Willi Schmidt (SA member)

Karl Oswald Willi Schmidt (born May 2, 1907 in Friedelshausen , Meiningen district , Saxony-Meiningen , † March 8, 1972 in Freiburg im Breisgau ) was a German SA leader.

Live and act

Youth and the Weimar Republic (1907 to 1933)

Willi Schmidt grew up as the son of the businessman Rudolf Schmidt and Lina Arnold in Friedelshausen. When Schmidt was fourteen years old, the family moved to Berlin . There he attended the Albrecht-Dürer-Oberrealschule in Neukölln up to Tertia. Then he worked practically and in the office of his father's laundry company.

In 1924 Schmidt began to work for the first time in circles of the political right: In that year he became a member of the national sports association Olympia, and then on November 25, 1924 or January 28, 1925, he joined the Neukölln local group of the federal Oberland . After the dissolution of the Confederation, Schmidt was automatically accepted into the Berlin section of the National Socialist Sturmabteilung (SA), which was founded for the first time on March 15, 1926 . He did not join the NSDAP until October 1 or December 1, 1930 ( membership number 388.091).

After spending a year in Bavaria in 1928, Schmidt lived again in Neukölln or Pankow from 1929 . In the Berlin area, Schmidt, who became known in the SA under the nickname "Schweinbacke", became notorious in the following years as a bully and thug, who also attracted the police's attention for his constant involvement in street and hall battles between the National Socialists and Communists and Social Democrats. Before 1933 he had five criminal records for breach of the peace, damage to property, possession of weapons and bodily harm. The Gestapo chief Rudolf Diels described him after 1945 as "the most outstanding manslaughter figure of the Berlin SA, an original, cozy felon". Brigadefuhrer Schwarz, who was temporarily in charge of him, confirmed that he had “all bad qualities of a mercenary ” in a unanimous judgment .

In SA circles, Schmidt was particularly considered to be a crony of the adjutant or chief of staff of the Berlin SA, Karl Ernst . It was also serious who accepted Schmidt on April 1, 1931, from SA Storm 27, into the staff guard he led. In the spring of 1932 Schmidt joined the staff of the Berlin SA sub-group East with the rank of troop leader.

time of the nationalsocialism

Early years (1933 to 1934)

After the National Socialist seizure of power in the spring of 1933 and Ernst's appointment as leader of the SA group in Berlin-Brandenburg , Schmidt became a member of the SA liaison staff there. He was considered to be the "man for the rough" in the "companionship" around Ernst.

Werner Schäfer , the commander of the Oranienburg concentration camp , who worked with Schmidt in 1933, described him as an “extraordinarily active and active National Socialist” who had “played an important part in clearing Berlin of dangerous red elements through personal commitment”.

On August 4, 1933, Schmidt took over the leadership of SA Storm 22/3. On October 1 of the same year he was taken on as a detective assistant in the Secret State Police Office, after he had previously completed a three-month training course.

On June 30, 1934, Schmidt, at the time assigned the rank of SA-Hauptsturmführer to SA-Sturm 51/3, was arrested in connection with the Röhm affair in Berlin. He therefore resigned from the police force. After a temporary stay in the Gestapo's house prison , he was taken to the Lichtenburg concentration camp with the reprimand “in no way suitable for release” . From there, after a few months in prison, he was transferred back to the Gestapa and released from there.

After his release from prison, Schmidt worked as a driver and local group administrator for the German Labor Front until November 30, 1935. He was then unemployed until he was given a position at the Office for People's Welfare in October 1936, where he left after only one week due to his renewed arrest by the Gestapo. In the SA he can be proven in 1935 as Sturmhauptführer in Sturm 10/3.

Involvement in political murders and in the Reichstag fire in 1933

Schmidt has been linked several times with the murder of the prominent clairvoyant Erik Jan Hanussen in late March 1933. The involvement in the killing of the Berlin boxer Erwin Volkmar , who was shot in April 1933 in the course of a fight in Berlin-Neukölln, is considered certain . In a short report by the Gestapo immediately after the incident it was said: “The shooter is Sturmführer Willi Schmidt, who z. Wore party uniform at the time of the incident. "

Schmidt's participation in the murder of the communist Albrecht Höhler , who shot SA storm leader Horst Wessel in 1930 , is also certain . On September 20, 1933, Schmidt claims to have been summoned by Karl Ernst to the police prison on Alexanderplatz . There he took over Höhler from the police together with Ernst, the Gestapo chief Diels and a few others and then took him by car to a wooded area outside Berlin, where Höhler was shot.

According to an assertion made by Diels in 1950 - but not yet substantiated - Schmidt kidnapped and murdered former SA member Adolf Rall in November 1933 . He had been in prison since 1932 and claimed there in 1933 that the SA was responsible for the Reichstag fire of February 1933. According to an article in Spiegel from 1961, the motive for the act was the efforts of the SA to silence Rall in this way. This was to prevent him from making further allegations that were detrimental to the reputation of the SA and the Nazi state.

Schmidt was also seen in direct connection with the actual event of the Reichstag fire. For example, Hans Bernd Gisevius claimed that Schmidt was a member of an SA command that had entered the Reichstag building undetected and set it on fire. This claim was taken up repeatedly in the scientific literature on the Reichstag fire by the proponents of National Socialist authorship of the fire.

1934 to 1945

Although numerous SA leaders close to Schmidt, such as Karl Ernst, Walter von Mohrenschildt and Daniel Gerth, were shot on orders from the state leadership in the course of the Röhm affair , he made no move to change his way of life. Much more, he continued to attract negative attention from his superiors and the authorities in the familiar way. During disciplinary investigations, the SA leadership found that Schmidt regularly got drunk and, when drunk, started quarrels and fights with " national comrades ".

