Konrad Pietrzuch: Press cuttings regarding his murder

The Potempa Murder of 1932 was a cause célèbre during Germany's Weimar Republic and the rise of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party. Committed by Nazi Party members, the brutal murder cast a dark shadow over the political advance of Hitler and the Nazis at the time. Many acts of violence would follow; the Potempa Murder was an early precursor. It led then President Paul von Hindenburg to suspect that the murder was symptomatic of how the Nazi Party operated. On the night of August 9, 1932, five uniformed Nazi Stormtroopers (Sturmabteilung) burst into the apartment of Konrad Pietrzuch, a Communist miner and trade unionist, in the Upper Silesian village of Potempa (now part of the rural community of Krupski Młyn in Poland) and beat him to death in the presence of his mother. The five murderers did nothing to disguise themselves during the attack and they were quickly arrested. After a well-publicized trial in Beuthen (now Bytom, Poland), they were found guilty of murder and sentenced to death. Hitler, along with other senior Nazis, was furious not only with the verdict but also with the sentence. While the five murderers were in jail, he sent them a telegram expressing his loyalty to them. The government under Chancellor Franz von Papen, which strove for law and order amid rising political violence, had only days before passed an emergency decree authorizing the death sentence for politically motivated killings. Chancellor von Papen was not keen to see the five murderers executed soon after the crime as he feared an escalation of Nazi violence nationwide. In September 1932, the government commuted the sentences to life imprisonment, on the ground that the new decree was unknown to the defendants at the time of the murder.

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