All of those detained stood trial in front of the Beuthen special court between 19 and 22 August 1932. The historian Henning Grunwald has described the infighting at the Potempa trial between the National Socialist Lawyers’ Association, which was under the control of Hans Frank, later the Governor General in Cracow, and the newly established ‘legal advice bureau’ (Rechtsabteilung) of the SA, which was headed by the top SA lawyer Walter Luetgebrune, as a ‘veritable beauty contest’.16 Given the prominence of the case, both Frank and Luetgebrune used all means available to prevail, including intimidating their rivals and local Nazi lawyers and bestowing gifts on the defendants to win their favour. This infighting was ultimately to the detriment of the accused, as the rivalry of the Nazi jurists ‘made a smooth and effective provision of legal aid virtually impossible’.17
The judges established a version of the crime that was highly plausible, thanks to detailed testimonies of witnesses and the accused and the well-known political attitudes of the defendants. This chronology indicated that in the early hours of the evening of 9 August 1932, Nowak, the leader of SA-Sturm 26 in Broslawitz, had arranged for a group of SA men to carry out acts of political violence that would ‘terrorize the region’.18 This group then drove to Hoppe’s tavern in nearby Tworog, another notorious Nazi meeting spot. Hoppe, Sturmführer of SA-Sturm 27 in Tworog, provided the men with additional weapons and instructed them to go to Potempa. There, the local innkeeper, Lachmann, served them large quantities of alcohol and cigarettes. Together with his friend, the butcher Golombek, Lachmann also apparently provided the names of four individuals to be attacked that night.19 Pietrzuch was on the hit list. By sheer coincidence, the attack on him was the only one that proved fatal. In the course of the night, the heavily intoxicated Nazis approached two other houses as well, but they were unsuccessful in carrying out further attacks.
Lachmann later claimed that the murder expedition against the well-known but harmless troublemaker Pietrzuch was undertaken only partly because of ‘political’ reasons. Personal motives also came into play. Not only had Pietrzuch apparently insulted guests repeatedly at Lachmann’s tavern, a local Nazi hangout, and supported Polish insurgents in previous years,20 but the innkeeper also feared that Pietrzuch would publicly reveal his regular poaching trips to nearby forests.21 A Communist pamphlet additionally claimed that Lachmann, in his role as municipal administrator, had denied the unemployed Pietrzuch brothers social benefits.22 In this situation, ‘political ‘ and ‘personal’ motives were inextricably linked, as was the case with so many violent incidents in the late Weimar Republic.
On 22 August 1932 the Beuthen special court sentenced five of the attackers to death: Lachmann because of ‘incitement for political homicide’ (Anstiftung zum politischen Totschlag) and Kottisch, Wolnitza, Gräupner, and Müller for ‘homicide committed out of political motives’. Hoppe received a prison sentence of two years for ‘abetment to dangerous bodily injury’. The remaining three culprits (Hadamik, Czaja, and Nowak) were acquitted.23 The defendants reacted with shouts of ‘Heil Hitler!’ and ‘Down with the justice system!’24 During the trial they had shown a surprisingly ‘nonchalant and almost lively humour’ in the courtroom, as press reports emphasized. They had greeted several Nazi officials who attended the trial, among them the notorious Silesian SA leader Edmund Heines, with Fascist salutes, and they did not seem overly bothered by the threat of capital punishment. A local Nazi newspaper expressed support for such behaviour by claiming that if the court ‘should dare pass a single death sentence’, a storm of protest would be raised throughout the nation.25 This prediction proved true, at least on a local level and within particular segments of society: the verdict provoked fierce protests and some local acts of rebellion among the National Socialist supporters who had gathered in the streets around the courthouse in order to put pressure on the judges. The correspondent of the London Times covering the case reported that ‘the disturbances around the Court became so serious that police wearing steel helmets and armed with carbines and automatic pistols were called out’. With the support of SA units that had arrived from the Silesian capital of Breslau, the Nazis, at least on that particular day, dominated the streets in Beuthen – not only in the vicinity of the court, but also in more remote areas of the town, where the windows of several shops and of a Socialist newspaper building were smashed. Jewish shopkeepers closed down their businesses and put up their shutters.26