On February 19, 1936, Schmidt attacked the innkeeper Emil Schüssel in his restaurant by slapping him in the face and throwing a beer glass on his head with the comment:

"I'm the well-known SA leader in Berlin, pig cheek, you're lucky I'm not in shape tonight, otherwise you would go through your own windows."

On the same occasion, Schmidt mobbed a former Prussian officer with the remark: "I am a royal Prussian Obersturmbannführer of the SA".

In 1935 Schmidt was punished by a court for dodging . In 1936 he did not comply with a summons on another matter, so that he had to be brought before the court . Later in the same year there was an SA honorary procedure for neglect of service, getting into debt, failing to flag at festive occasions and brawls.

By a judgment of the 12th Large Criminal Chamber of the Berlin Regional Court on November 17, 1936, Schmidt was finally brought to court for two cases of robbery and robbery that had occurred in April 1933 and sentenced to a two-year prison term. On April 12, 1938, Philipp Bouhler, the head of the Führer’s office, obtained the suspension of the sentence against Schmidt and the suspension of the remaining sentence with a three-year probation period, so that the last six months of his sentence were waived.

By decision of the Second Chamber of the SA Disciplinary Court of the OSAF on March 18, 1938, Schmidt was permanently dismissed from the SA on a punishable basis, with dismissal from his rank and position.

In 1937, the Berlin SA leader Hermann Walch - now head of the prisoner camp in which Schmidt was imprisoned - attributed in an assessment of his constant clashes with state power to the fact that he was "the bully type" who "made the change after the seizure of power “Couldn't find it. So he was not able to "switch from fighting the state to the legal state structure". At the same time, the SA group Berlin-Brandenburg came to the conclusion in a judgment on Schmidt that his own "passion for thugs", which he did not know how to control, had become his undoing.

After his release from prison in autumn 1938, Schmidt worked as an employee (local group administrator) at the German Labor Front local group Richardplatz in Berlin-Neukölln and for the National Socialist Welfare Association , for which he had already worked for a week in October 1936.

On July 4, 1938, Schmidt was expelled from the NSDAP by decision of the Berlin Gaugericht. Schmidt's request for a mercy re-entry into the party in 1939 was rejected by the Fuehrer's office on May 24, 1939, on the grounds that the misconduct on which his exclusion was based were so serious, even if his services were taken into account, that he would not be re-accepted could. Previously, the deputy Gauleiter of Berlin, Arthur Görlitzer , the Gaugericht Berlin and the SA had recommended that the law firm reject the application. He was given the prospect, however, that if he could prove himself through long years of impeccable lifestyle and active cooperation in the associations affiliated to the party, he could approach the Fuehrer's office with a petition for clemency again in the future, and then with better prospects of success .

Schmidt had been married to Elfriede Erika Pallagst since 1934. The couple lived at Parchimer Allee 91 in Berlin-Britz, but soon separated again. The marriage resulted in at least two children (* 1934 and 1936).

post war period

In 1968 Schmidt was tracked down and interrogated by the investigative authorities in the Albrecht Höhler murder case . At that time Schmidt, meanwhile remarried and father of other children, ran a nursing home in Berlin-Heiligensee . However, since Schmidt could only be found completing the murder of Höhler - which, in contrast to murder, was already statute barred - no charges were brought against him.

Lore

Various personal documents on Schmidt have been preserved in the Federal Archives: For example, a personal file from the Office for People's Welfare (Bundesarchiv Lichterfelde: NS 37/3837) as well as various files in the holdings of the former Berlin Document Center (SA-P microfilm D 243, images 605-2918; OPG microfilm I 39, photos 185-242).

Individual evidence

1. ^ Rudolf Diels: Lucifer ante Portas , 1950, p. 243.
2. ↑ Our "cheek" celebrates engagement , in: The attack of October 30, 1933 (with photo by Schmidts).
3. ^ Diels: Lucifer ante Portas , 1950, p. 243.
4. ^ Daniel Siemens: Horst Wessel. Death and Transfiguration of a National Socialist , 2009, p. 223.
5. ↑ quoted from: Volker Banasiak / Barbara Hoffmann: Lebenslaufen und Schicksale , in: Udo Gößwald / Barbara Hoffmann (eds.): Das Ende der Idylle? Horseshoe and Krugpfuhlsiedlung in Britz before and after 1933 , ISBN 978-3-944141-01-5 , Berlin 2013, p. 348.
6. ^ Daniel Siemens: Horst Wessel. Death and Transfiguration of a National Socialist , 2009, p. 212 f.
7. ↑ Rudolf Diels: Lucifer ante Portas , 1950, p. 305 and "The last witness", in: Der Spiegel 6/1961.
8. ^ Gisevius: Until the bitter end , vol. 1, p. 93.
9. ^ Pierre Grégoire: The Reichstag Fire 1978, p. 159.
10. ↑ Volker Banasiak / Barbara Hoffmann: CVs and fates , in: Udo Gößwald / Barbara Hoffmann (eds.): The end of the idyll? Horseshoe and Krugpfuhlsiedlung in Britz before and after 1933 , ISBN 978-3-944141-01-5 , Berlin 2013, p. 349.
11. ↑ Volker Banasiak / Barbara Hoffmann: CVs and fates , in: Udo Gößwald / Barbara Hoffmann (eds.): The end of the idyll? Horseshoe and Krugpfuhlsiedlung in Britz before and after 1933 , ISBN 978-3-944141-01-5 , Berlin 2013, p. 349.