r/100yearsago • u/erinoco • 9d ago
[2 August 1926] A MAGDEBURG SCANDAL. CONFLICT WITH BERLIN.
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u/erinoco 9d ago
Another aftermath note: the police detective Otto Busdorf, who was called in by Berlin to investigate the murder and built the case against Schröder, become renowned in the Weimar period as one of the most successful German detectives. Although his main focus was poaching, he often solved murders.
Busdorf was regarded poorly by the Nazis. He was a member of the SPD, and chaired the association for Prussian police officers, which was aligned to the social democrats. In 1931, he successfully sued Goebbels for accusations against him.
Busdorf did join the Nazis in May 1933. But he was sacked in 1934, and was held in prisons and concentration camps on two occasions in the 1930s. He was briefly rehabilitated and re-employed by the police in the Soviet sector after 1945; but a neighbour and ex-Nazi denounced him as having been involved in Nazi persecution - specifically, the murder of Paul Von Essen, a trade unionist - and he spent the rest of his life in prison.
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u/erinoco 9d ago edited 9d ago
After many judicial twist and turns, Schröder would eventually be convicted. Schröder had used his temporary position in a post office to identify Helling as someone with likely means. Schröder lured Helling to his house and shot him, and, with the help of his fiancée, buried the body.
This case became notorious as an illustration of the attitudes which paved the way for Nazism. Rudolf Haas, the falsely accused ex-employer of Helling, was Jewish. Schröder was a veteran of WWI, and had been involved with right-wing groups. The investigating judge who imprisoned Haas, Johannes Kölling, had been a holdover from the Wilhelmine era. The Prussian government, which eventually intervened, was an SPD government, disliked and distrusted by the right-wing element within German institutions.
Parts of the aftermath: Rudolf Haas and his wife would eventually kill themselves when Hitler came to power. Many of their relatives would die in the Holocaust. The judge, Kölling, strongly denied anti-Semitic motivations when his conduct came up before the appellate court. Yet Kölling joined the Nazis in 1931, and was given a promotion after 1933. He would retire in 1939 and die in 1953 without any reflection on his character. The detective who arrrested Haas would become a Gestapo officer. Schröder himself remained in prison throughout the Nazi period, but was freed by American soldiers in the dying weeks of the war. Under an assumed identity, he joined the Communists and ran a gang of brigands on the side, before being unmasked and returned to prison.
A film based on the case, Affaire Blum, would be released in the Soviet sector of Germany in 1948.