After the verdict, the Silesian SA leader Heines, who since September 1930 had also served as a member of the Reichstag for the NSDAP, loudly predicted that ‘the German people will soon render other sentences’. The Beuthen judgement, he added, would become a beacon of hope for the German awakening.27 Several hours later he repeated this message from the balcony of a nearby café to a crowd of followers.28 Heines felt at ease in his self-declared role of judge. Twelve years earlier, in 1920, when he had been a member of the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Roßbach, an infamous Freikorps unit fighting in West Prussia and the Baltic countries, he had ‘judged’ and executed an alleged traitor. Although the German courts ultimately sentenced him to a prison term of five years for this crime in May 1929, Heines – who had quickly regained his liberty after providing a bail of 5,000 reichsmark – soon afterwards proudly identified himself at an NSDAP party rally at the Berlin Sports Palace as a ‘Feme judge’, or a ‘judge’ in a kangaroo court.29
After the national election of 31 July 1932, the NSDAP became the largest political party in the German Reichstag. Its leader, Adolf Hitler, turned the local events in Upper Silesia into a political attack on the national government. Several hours after the verdict in Beuthen became known, Hitler sent a telegram in which he declared his ‘unreserved loyalty’ to the attackers and condemned the death sentences as a ‘most outrageous blood verdict’. Officially addressing the five men sentenced to death, he aimed to reach out to Nazi followers more broadly when he sharply criticized von Papen’s conservative government and declared a revision of the verdict a national necessity: ‘From now on, your freedom is a question of honour for all of us, and to fight against the Government which has rendered possible such a verdict is our duty.’30 Hermann Göring likewise sent a telegram of encouragement to the condemned men and provided 1,000 reichsmark to their families. The SA Chief of Staff Ernst Röhm even travelled to Beuthen and visited the SA men in prison.31
The Nazi leaders’ open defence of the Potempa murderers, although their crime caused widespread indignation and outrage in Germany as well as in the international press, becomes more intelligible by looking at the extensive ‘proclamation’ Hitler had printed in his name in the official Nazi paper Der Völkische Beobachter on 24 August 1932. With even more than his usual exaggeration, he claimed:
More than 300 massacred – one could literally say, butchered – party comrades number among our dead martyrs. Tens of thousands and even more tens of thousands have been injured . . . Only when the cup began to run over and the terror of the red bands of organized murderers and criminals became unbearable did von Papen’s ‘National Government’ rouse itself to take action . . . Whoever of you harbours sentiments to fight for the honour and freedom of the nation will understand why I refuse to join this bourgeois Government . . . We shall liberate the word ‘national’ from the grip of an objectivity whose real innermost essence is inflamed by the judgement passed in Beuthen against national Germany. Herr von Papen has thus engraved his name in German history with the blood of national fighters.32
Joseph Goebbels, already notorious for his defamatory attacks on the political opponents, added another characteristic note to the Nazi propaganda in the Potempa case: antisemitism. In a leading article for Der Angriff, the capital’s Nazi newspaper that he himself had founded in 1927 and edited thereafter, Goebbels printed in bold letters: ‘The Jews are guilty.’33 He repeated this slogan over and over again but did not establish any logical connection between the crime and his charge. Goebbels’s strategy was as simple as it was effecti
ve among Nazi followers: he deflected their feelings of anger and frustration with the verdict, as well as with the political and economic situation more broadly, onto the usual scapegoat, the Jews. Goebbels went so far as to threaten them with violence: ‘The hour will come when the Executive of the State will have other duties to fulfil than to protect from the wrath of the people those who have betrayed the people.’34 In reaction to such slander and calls for pogrom, the authorities suspended the publication of Der Angriff for a week, but with no lasting effect.
