Willi Veller

Willi Veller

Wilhelm "Willi" Veller (born October 9, 1896 in Witten an der Ruhr , † June 22, 1941 in Bredauen ) was a German politician (NSDAP).

Live and act

Veller was born in 1896 as the son of an independent businessman. After attending primary and secondary school, Veller volunteered at the beginning of the First World War . As a member of the 171 Infantry Regiment, he was wounded three times and promoted to Vice Sergeant. In 1915 he was appointed officer aspirant. In 1916, Veller was taken prisoner by Russia. He was imprisoned in Siberia until 1918 . After the Russian Revolution he was able to flee and return to Germany, where he returned to his old regiment. During his vacation, Veller enrolled at the University of Bonn , where he later became a Dr. phil received his doctorate. However, the University of Bonn announced that this should actually be ruled out, because Veller's name does not appear in any list of doctoral candidates. In August 1918 Veller joined the aviation replacement department in Altenburg. After the war, Veller entered his father's business. After his father's death in 1928, he took over the business, but in 1930 his business went bankrupt.

In 1924 Veller joined the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP). At the same time he became a member of the Sturmabteilung (SA), in which he reached the rank of SA Brigade Leader and was appointed SA Leader for the Düsseldorf subdistrict. In the late phase of the Weimar Republic , Veller took part as SA leader in numerous battles in the hall, street fights and other physical disputes with political opponents and competitors of the Nazi movement. In a letter that Veller wrote to Gregor Strasser in February 1933 , he stated that during the Weimar period he had been tried more than thirty times for his political activities, including eight for assault. Karl Ibach described the street fighter Veller as an "unscrupulous murder boy". In November 1929 Veller became a city councilor in Wuppertal and remained so until 1933.

In the general election of September 1930 Veller was as a candidate of his party for the constituency 22 (Dusseldorf East) in the Reichstag voted, of which he was subsequently until November 1933rd The most important parliamentary event in which Veller took part during his time as a member of parliament was the passing of the Enabling Act in March 1933, which formed the legal basis for the establishment of the Nazi dictatorship and which, among other things, was passed with his vote. He was a member of the Reichstag until November 1933.

Veller celebrated, as so often, in various pubs in Wuppertal until the early hours of the morning and often hit the bill for alcohol orgies. The neurologist Göring, a relative of the then Prussian interior minister and later Reichsfeldmarschall Hermann Göring, certified in writing that Veller had a massive alcohol problem. In November 1932, after a carousing party, he drove through the valley in his company car until four in the morning and shot while drunk at uninvolved passers-by and going to work. A young worker was injured. Nevertheless, he was promoted to high positions shortly after the seizure of power.

Life in the Nazi State (1933 to 1941)

In July 1933 Veller was appointed acting police chief of Wuppertal. In this function he organized the persecution of political opponents of National Socialism in the city and the enforcement of the commune with violence and terror. Karl Ibach describes the position of power that Veller enjoyed on this provincial level by characterizing him as the "little Göring Wuppertal". In addition, he was appointed SA brigade leader at the same time and one month later charged with the management of SA brigade 72 (Wuppertal).

In this position, Veller set up the Kemna concentration camp , a so-called "wild" one, because it was not recognized by government agencies, in which Veller had his political opponents imprisoned. Veller had the warehouse set up on the site of an empty cleaning wool factory near Wuppertal-Beyenburg. Veller had previously held political opponents in the basement of the headquarters of his personal staff in Jägerhof Palace in the center of Düsseldorf and had them tortured by his SA staff guard. The rumors circulating in the Wuppertal population about the mistreatment of the prisoners in Kemna by the SA guards finally led the public prosecutor to initiate an investigation, which, however, soon petered out. The investigating public prosecutor was transferred to a criminal offense, and the proceedings were filed without a hearing.

Veller was one of eight higher Wuppertal SA leaders who were group leader Heinrich Knickmann , the special representative of the Supreme SA leader, d. H. Hitler's, to regulate the situation in Wuppertal on December 15, 1933 in honorary detention or leave of absence. On February 15, 1934, he was relieved of his position as the leader of the Wuppertal SA standard for embezzlement of party funds and corruption and demoted. As an SA standard leader he was transferred to the staff of SA upper group 4 (Dresden). In March 1934 he was finally released from his duties as Wuppertal police chief.

An investigation by party offices of the Kemna events initially led to an order from Hitler's personal staff to exclude Veller and six other SA men from the party for mistreating “ prisoners ” in Kemna. This decision was made on 19./20. In February 1935, after an objection by Veller, it was overturned by the NSDAP Supreme Court in Munich . Instead, Veller's sentence was limited to a warning. From January to December 1936 Veller was entrusted with the management of SA Standard 211 (SA Group Pomerania), from July 30th as SA Oberführer . From January 1, 1937 to November 30, 1939, he was the leader of SA Brigade 22 (Küstrin). In April 1938 he was unsuccessfully proposed for the Reichstag. From November 1939 he was police chief of Oberhausen. Formally, he remained so, after he was sergeant on September 3, 1940. R. and was sent to the war on the Eastern Front as a platoon leader, where he died on June 22, 1941 in Bredauen in Lithuania.

literature

• Markus Kiel: From a purely national socialist point of view - the critically viewed biography of the SA leader and Wuppertal police president , ISBN 978-3-89688-630-9 , Münster, 2019
• Erich Stockhorst: 5000 people. Who was what in the 3rd Reich . Arndt, Kiel 2000, ISBN 3-88741-116-1 (unchanged reprint of the first edition from 1967).
• Joachim Lilla , Martin Döring, Andreas Schulz: extras in uniform: the members of the Reichstag 1933–1945. A biographical manual. Including the Volkish and National Socialist members of the Reichstag from May 1924 . Droste, Düsseldorf 2004, ISBN 3-7700-5254-4 , p. 683 .
• David Minert: Willi Veller - An SA thug in the office of the Wuppertal Police President , slea
• Erich Stockhorst: 5000 people. Who was what in the 3rd Reich . Arndt, Kiel 2000, ISBN 3-88741-116-1 (unchanged reprint of the first edition from 1967).
• Joachim Lilla , Martin Döring, Andreas Schulz: extras in uniform: the members of the Reichstag 1933–1945. A biographical manual. Including the Volkish and National Socialist members of the Reichstag from May 1924 . Droste, Düsseldorf 2004, ISBN 3-7700-5254-4 , p. 683 .

Web links

• Willi Veller in the database of members of the Reichstag

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Markus Kiel: From a purely national socialist point of view - the critically viewed biography of the SA leader and Wuppertal police president , 2019
2. ↑ Hans-Ulrich Thamer : Seduction and violence. Germany 1933-1945. The Germans and their Nation , 1986, p. 181.
3. ^ ^{A b} Karl Ibach: Kemna. Wuppertal concentration camp 1933-1934 , 1983, p. 26.
4. ↑ Markus Kiel: From a purely national socialist point of view - The critically viewed biography of the SA leader and Wuppertal police president , 2019
5. ↑ ^{a b} Joachim Lilla , Martin Döring, Andreas Schulz: Extras in Uniform: The Members of the Reichstag 1933–1945. A biographical manual. Including the Volkish and National Socialist members of the Reichstag from May 1924 . Droste, Düsseldorf 2004, ISBN 3-7700-5254-4 , p. 683 .
6. ↑ Helmut Heiber : files of the party chancellery of the NSDAP , 1983, p. 56.