The Feme murders ( ) were extrajudicial killings that took place during the early years of the Weimar Republic. They were carried out primarily by far-right groups against individuals, often their own members, who were thought to have betrayed them.
Due to their secretive nature, it is not known how many were killed in the Feme murders, which are most often considered a distinct category from political assassinations. The number may have been in the hundreds, although one source reports just 23 between 1920 and 1923 in Bavaria and the eastern states of East Prussia, Pomerania, Mecklenburg, Brandenburg and Upper Silesia. In spite of a number of investigations into the murders, few of the perpetrators were ever identified or prosecuted. The Feme murders had largely ended by 1924.
Origin of the term (from Middle High German , meaning "punishment", and meaning "murder"), refers to an act of vigilante justice by a political group: the killing of "traitors" who knew about the group's secrets and had reported them to authorities or threatened to do so. The name alludes to the secretive Vehmic court system of medieval and early modern Westphalia, which had authority to ordain capital punishment.
In the politically heated turmoil of the early Weimar Republic, the media frequently used the term to refer to right-wing political killings by groups such as the Organisation Consul, e.g. the murder of Jewish politicians Kurt Eisner and Walther Rathenau and other politicians including Matthias Erzberger. In 1926, the 27th Reichstag commission officially differentiated political assassinations from Feme murders. Assassinations were by definition carried out against political opponents, whereas the commission defined Feme murders as "Attacks on human life on the basis of an organisation's or individual member's conspiracy against members and former members as well as against outsiders because of behaviour they consider treacherous or harmful to the community".
The meaning can also be seen in the phrase "" ("Traitors fall to the Feme!"), which was in the statutes of the Organisation Consul and often used in mass media reports regarding violent acts of vengeance among the German right. Gumbel, Emil Julius (1919). "Verräter verfallen der Feme": Opfer, Mörder, Richter, 1919-1929, Berlin: Malik-VerlagTucholsky, Kurt (1930). E. J. Gumbel, Berthold Jacob, Ernst Falck, "Verräter verfallen der Feme", Die Weltbühne (contemporary review of Gumbel's above book by Kurt Tucholsky)Hofmann, Ulrike C. (2000). "Verräter verfallen der Feme!" Fememorde in Bayern in den zwanziger Jahren, Cologne: Böhlau
Official responses The first to attempt to study the phenomenon systematically and for all of Germany was the Jewish statistician Emil Julius Gumbel, who in 1929 published Verräter verfallen der Feme!“ Opfer – Mörder – Richter (1919–1929) ("Traitors fall to the Feme!" – Victims – Murderers – Judges (1919–1929)).
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, if they were identified, often received lesser sentences or acquittals. Some military officers such as Paul Schulz of the Black Reichswehr were 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.
The deficiencies in law enforcement were matters of concern for several parliaments during the Weimar period. In 1920, the Bavarian Landtag set up its own investigative committee to look into the situation after former Reichswehr soldier Hans Dobner was unsuccessfully targeted when he attempted to sell information on a weapons cache to the authorities. In 1924, the Landtag of 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.
In January 1926, at the request of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), an investigative committee of the Reichstag was set up under the name "Feme Organizations and Feme Murders" to investigate the crimes and their political environment within parties, the Reichswehr and the judiciary. The project was hindered from the beginning by the right wing-majority in the Reichstag, the Bavarian judicial authorities' refusal to cooperate, and not least by the indecisiveness of the SPD itself.
Victims 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 and numerous putsch and separatist efforts shook Germany. Within the Black Reichswehr, First Lieutenant Paul Schulz commanded a special unit that killed those who were seen as having betrayed the country by leaking military secrets. He was implicated in the murder of Black Reichswehr Wachmeister Willi Legner, but was never tried.
In March 1925 Schulz was arrested for inciting several murders. Brought to trial, he was sentenced to death on 26 March 1927 for inciting the murder of Black Reichswehr Sergeant Walter Wilms. Also sentenced to death were First Lieutenant Fritz Fuhrmann and Sergeant Erich Klapproth, who carried out the murder. All three death sentences were commuted to life imprisonment by President Paul von Hindenburg in February 1928.
To large parts of the German right-wing he was considered a martyr. While in jail, Schulz was in contact with numerous right wing politicians, including Gregor Strasser of the Nazi Party. In May 1928, the 12 newly elected Nazi members of the Reichstag called for his release. A political amnesty was granted in October 1930 and Schulz obtained his freedom.
