Willi Schmid

Wilhelm Eduard Schmid (around 1930)

Wilhelm Eduard "Willi" Schmid (born April 12, 1893 in Weilheim in Upper Bavaria; † June 30, 1934 in or near the Dachau concentration camp ) was a German music critic and poet . Schmid became known as a music critic of the Munich Latest News and as an erroneous victim of the National Socialist "cleansing" action known as the Röhm Putsch .

Life

Youth and education

Extract from the dissertation of Wilhelm Eduard Schmid

After attending school, Schmid studied at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich . As a participant in the First World War, he was shot in the stomach. After returning from the war, he continued his studies, which he obtained with a doctorate as Dr. phil. completed. His dissertation, which was supervised by Alois Fischer and Albert Rehm , deals with the topic of the position and sources of the preventive idea at Don Bosco in connection with the educational situation of his time . The oral exam took place on July 22, 1922. The work was released for printing on July 6, 1923.

Career as a music critic

As a practicing musician, Schmid played the cello and studied the viol under Christian Döbereiner . He founded the Munich Violin Quintet and went on concert tours with it in Germany and Italy. In the 1920s he became known as a journalist. He wrote widely read music reviews for the Bayrischer Kurier and the Münchner Neusten Nachrichten as well as for magazines such as B. the Swiss music newspaper .

assassination

On the evening of June 30, 1934, around 7:20 p.m., Schmid was arrested by several SS people in his Munich apartment as part of the political cleansing action, known as the Röhm Putsch , and taken to the Dachau concentration camp , where he was on the same day - without first to have been properly interrogated - was shot. The shooting probably took place between 11 p.m. and midnight and was probably carried out by the head of the detention bunker of the camp, Johann Kantschuster . Schmid left behind his wife and three children. The corpse was handed over to his relatives in a sealed coffin under the railway overpass near Dachau on the evening of July 3, with the prohibition on opening it.

In the older literature, Schmid's murder was attributed to a mix-up of his person with the Munich SA group leader Wilhelm Schmid or with the SA standard leader, Hans Walter Schmidt , the adjutant of the Silesian SA leader Edmund Heines . Later long been a confounding Schmi d s with the doctor Ludwig Schmi dd , in 1933 Otto Strasser , the leader of the Black Front , a secessionist elimination of the NSDAP, had helped in the escape abroad - assumed. This thesis was found earliest in Heinz Höhne , in his book The Order under the Skull . Later she was u. a. Taken over by the Hitler biographer Ian Kershaw .

Hans-Günter Richardi , however, provides the most source-based information about the background to Schmid's murder in his 1993 book Secret Files Gerlich / Bell . In this, he refers to investigations by the Munich public prosecutor's office into the murder of Schmid from the late 1940s, which for a Confusion with another employee of the Münchener Neuesten Nachrichten by the name of Paul Schmitt : These investigations would have shown that the head of the SS security service, Reinhard Heydrich , had been enemies with the aforementioned Paul Schmitt, since 1933 together with Josef Müller (the later founder of the CSU) had tried to take action against Himmler and Heydrich via Rudolf Hess . In April 1934 Heydrich therefore instructed Walter Ilges , an employee of the SD main office in Munich, to put a “Schmidt Latest News” on the SD's internal blacklist, thinking of Schmitt. On June 22, 1934, when the preparations for the liquidation of all persons on the SD's black list had been initiated, the Director of Criminal Investigation Schreieder was commissioned by the Bavarian Political Police by the Government Councilor Brunner to determine the address of Schmidt. Schreieder then explored Schackstrasse No. 3 as an apartment. However, this was a mistake, as this was not the address of the sought-after employee of the Münchener Neuesten Nachrichten named Schmidt (i.e. Paul Schmitt), but that of another employee of this newspaper, who happened to also be Schmid (namely Wilhelm Eduard Schmid). As a result of this mix-up, the wrong MNN employee named Schmidt / Schmitt / Schmid (Schmid) was arrested on June 30th and taken to Dachau.

