Feme murders
The Feme ('fā-mə) murders (German: Fememorde) were a series of murders in the Weimar Republic between 1919 and 1923 carried out by German far-right groups against individuals they believed had committed treason against them by betraying their secrets. They were considered a distinct category from politically motivated assassinations of public officials. By the time the Feme murders ended, they had claimed almost 400 victims. In spite of a number of investigations, few of the perpetrators were ever identified or prosecuted.
Number of victims[edit]
Nearly all of the Feme murders occurred during the turbulent early years of the Weimar Republic. A peak was reached in 1923 when hyperinflation, Allied occupation of the Ruhr, Adolf Hitler's Beer Hall Putsch, and separatist efforts shook Germany. By 1924 a total of nearly 400 of their political opponents[4][5] had fallen victim to right-wing radical and National Socialist assassinations by the Organisation Consul, the Viking League, the Black Reichswehr, the Sturmabteilung Roßbach, the Bavarian Citizens' Defense and their successor organizations. Within the Black Reichswehr, First Lieutenant Paul Schulz commanded a special unit that killed those who were seen guilty of betraying the country by leaking military secrets.[6]
Reactions[edit]
The first to attempt to study the phenomenon systematically and for all of Germany was the statistician Emil Julius Gumbel, who in 1922 presented the paper Four Years of Political Murder (later updated under the title From Feme Murder to the Reich Chancellery). Gumbel was subjected to serious threats because of the study.
While the Weimar judiciary rigorously prosecuted leftists involved in the German Revolution of 1918–1919 and in the political activities of the Bavarian Soviet Republic, police and judicial investigations of the Feme crimes were slow, and the murderers, insofar as they were identified, got off with light sentences or even acquittals. Mid-level military officers such as Paul Schulz of the Black Reichswehr were eventually convicted and imprisoned before an amnesty for the Feme murders was declared in 1930, but Germans who exposed the killings were tried and convicted for insulting the military establishment for their role in doing so, even when their allegations against the military were true.[7]
The obvious deficiencies in law enforcement were matters of concern for several parliaments during the Weimar period. In 1920 the state parliament of Bavaria set up its own investigative committee to look into the Feme murder of Reichswehr soldier Hans Dobner. In 1924 the state parliament in Prussia set up a "Political Murders" investigative committee, and two years later instituted a second. In November 1925 the journal Die Weltbühne published an unattributed article by Carl Mertens, a German officer and pacifist, about the Feme murders of more than twenty members of right-wing groups.[8] In January 1926, at the request of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), an investigative committee of the Reichstag, under the name "Feme Organizations and Feme Murders", was set up to clarify the crimes and their political environment in parties, the Reichswehr and the judiciary.[9] The project was hindered from the beginning by the right-wing majority in the parliament, the Bavarian judicial authorities' refusal to cooperate,[10] and not least by the indecisiveness of the SPD itself.[11]