The following is a selected list of victims:
July 1920: Willi Schmidt, (born 1899 in Stettin), a member of the Freikorps Roßbach, was shot by Edmund Heines and other members of the Freikorps in a forest in the Greifenhagen district of Pomerania and buried on the spot after being suspected of trying to reveal a weapons cache to the authorities. 6 October 1920: Maria Sandmayer (b. 1901), a maid, was found strangled in Forstenrieder Park in Munich. She was murdered after she tried to report a weapons cache of the Bavarian Citizens' Defense. 1921: Peter Christ, overseer, murdered in Langenöls, Breslau district. In 1921, Christ was a member of the Upper Silesian Self-Protection. Because of criticism he made of the corruption of the leadership, he was arrested by members of the German special police. He is said to have declared to comrades: "I am well informed that the money for our organization does not go to the responsible authorities. There is enough money, but we don't get it. It stays up so that the upper superiors can live well." He was later found with his head shot through. In 1928, a file note was found according to which the head of the executive branch of the German special police, Gottfried Hobus, was instructed to take Christ into "appropriate treatment". The State Commissioner for Upper Silesia, Karl Spiecker, called the case "scandalous" when it was presented to him in 1928 and assessed it as murder. He explained that Christ should have been brought before a court of law.Bernhard Sauer: "'Traitors had been shot in large numbers among us.' Die Fememorde in Oberschlesien", p. 11. 4 March 1921: Hans Hartung (b. 1897), a waiter, was shot and his body recovered from the Zusam River near Zusmarshausen in Bavaria. He was murdered after he tried to blackmail the Bavarian Citizens' Defense for his silence about their activities. 5 June 1921: Josef Nowak, St. Annaberg in Silesia, was seized on 4 June 1921 on suspicion of espionage in favour of the Polish side in the Silesian Uprisings. He was driven through his village by eight members of the Upper Silesian Self-Defense Force, beaten with sidearms and rifle butts, and then, after, Nowak, together with Ignatz Kwittek, Ignatz Kwiotek and Anton Wojciechowski, who were also accused of treason, driven to the basalt quarry near St. Annaberg and beaten and shot to death. The heads of each of the four men were split five to six times and chopped up with side guns like "rotten turnips". Nowak's body had four shots in the stomach, two shots in the chest, and seventy-three bayonet and knife stabs. The bodies were buried under stone rubble and found a few days later by their relatives. Nowak had merely said that he thought that the fighting between Germans and Poles in Upper Silesia was a senseless civil war.
June 13, 1921: Johannes Buchholz: Police sergeant Johannes Buchholz, a member of the Berlin Police Hundred Association, was killed by a shot in the back of the head in the Schlosskaserne, a police barracks in Berlin-Charlottenburg. The background was that those responsible for right-wing radical machinations in this hundred feared that he would report them as well as financial deportations to the unit. Two police officers of the Hundred were charged with the death of Buchholz, but acquitted for lack of evidence.Hsi-Huey Liang: Die Berliner Polizei in der Weimarer Republik (= Historische Kommission zu Berlin [Hrsg.]: Veröffentlichungen der Historische Kommission zu Berlin. No.47 ). de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 1977, , pp. 98–100 . July/August 1921: Fritz Köhler, member of the self-protection organization Ehrhardt in Upper Silesia. As a member of a work detachment formed by members of this self-protection organization, Köhler was housed in the summer of 1921 as a field warden on the estate of the manor owner Ulrich Freiherr von Richthofen in Klein-Wandriß in the district of Liegnitz. He supervised the forester's lodge of the Kohlhöher Forest, which belonged to the estate. For unknown reasons, Köhler was suspected of being a traitor. When Köhler, together with three other members of the self-defense organization – Karl Ernst Scweninger, Martin Lampel and Veit Ulrich von Beulwitz – visited a secret weapons cache, Köhler was prompted to listen on the ground to see if groundwater was bubbling in the weapons depot. When he lay down on the ground for this purpose, he was hit on the head by Beulwitz with a pickaxe. He was then shot by Lampel, according to other statements by Beulwitz. Beulwitz, Schwinger and Lampel were later charged with joint intentional homicide. The proceedings were discontinued by order of 28 November 1930 in accordance with the Law on Immunity from Punishment of 14 July 1928 as amended on 24 October 1930.Bernhard Sauer: "Traitors had been shot in large numbers in our country." Die Fememorde in Oberschlesien 1921. In: Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft. Volume54 , No.7/8 , 2006, (bernhard-sauer-historiker.de [PDF; accessed 28 March 2022]) 29/30 August 1921: Four former members of the Upper Silesian Self-Protection near Sibyllenort, Oels district: In the night of 29 to 30 August 1921, four former members of the Upper Silesian Self-Protection, allegedly members of the Roßbach working group, were killed by shots to the head near Sibyllenort. The crime remained unexplained. The carpenter Alfons Wabnitz and the businessman Fritz Schrewe were suspected of having carried them out.Bernhard Sauer: "Traitors had been shot in large numbers in our country." Die Fememorde in Oberschlesien 1921. In: Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft. Volume54 , No.7/8 , 2006, (bernhard-sauer-historiker.de [PDF; accessed 28 March 2022]).Vorwarts of 31 August 1921.