By twisting the facts and using them to form an explicit political threat, Hitler and his entourage reached out to millions of his followers, and in particular the SA, who in the summer of 1932 expected an immediate seizure of power, not further sitting on the fence. Under such a weight of expectation, the Nazi leadership speculated that, in a political climate marked by fundamental ideological conflict and mutual hatred, not too many people would care about the fate of a simple worker, especially one who was supposedly a former Polish insurgent.35 Hitler could count on his stormtroopers to perpetrate new bloody run-ins every day.36 Under the circumstances, the details of the Potempa murder would be quickly forgotten and only their political interpretations would survive. The Nazi Party and its press made every effort to shift the blame for the Potempa murder onto the victim, the Communist movement, or the ‘Judeo-Marxist system’ more generally.37 The following poem, allegedly written by an ordinary member of the SA and printed in a Silesian Nazi paper in early September 1932, illustrates the interchange of roles perfectly:
Beuthen!
Beuthen! It stands there on the horizon.
Still gleaming red and fresh.
Beuthen! Five comrades accuse
And what’s lurking behind them is death.
Germany! Don’t you hear their threats?
Not the millions’ shout?
It sounds through the streets, it roars through the land:
We want our comrades out!
An army is marching for their freedom,
Bound together by blood.
One leader, one faith and one banner,
Sustained by fealty and pluck.
The faith in people and fatherland.
The loyalty for the leader, our stand.
The bravery of the fighting brown dead,
Falling in towns and throughout the land.38
It is hard to imagine a more complete conversion: the real victim of the crime, the murdered Pietrzuch, was eliminated for a second time, now rhetorically, whereas the five murderers sentenced to death were elevated to heroes, extolled as brave men who were faithful to the Nazi cause and allegedly were supported by millions of fellow countrymen. The excuses put forth for this reaction by leading Nazis are telling of what the British journalist F. A. Voigt in 1932 called the ‘terrible barbarisation of German political life’.39 According to one article in the Nazi press, the murdered Pietrzuch was a ‘Polish rogue’ and a ‘sub-human’ who had ‘long ago forfeited the right to live on German soil’.40 In similar terms, the writer and Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg, known to the wider public as the author of the book The Myth of the 20th Century, published in Germany in 1930, justified the killing of Pietrzuch as an act of lynching – a practice he decribed as the ‘only possible corrective to an unnatural law’. In the United States, Rosenberg explained, there is ‘formal equality between the white man and the negro, but in practice there is a differential treatment’. The Nordic German was called upon to make similar and potentially lethal distinctions between ‘Aryans’, Slavs, and Jews.41
Nevertheless, the leadership of the Nazi Party was in serious trouble in the autumn of 1932. If the SA men sentenced to death were executed, the situation would become ‘unbearable’, Goebbels wrote in his diary.42 In that event, he feared that the pressure from the impatient Nazi following would become so strong that an open confrontation with the authorities, termed by Hitler the ‘guillotine Government’, might become inescapable.43 Regardless of the outcome of such a confrontation, this would have ended the alleged legal character of the Nazis’ rise to power. Luckily for them, the Prussian Staatsministerium, which after the coup of 20 July 1932 (Preußenschlag) had fallen into the hands of the Catholic reactionary von Papen, gave in to pressure from various nationalist groups and altered the death sentences to lifelong imprisonment beginning on 2 September 1932.44 The Nazi Party was thus able to maintain the pretence of being devoted to the rule of law.
