Gottfried Wendt was a Colonel of the Imperial German Army, a national conservative political advisor, and later a power player in both the Black Reichswehr and the Nazi Party. Wendt was one of the conspirators behind Operation Prangertag in 1929, but the coup failed to materialize. He later became involved in the rise of the NSDAP, which consolidated the right-wing paramilitary forces into a single right-wing revolutionary army.
Biography[]
Gottfried Wendt was born in Berlin, German Empire, and he served in the Imperial German Army during World War I. He became acquainted with Major-General Wilhelm Seegers during the conflict and joined Seegers' right-wing nationalist "Black Reichswehr" organization during the Weimar era, privately working to overthrow the Weimar Republic and replace it with a reactionary dictatorship. Wendt was involved in the failed Operation Prangertag coup attempt in 1929, but he was not implicated in the affair, and was instead promoted to head of the political police of Berlin on the assassination of August Benda by the Nazi Party. It was later revealed that Wendt had ordered the Nazis Horst Kessler and Richard Pechtmann to infiltrate the KPD and carry out the murder to remove a Social Democrat from a key position of power and frame the Communists for the deed.
As chief of the political police, Wendt secretly allied himself with Nazi Party organizer Walter Stennes and covered up the Nazi Party's role in Benda's assassination by sealing all files connected to the murderer Greta Overbeck. Wendt also supported a partnership between the conservatives and the Nazis to fight the left, and he also agreed to take part in Alfred Nyssen's short-buy scheme that helped the Black Reichswehr profit from the stock market crash. While Wendt ignored Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann's pleas for help during his heart attack and allowed the leading liberal politician to die, Wendt's ambitions of rising in the ranks were checked when Prussian Interior Minister Albert Grzesinski appointed himself as police chief rather than Wendt.
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