted to SS-Obergruppenführer .

After increasing air raids on Stuttgart , Murr had the first premonitions of a possible defeat in 1943. Although he prepared evacuation measures for Stuttgart, he did not show anything from the outside and remained the loyal mouthpiece of Hitler and Goebbels in public. When Murr's only son Wilfried, who was deployed to the Waffen SS in Belgium, shot himself at the end of January 1944 at the age of 21 in order to forestall a court martial for two rape, Murr did not question his unconditional loyalty to the Führer and assured Hitler on March 1st to continue to serve.

Before and after the end of the war

In March 1945, Murr abandoned the evacuation plans that became known in December 1944 and called for the people of Stuttgart to be taken to the south-east on a 20-kilometer daily march and the destruction of the city. On April 10th he called for the defense of the city to the utmost and on April 13th forbade the destruction of anti-tank traps and the raising of white flags under threat of execution and kin. However, he himself fled Stuttgart on April 19 under a false name, together with his wife and other companions. The stream of refugees reached the Große Walsertal via the former Urspring Monastery near Schelklingen , Kißlegg , Wangen im Allgäu , Kressbronn am Bodensee and other stations . Murr, his wife and two adjutants stayed at the Biberacher hut until May 12th and then moved to an alpine hut above Schröcken . There they were arrested on the morning of May 13th by French soldiers to whom Murr posed as Walter Müller . The arrested were first brought to Schoppernau , then to Egg , where first Murr's wife and then Murr killed themselves with poison ampoules they carried with them. Both were buried in the Egg cemetery.

The American occupiers had put Murr on a list of potential war criminals under Proposed US Policy Directives and were looking for him. The Americans and French soon suspected that Murr might be dead and, together with the Württemberg police, started an investigation that led them to Egg. On April 16, 1946, the grave of "Walter Müller" and his wife was opened. His former Stuttgart dentist Dr. Pagel was able to clearly identify Murr from his teeth. An official protocol was recorded in Egg's town hall, which Karl Aberle published in his detailed article on “Escape and End of Reich Governor Murr” a few days after the grave was opened in the “Stuttgarter Zeitung”.

On October 13, 2011, Murr was stripped of its honorary citizenship of the city of Böblingen .

See also

• Cabinet Murr

literature

• Franz Menges:  Murr, Wilhelm. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 18, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1997, ISBN 3-428-00199-0 , p. 618 f. ( Digitized version ).
• Paul Sauer: Wilhelm Murr. Hitler's governor in Württemberg . Silberburg-Verlag, Tübingen 1998, ISBN 3-87407-282-7 .
• Joachim Scholtyseck : "The man from the people". Wilhelm Murr, Gauleiter and Reich Governor in Württemberg-Hohenzollern. In: The leaders of the province. Nazi biographies from Baden and Württemberg. (= Karlsruhe contributions to the history of National Socialism. Volume 2). 2nd Edition. Study edition. Universitäts-Verlag Konstanz, Konstanz 1999, ISBN 3-87940-679-0 , pp. 477-502, 878.
• Frank Raberg : Biographical handbook of the Württemberg state parliament members 1815-1933 . On behalf of the Commission for Historical Regional Studies in Baden-Württemberg. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 2001, ISBN 3-17-016604-2 , p. 595 .
• Hubert Roser: Wilhelm Murr. Reichsstatthalter and NSDAP Gauleiter in Württemberg-Hohenzollern 1888–1945, in: G. Taddey / J. Fischer (ed.), Life Pictures from Baden-Württemberg, i. A. of the Commission for Historical Regional Studies in Baden-Württemberg, Vol. 19, Stuttgart 1998, pp. 488-522.

Web links

• Literature about Wilhelm Murr in the catalog of the German National Library
• Wilhelm Murr, Reichsstatthalter Biography of Murr on the online portal history of the state ministries in Baden and Württemberg in the time of National Socialism
• Wilhelm Murr in the database of members of the Reichstag

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Uwe Lohalm: Völkischer Radikalismus. The history of the Deutschvölkischer Schutz- und Trutz-Bund. 1919-1923 . Leibniz-Verlag, Hamburg 1970, ISBN 3-87473-000-X , p. 314.
2. ↑ Quoted from: Karl Aberle : Flucht und Ende des Reichsstatthalters Murr: His disappearance now cleared up - He judged himself and was buried under a false name . In: Stuttgarter Zeitung , No. 36, April 23, 1946, p. 2.
3. ^ SS Personnel Office: List of seniority of the NSDAP Schutzstaffel, as of December 1, 1937, serial no.34
4. ↑ Hermann Weiß (Ed.): Biographical Lexicon for the Third Reich. Frankfurt am Main 1998, p. 329.
5. ^ Wilhelm Murr falls from the city memory .
6. ↑ The Nazi man was an honorary citizen of the city for 78 years.  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: SZBZ . October 14, 2011.