Manfred Freiherr von Killinger (14 July 1886 – 2 September 1944) was a German naval officer, Freikorps leader, military writer and Nazi politician. A veteran of World War I and member of the Marinebrigade Ehrhardt during the German Revolution, he took part in the military intervention against the Bavarian Soviet Republic. After the Freikorps was disbanded, the antisemitic Killinger was active in the Germanenorden and Organisation Consul, masterminding the murder of Matthias Erzberger. He was subsequently a Nazi Party deputy in the Reichstag and a leader of the Sturmabteilung, before serving as Saxony's Minister-President and playing a part in implementing Nazi policies at a local level.
Purged during the Night of the Long Knives, he was able to recover his status, and served as Nazi Germany's Consul in San Francisco between 1936 and 1939. As Ambassador to the Slovak Republic in 1940, he played a part in enforcing antisemitic legislation in that country. In early 1941, Killinger was appointed to a similar position in Romania, where he first became noted for supporting Ion Antonescu during the Legionary Rebellion. Together with his aide Gustav Richter, he attempted to gain Romania's participation in the German-led Final Solution, thus pressuring Romanian authorities to divert focus from their own mass murder of Jews. Killinger oversaw German presence in Romania until 1944, and was the target of a notorious 1943 pamphlet by writer Tudor Arghezi. He committed suicide in Bucharest, days after King Michael's Coup of 23 August 1944 toppled the Antonescu regime.
Biography
Military career and Freikorps leadership Born in Gut Lindigt (now part of Nossen) in the Kingdom of Saxony, and raised an Evangelical-Lutheran,Göring, p.315 Killinger was from an aristocratic Swabian-Frankish family originally from the "knightly territory" of Kraichgau in Baden-Württemberg. He completed his primary education in Nossen, and gymnasium in Meissen and Freiberg, becoming a cadet of the Ritter-Akademie in Dresden.
After 1904, Killinger was a cadet in the German Empire's Naval Forces, where he trained as a torpedo boat operator. Fighting in World War I, he was commander of the torpedo boat V 3, and took part in the Battle of Jutland (Skagerrakschlacht). Killinger rose to the rank of lieutenant commander.Winkler, p.178
After the conflict, Killinger became politically oriented towards the far right. He soon became involved with the paramilitary anti-communist organization known as the Freikorps, which was the conservative and nationalist reply to the German Revolution. He joined the Marinebrigade Ehrhardt, a unit of the Freikorps, and was commander of a storm company within the brigade.Göring, p.315-316; Wette, p.54, 55 Killinger was in Munich during the bitter fighting between the Freikorps and the Communist Party-dominated Red Guards of the Bavarian Soviet Republic.Confino & Fritzsche, p.95; Lembcke, p.135 He later indicated that, during the conflict, he had disfigured captured Red GuardsConfino & Fritzsche, p.95 and had ordered a female Communist sympathizer to be whipped "until no white spot was left on her backside".Killinger, in Confino & Fritzsche, p.95; in Lembcke, p.135
Subsequently, Killinger was also involved in the Kapp Putsch against the Weimar Republic, provoked by the authorities' decision to disarm the Freikorps; following that, he organized another paramilitary group under the name Union of Front-Line Veterans, and joined the Munich-based antisemitic secret society known as the Germanenorden, which proclaimed its allegiance to the Aryan race and the Germanic peoples.Wette, p.55; Winkler, p.178
Organisation Consul and Erzberger's killing Killinger belonged to the antisemitic organization, Deutschvölkischer Schutz- und Trutzbund. By 1920, he also became a leader in the Organisation Consul.Göring, p.315; Wette, p.54-55; Winkler, p.178 As such, he helped to plan the murder of Matthias Erzberger, former Minister of Finance, who had become a target as early as 1918, when he had signed his name to the Armistice of Compiègne.Wette, p.54-55 He personally supervised the way in which Heinrich Tillessen and Heinrich Schulz, the people charged with assassinating Erzberger (both members of the Germanenorden), carried out their task.Szejnmann, p.38; Wette, p.54, 55; Winkler, p.178 He is also alleged to have masterminded the 1922 murder of Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau.Moravek Perou De Wagner, p.113; Szejnmann, p.38
The murder provoked a series of street rallies called by the Social Democrats and the Independent Social Democrats, who were joined by the Communists.Winkler, p.178-179 In parallel, the far right press equated Killinger's squad with Wilhelm Tell and Charlotte Corday.
In August, the Joseph Wirth cabinet and President Friedrich Ebert advanced legislation giving Minister of the Interior Georg Gradnauer the power to ban anti-republican organizations.Winkler, p.179 This caused an uproar in Bavaria, which was then ruled by the right-wing People's Party-led coalition of Gustav Ritter von Kahr, who accused Wirth of favoring the Left. The dispute became entangled with that over Bavaria's long-standing state of emergency, which the federal government, unlike the Bavarian officials, wanted to see abolished. The crisis ended in September, when Kahr lost the support of his own party and resigned.
