Wilhelm Ohst

Friedrich Wilhelm Eitel Ohst (born September 9, 1896 in Berlin ; † 1948 , declared dead on May 8, 1945 ) was a German SA leader.

Live and act

Origin, World War I and post-war period

Ohst was a son of the station master Wilhelm Ohst and his wife Helene, born. Ahlers. From 1906 to 1914 he attended a grammar school in Brilon.

On August 1, 1914, immediately after the beginning of the First World War , Ohst joined the Prussian Army as a volunteer, with whom he was deployed on the Western Front until 1918.

On March 6, 1915, Ohst was promoted to lieutenant in the reserve. He was then a company commander for two and a half years and, at the end of the war, a department leader of the 3rd Battalion of the 25th Infantry Regiment. During the war, Ohst was wounded several times (shot in the thigh and leg as well as gas poisoning), so that after the war he was considered 70% war-damaged. He was also awarded the Iron Cross of both classes and the Knight's Cross of the Hohenzollern House Order.

After the end of the war, Ohst and the voluntary Landesjägerkorps took part in the fighting that broke out after the collapse of the Empire between the supporters of a socialist revolution and the Freikorps fighting the revolution. He then went to the Baltic States with the 2nd Company of the Jäger Corps, where he remained until the Baltic Army was dissolved. After his return to Reich territory, he joined the Reichswehr Regiment 62 in Düsseldorf, with which he participated in the fight against revolutionary uprisings in the Ruhr area.

After the French army marched into the Ruhr area in early 1923, Ohst took part in the fight against the occupation forces undertaken by radical nationalists in the form of sabotage. He was involved in the demolition of bridges. At this time he also came into contact with Franz Pfeffer von Salomon .

Because of his activities in fighting the French occupation forces, Ohst was sentenced to death in absentia by a French court martial. Soon afterwards he was arrested by Belgian troops in Neuss , but was able to escape from custody before a possible extradition to the French.

Further life in the Weimar Republic (1924 to 1933)

After the end of the Ruhr War, Ohst was a member of the Black Reichswehr in the Association of Military District Command 6 in Münster until the end of 1925. At that time he fell ill with smoldering pneumonia, which led to severe pulmonary tuberculosis. As a result, he spent the years 1926 to 1930 in hospitals and lung sanatoriums.

In the 1920s and early 1930s Ohst worked as a state lottery taker in Berlin, where he lived at Berliner Straße 33b and later at Weidenweg 79.

Since 1931 at the latest he was a member of the Sturmabteilung (SA). According to the card index, Ohst joined the NSDAP on December 30, 1931 (membership number 1.067.972), although he himself claimed to have been a member as early as 1925. At the end of 1931 he was appointed SA leader for special use in Sturmbann 1/5. In 1931 he took part in the implementation of the anti-Semitic Kurfürstendamm riot .

In March 1932 Ohst received the position of SA leader z. b. V. in the SA subgroup Berlin-East.

In July 1932 Ohst was briefly a staff leader in the SA sub-group Magdeburg-Anhalt in Dessau as a Sturmbannführer .

From October 1932 to the summer of 1934 Ohst was Sturmbannführer z. b. V. in the group staff of the SA group Berlin-Brandenburg, first under Wolf-Heinrich von Helldorff and then under Karl Ernst. In this capacity he was entrusted with the execution of special tasks on various occasions.

Activity in the initial phase of the Nazi regime (1933 to 1934)

In February 1933, Ohst, at that time with the rank of SA-Sturmbannführer, was installed by Hermann Göring as the SA's liaison to the police in the Berlin police headquarters.

Soon thereafter, on the occasion of the ban on the Berliner Tageblatt on March 21, 1933 , Göring appointed Ohst as commissioner of the Reich government to bring the Mosse publishing house into line : In this position, he was responsible for the measures to liquidate this traditionally liberal publishing house as a force dissident towards National Socialism and instead bring him to the National Socialist line. As a minder and controller, he was particularly concerned with overseeing the editorial team and even the publishing house's rotary printing presses in order to ensure that the content of the publications published by Mosse-Verlag, in particular the daily and foreign newspapers of the publishing house, complied with the specifications the new rulers stood. As part of Ohst's "cleansing" of the editorial staff from the Nazis, he dismissed elements that were unpleasant. a. 118 Jewish publishing employees from their positions.