On July 6, 1934, an obituary notice was published in the Münchener Neuesten Nachrichten, reporting the death of Schmid, who "suddenly divorced our group as a result of an accident." On July 31, 1934, Rudolf Hess went to Schmid's widow and apologized for her accidentally shot and assured her that "not a shadow of guilt" would fall on her husband.

The eulogy at Schmid's funeral was given by the priest and poet Peter Dörfler . The philosopher Oswald Spengler , a friend of Schmid, dedicated the text Poem and Letter to him in 1935 . Willi Schmid's memory , which is contained in the edition of Spengler's speeches and essays .

family

Wilhelm Schmid was married to Katharina Schmid, née Tietz (born May 13, 1899 in Schwerin; † July 15, 1985 in the USA). The children Thomas, Hedi and Renate "Duscha" Schmid Weisskopf emerged from the marriage and later married the physicist Victor Weisskopf . She wrote the book Willi Schmid about her father . A Life in Germany . Katharina ("Käthe") Schmid left Germany with her children in 1937 and married the extreme mountaineer and physicist Hermann Wilhelm Hoerlin in Austria in July 1938 . In 1939 their daughter Bettina Hoerlin was born. The family moved to the United States shortly thereafter. On July 7, 1945, Katharina Schmid, now Kate Eva Hoerlin, gave a notarized affidavit to a New York authority about the arrest and murder of her first husband, which was attached to the indictment of the Nuremberg trials . She referred to a possible mix-up with the SA leader Willi Schmidt.

Fonts

• Position and sources of the preventive thought in Don Bosco in connection with the educational situation of his time , Munich 1923. (Dissertation)
• Unfinished Symphony , R. Oldenbourg Verlag, Munich / Berlin 1935
• Willi Schmid's estate can be found in the City Archives of Munich

Individual evidence

1. ^ Date and place of birth according to Wilhelm Kosch / Carl Ludwig Lang: Deutsches Literatur-Lexikon. Biographisch-Bibliographisches Handbuch , 1994, p. 298.
2. ↑ Hans-Günther Richardi: Secret files Gerlich / Bell, p. 181.
3. ↑ Heinz Höhne : The order under the skull. The history of the SS. 1967, p. 110.
4. ↑ For example in Joseph Alexander Leighton: Social Philosophies in Conflict. Fascism & Nazism, Communism, Liberal Democracy. 1937, p. 33. Martin Broszat , Elke Fröhlich : Bavaria in the Nazi era. 1977, p. 365. Douglas G. Morris: Justice Imperiled. The Anti-Nazi Lawyer Max Hirschberg in Weimar Germany. 2005, p. 317.
5. ↑ Heinz Höhne: The order under the skull. The history of the SS. 1967, p. 110; Ian Kershaw : Hitler, 1889-1936. Hubris , 1999, p. 515. See also Len Deighton: Winter. A Novel of a Berlin Family. 1987, p. 331 and Bernt Engelmann: Auf Gut Deutsch. A Bernt Engelmann reader. 1981, p. 108. The latter gives the motive for the crime that Schmitt was an “intimate connoisseur of the brown celebrities”.
6. ↑ Hans-Günther Richardi: Secret files Gerlich / Bell, p. 181.
7. ^ Duscha Schmid Weisskopf: Willi Schmid, A Life in Germany. Boston, Massachusetts, 2012.
8. ↑ Nicholas Mailänder : The Hoerlin Letters, Nanga Parbat & National Socialism, illustrated text accompanying the program of the Bavarian Broadcasting Corporation from June 28, 2016 online
9. ^ Bettina Hoerlin: Courage. In the shadow of Nanga Parbat 1934. The true story of the mountaineer Hermann Hoerlin and a life-threatening love. Innsbruck 2014; Bettina Hoerlin: Steps of Courage. My Parents' Journey from Nazi Germany to America. AuthorHouse, Bloomington 2011, ISBN 978-1-4634-2618-7 Online excerpt of the English edition
10. ↑ DOCUMENT 135-L Affidavit by Kate Eva Hoerlin, Given in New York, July 7, 1945 . In: Trial the major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal Nuremberg. November 14, 1945 - October 1, 1946. pp. 581–587 [1]