Borderland Mentalities
The Potempa murder was a rather typical case for the period in that it linked the hardships of the immediate post-First World War period to the SA violence of the early 1930s. In many respects, these earlier grievances shaped the later patterns of violence within the nationalist faction in Germany as well as in some other central and eastern European states.45 With regard to the actual crime, the close collaboration between the SA and other nationalist organizations in the region was key. The two youngest attackers sentenced to death, Reinhold Kottisch and Rufin Wolnitza, were in fact not yet officially SA men, but members of the Upper Silesian Self-Defence force (Oberschlesischer Selbstschutz). Both organizations overlapped heavily in the early 1930s, as can be seen from the fact that at least Wolnitza was also a member of the NSDAP.46 Up to the time of their imprisonment, both men had lived in the ‘SA home’ in Broslawitz, where they engaged in paramilitary training that focused on the occupation of streets and forest edges, preparing for shooting battles, and the build-up of attacks by shock troops.47
The Upper Silesian Self-Defence force was an officially tolerated paramilitary organization created after the First World War to fight against the Poles in this highly contested borderland region between the German Reich and the re-established Polish state.48 In the autumn of 1918, the Poles had initially demanded that the whole area of Upper Silesia, a region developed since the nineteenth century into one of the German Reich’s industrial centres because of its rich natural coal reserves, be integrated into the new Polish state. Leading politicians as well as the public in Germany bitterly opposed this idea, insisting on national self-determination and putting forward the argument that the area was, regardless of a strong Polish ethnic element, predominantly German. They further claimed that these territories were indispensable for their national economy, which had been badly hit as a result of the recent military defeat.49 Three Polish uprisings between 1919 and 1921, inspired by the strong missionary zeal to ‘re-Polonize’ the diverse population of the region, did not help to calm the passions running high in the towns and villages of Upper Silesia.50
The activities of German Freikorps militia, commanded by men like Peter von Heydebreck, Hermann Ehrhardt, Wilfried von Loewenfeld, and Horst von Petersdorff, further increased hostilities. These militias not only engaged in fighting with the Poles but also persecuted alleged German traitors, thus demonstrating that not only linguistic and ethnic but also political boundaries were highly contested.51 The founder of the so-called ‘special police’ of the Upper Silesian Self-Defence force, Heinz Oskar Hauenstein, who later became one of the first members of the Berlin SA, claimed in a 1928 trial that his organization had been responsible for more than 200 ‘Feme murders’. The term Feme, alluding to a medieval Germanic practice of penalization, was used in interwar Germany to designate the political murder of a ‘traitor’ by perpetrators from the extreme right.52 German Freikorps also summarily executed numerous alleged Polish spies.53 One former Freikorps man later declared cynically, ‘We actually spared the bullets when killing this riffraff.’54 However, in a 1922 bill of indictment against members of the Freikorps Ehrhardt Brigade, even the Reich prosecutor in Leipzig described the anti-Polish efforts of the German militia sympathetically as acts of legitimate self-defence. He regarded them as necessary to fight off Polish attacks that were intended to ‘smash the state and economic order in Germany’ and were carried out ‘with the help of foreign powers’. In these statements, the Reich prosecutor alluded to decisions made by the Inter-Allied Control
Commission, which was widely accused of pro-Polish sympathies in Germany after the First World War.55
These currents of the immediate post-war years still reverberated in the nationalist and strongly anti-Polish sentiments of the Upper Silesian SA in the early 1930s. The group’s firm anti-democratic convictions tied in with older, well-established political beliefs in the region. Many ethnic Germans shared widespread frustration with the supposedly lenient stance of the Weimar governments on questions of national security and in particular with regard to the defence of the German border to the east.56 To a certain extent, the Upper Silesian SA was successful in passing itself off as a legitimate successor to the former Freikorps units.57 Its rhetoric drew heavily on such comparisons, and was propagated by leading men of the extreme right like Manfred von Killinger, a former Freikorps leader who later joined the SA.58 In particular, in regions close to the German frontier, the SA units presented themselves as veritable border guards, called to defend national unity against the Czechs and Poles in the east and the French in the west (Plate 6).59 The effects of such a borderland mentality were not confined to the SA alone, as the following example illustrates. After the Nazis took power, the National Socialist Teachers’ League (Nationalsozialistischer Lehrerbund) in Silesia repeatedly organized ‘training camps’ for its members. These two-week-long courses were designed to raise the ‘border-consciousness’ of German teachers, which was defined as the racial and historical awareness of Silesia’s particular role within the ‘pan-German East’.60 Since the early 1920s, many teachers had been profoundly hostile to Poland and its protecting power, France. Now, they proudly boasted of their alleged ‘German frontier perspective’ and passed these attitudes and ideas onto their disciples.61
Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler's Brownshirts Page 2