Facing trial over his implication in the murder as Tillessen and Schulz escaped to Hungary, Killinger was acquitted by an Offenburg court in mid-June 1925Morris, p.107; Winkler, p.178 (after the end of World War II, Schulz and Tillessen were sentenced to prison terms). He became a high level functionary in the Organization ConsulMorris, p.107; Wette, p.55-56 and the Viking League.Szejnmann, p.38 Around 1924, he was also involved in secret rearmament program, by setting up an enterprise in the Spanish locality of Etxebarria, and secretly experimenting with submarines.A Program for German Economic and Industrial Disarmament, p.576
Nazi beginnings and leadership of Saxony In 1927, the Viking League was outlawed and, as a result, Killinger joined the Nazi Party, which had been created by Adolf Hitler.Göring, p.316; Szejnmann, p.38; Wette, p.56 In 1928, he was elected to the Landtag in Saxony, and, in the election of July 1932, to the Reichstag from electoral constituency 28, Dresden–Bautzen. He retained a seat in this body until the end of the Nazi regime, switching to constituency 14, Weser-Ems, at the election of March 1936 and to constituency 23, Düsseldorf West, at the election of April 1938.Freiherr von Killinger entry in the Reichstag Members Database In parallel, Killinger was an SA-Obergruppenführer of the Sturmabteilung (head of the SA Mitteldeutschland, and, after 1932, head of the SA-Obergruppe V in Saxony, Thuringia, and Saxony-Anhalt).Göring, p.316
On 10 March 1933, after Hitler established the Nazi regime, Minister of the Interior Wilhelm Frick authorized Killinger to take control of Saxony as Reichskommissar, and to depose the Minister-President Walther Schieck (a member of the German People's Party).Szejnmann, p.21, 38 As this happened, Sturmabteilung and Schutzstaffel troopers clamped down on leftist organizations throughout the region, and raised the swastika flag on official buildings.Szejnmann, p.21-22 Three days later, Killinger banned all non-Nazi paramilitary groups active in Saxony, as thousands of people spontaneously affiliated with the Nazis.Szejnmann, p.22 He also issued an order creating a special counter-intelligence unit to report on "Bolshevik activities", and, on April 4, ordered a new Landtag and local councils to be formed on the basis of results in the previous Reichstag elections. In this, he arguably profited from the fact that far left parties had already been banned.
As the resulting cabinet was being introduced by Killinger, Nazi Gauleiter Martin Mutschmann was appointed Reich Governor (Reichstatthalter) of Saxony. Social Democrats, the one opposition force inside the Landtag, were subject to and violence persecutions, and many interned in newly created concentration camps. Their local section was officially banned on 23 June 1933, leaving the Nazis in absolute control over Saxony. At the same time, Hitler reportedly called on Killinger not to allow violence to degenerate into disorder, and to confine repression to the left and members of the German Jewish community. Over the following years, Nazi violence in Saxony would specifically target Communists and Jews.Szejnmann, p.23-24
In May, Killinger took over the office of Minister-President;Christmann, p.86; Wette, p.56 he also became the Saxon Minister of the Interior, which brought him control over local police forces. In his first official acts, Killinger removed the modernist Otto Dix from his positions as professor and rector of the Dresden Academy of Arts,Plumb, p.33 and dismissed the Democratic Party's Mayor of Dresden, Wilhelm Külz (altogether, nine out of twenty mayors in large Saxon cities resigned as a direct result of Nazi pressures).Szejnmann, p.22-23 In September, Dix's artworks were mockingly showcased in large exhibit of "degenerate art" held in Dresden.
In June 1934, Hitler, together with Hermann Göring, and Schutzstaffel leader Heinrich Himmler, launched the Night of the Long Knives, during which the Sturmabteilung was purged and many of its leaders, whom Hitler viewed as potential rivals, were killed (Ernst Röhm included). Killinger, a leader in the SA, barely survived the purge, and was deposed from all his offices a few days after Röhm died.Szejnmann, p.23 Almost a year later, in March 1935, he was replaced as Saxony's Minister-President by Mutschmann.Christmann, p.86; Szejnmann, p.23 This also constituted the final stage in a prolonged power struggle between the former Reichskommissar and Mutschmann. Later in the year, Killinger was appointed a member of the Volksgerichtshof, or German People's Court, but his career in the Nazi justice system was a brief one.
Early diplomatic career and Legionary Rebellion In 1936, Killinger started a new career in Germany's diplomatic service. From 1936 to early 1939, he was sent to the United States as Germany's first Consul General in San Francisco."German Slays His Staff..."; "Missions"; Wette, p.56 According to Time, Killinger, who had allegedly grown "unpopular" in the United States, was "recalled to the Reich to report on the bombing of a Nazi freighter in Oakland Estuary [in November 1938]"."Missions" He was replaced by Fritz Wiedemann, Hitler's personal aide, whose mission, according to Time, was "to smooth ruffled U. S.-German relations and sell the Nazi regime to an unsympathetic U. S."
In 1940, Killinger was appointed as Germany's Ambassador to the newly created Slovak Republic. In the latter capacity, he intervened in the competition between, on one side, the pragmatic authoritarian Ferdinand Ďurčanský and, on the other, the fascist Jozef Tiso and Vojtech Tuka's Hlinka Guard, asking for Ďurčanský to be dismissed (which occurred in the same month).Browning, p.207
Over the following period, Killinger was charged with increasing German control over Slovakia by organizing bodies of Nazi advisers—one of them was Dieter Wisliceny, a collaborator of Adolf Eichmann, who was charged with seeing an end to the "Jewish Question".Browning, p.208 Starting in September, Wisliceny helped implement a series of racial antisemitic measures, which contrasted with previous religious discrimination policies and culminated in the deportation and murder of a majority of Slovak Jews in 1942.Bauer, p.357; Browning, p.208-209 Manfred von Killinger's office as Ambassador was eventually taken on by Hanns Ludin.