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Walter Stennes

Walter Franz Maria Stennes (12 April 1895-19 May 1983) was a leader of the Sturmabteilung of the Nazi Party in Berlin and the leader of the August 1930 Stennes Revolt against Adolf Hitler and local party chief Joseph Goebbels.

Biography[]

Walter Stennes was born in Bad Wunnenberg, Westphalia, German Empire in 1895, the son of an Imperial German Army officer. He served as a lieutenant in the 3rd Westphalian Infantry Regiment No. 16 on the Western Front of World War I and received several decorations during the war. After leaving the army, he became a police captain, a Freikorps leader, and an arms racketeer.

Stennes joined the NSDAP in 1927 and took over the leadership of the SA in Berlin from Kurt Daluege, becoming regional commander-in-chief of the SA in eastern Germany on 30 September 1927. In this capacity, Stennes oversaw the assassination of Social Democrat politcal police chief August Benda in June 1929, sending Horst Wessel and Richard Pechtmann to seduce Benda's maid Greta Overbeck and persuade her to plant the bomb for them. Benda's death elevated Nazi ally Gottfried Wendt of the DNVP and Black Reichswehr to the leadership of the political police, but relations between Stennes and Wendt deteriorated after Wendt had both Wessel and Pechtmann killed to prevent the Berlin Police from tracing their assassination plot back to him.

In 1930, Stennes received orders from the Nazi leadership to abstain from any street fighting, but he ignored this directive and attacked Jewish businesses on the Kurfürstendamm. Stennes was later arrested by the political police, and Wendt left him imprisoned to punish his disobedience. Police infiltrator Gereon Rath visited Stennes in prison and informed him that Hitler had removed Stennes from his party leadership position; Stennes responded by asking Rath to find proof that Wendt was gay. Within the next few months, Gereon and Stennes instigated a brawl between Stennes' SA and members of the SS at the Moka Efti nightclub, and, in August 1930, the two men planned to seize leadership of the Nazi Party. While Rath's son Moritz overheard Gereon and police chief Albert Grzesinski planning to outlaw the party and informed Stennes of his uncle's betrayal, Stennes went ahead with his coup attempt, seizing Berlin's NSDAP headquarters. Stennes was talked into standing down after Hitler promised greater financial investment in the SA, but, by 1931, Stennes continued to complain about the lack of footwear for the SA units in Breslau, and he claimed that the strategy of legality was a failure due to the NSDAP's persistent inability to win a parliamentary majority.

In April 1931, Stennes once again stormed the Berlin party offices, but Joseph Goebbels and Hermann Goering responded by purging the Berlin SA and expelling Stennes from the party. Stennes went with his wife and daughter into exile in China after the Nazi seizure of power, and Stennes served as a military advisor to Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang until 1949, reorganizing the KMT army and police forces on the model of the Prussian Army. Stennes returned to Germany in 1949 and became a leader of the right-wing German Social Party in 1951, after which he retired to private life and died in Ludenscheid in 1983.

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