At the same time, Ohst undertook several trips abroad on behalf of Goebbels: During a visit to Lugano , for example, he tried to convince the former editor-in-chief of Berliner Tageblatt Theodor Wolff , who had fled , to return to Germany and take over the editor-in-chief of the newspaper again. He made a similar offer to Hans Lachmann-Mosse . The then 13-year-old George L. Mosse later described Ohst as follows:

"Ohst was dead, like so many SA men from the very beginning, and was expelled from the NSDAP in 1934 on charges of instigating tavern fights, leading a loose lifestyle and committing murder." ( "Ohst was a thug , like so many early members of the SA, and in 1934 he would be expelled from the party for starting barroom brawls, for loose living, and for murder. " )

On March 24, 1933 Ohst arrested the clairvoyant Erik Jan Hanussen in his apartment on Lietzenburger Strasse on behalf of the newly appointed SA group leader of Berlin-Brandenburg Karl Ernst, together with SA people Rudolf Steinle and Kurt Egger . Ohst and the two SA men are also considered to be the likely murderers of Hanussen. Ohst accused his cronies of murder as early as 1934, but explained his understanding for the crime: "In my opinion, Hanussen is one of the greatest criminals."

On January 27, 1934, Ohst himself was arrested. He was accused of having misused the SA uniform and the name of the SA group leader Ernst for business purposes. He was also accused of having managed money in an irresponsible manner as a lottery taker and of having obtained personal advantages by taking over Mosse. Ohst defended himself by pointing out that “I did not use a penny of the state lottery money that was missing for me personally, that I used it for them in the difficult time of the party and SA.” He also argued that Göring was for explained his work in connection with the takeover of the Mosse house, during which he claims to have released 138 Jews: “Dear Ohst, for you I am no longer Prime Minister, for you I am just a comrade.” He was finally found innocent and unencumbered dismiss.

Resignation from the SA and further life in the Nazi state (1934 to 1945)

In connection with the Röhm affair in the summer of 1934, Ohst was arrested again. After six weeks of “honorary imprisonment” in the Columbia-Haus concentration camp , he was released on August 18, 1934.

Shortly after his release, SA special court proceedings were initiated against Ohst because of his connections with the Berlin SA chief Ernst who was executed in the Röhm affair. He was u. a. his involvement in the murder of Hanussen on behalf of Ernst as well as his participation in carousing bouts and the embezzlement of state lottery money. On September 29, 1934, the special court suggested that the Supreme SA leadership should release Ohst from the SA. After the latter approved this proposal, the special court officially decided in its session on October 23, 1934, the dismissal of Ohst from the SA, with the dismissal of his rank and position.

Shortly afterwards, he was accused of having had contacts with gentlemen at the French embassy, ​​under new charges. In an SA court of honor, he was expelled from the SA on September 27, 1934, on the grounds that "it would mean a slap in the face for every SA man and SA leader, since his personality and his actions were not involved are to be brought into harmony with the spirit of the SA. "

From 1935 on, Ohst was the managing director of the Association of German Traders and publisher of the German coal newspaper. The publisher Deutsche Kohlenzeitung passed into his possession in autumn 1938 - now entered in the commercial register as Deutsche Kohlenzeitung Verlag Wilhelm Ohst.

Remaining after the Second World War

Ohst's last confirmed sign of life is a letter from March 1944, in which he informs the Charlottenburg district court that the coal newspaper's publishing premises were badly damaged in an air raid. In November 1944, according to his wife, he was drafted into the Volkssturm.

His whereabouts after the end of the war is unclear: According to the German War Graves Commission, Ohst has been missing or missing since the Second World War. He was declared dead by a decision of the Charlottenburg District Court on September 9, 1948, with May 8, 1945 being formally set as the date of death. After the war, his wife said an acquaintance had last seen him on May 2, 1945 in Berlin. He is said to have been shot by communists in the last days of the war.

When the Berlin public prosecutor tried to trace him in connection with the murder of Hanussen in the 1960s, he turned out to be impossible to find. In an internal memo, however, the investigators assumed that the man who was living with Ohst's wife at the time was none other than Ohst himself, who had acquired a new identity after the war. According to the assumption, even in the post-war years, Ohst had himself officially reported as missing in the war in order to be able to go into hiding under a new name and avoid political and legal persecution and, if necessary, to obtain survivor benefits for himself and his wife.

Archival material

Various documents on Ohst have been preserved in the Federal Archives: the holdings of the former Berlin Document Center include an SA personnel file, a file with party correspondence and an SA court file (SA-P microfilm D 98, images 1765-2020) on Ohst .

literature

• Kurt Schilde : SA prison Papestrasse , 1996.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Margret Boveri: We all lie. Walter Olten, 1986. p. 77.
2. ↑ Bernd Sösemann: Theodor Wolff. A life with the newspaper , 2000, p. 294.
3. ^ Georg Lachmann Mosse: Confronting History. A Memoir , 2000, p. 46.
4. ↑ Alexander Bahar / Wilfried Kugel : Reichstagbrand (2001), p. 650. As a result, they shot him in the barracks of the SA field police in Pape-Strasse.
5. ↑ Shields: SA prison , p. 33.
6. ↑ Kurt Schilde: SA prison Papestrasse , 1996, p. 32.
7. ↑ German War Graves Commission