August Schneidhuber

Ludwig Ernst August Schneidhuber (8 May 1887 – 30 June 1934) was a German military officer and an SA-Obergruppenführer in the Sturmabteilung (SA), the Nazi Party's paramilitary organization. He held several high-level SA commands and was the Police President in Munich. He was murdered along with many other SA leaders in the Night of the Long Knives.

Early life and military career Schneidhuber was born in Traunstein, the son of a judicial officer. He entered the Royal Bavarian Army as an officer cadet. In March 1907 he was commissioned as a Leutnant in the Royal Bavarian 1st Foot Artillery Regiment. He married Ida Wassermann, a Jewish woman, with whom he had two daughters (born 1914 and 1919). The couple divorced in 1920. Due to her former marriage, Ida Schneidhuber was given lenient treatment during the Holocaust and survived the Theresienstadt Ghetto.

During the First World War, Schneidhuber was deployed on the western front from 1914 to 1918. During the war he was employed as a regimental adjutant, an artillery battery commander, an instructor at the foot artillery school in Maubeuge and in various staff positions. In 1914, he was promoted to Oberleutnant and, in 1916, to Hauptmann. He was awarded the Iron Cross, 1st and 2nd class, was wounded in a poison gas attack and remained hospitalized until the summer of 1919. In 1920, Schneidhuber officially resigned from the Reichswehr with the rank of Major of the reserves. Returning to civilian life, he settled in the Chiemgau area of Bavaria and made his living as a farmer.

Career in the Nazi Party Sturmabteilung (SA) According to Baldur von Schirach, Schneidhuber was an early adherent of the Nazi movement. He belonged to the Citizens' Defense, a far-right paramilitary organization until 1921, and joined the Nazi Party for the first time that year. From 1924 to 1925, Schneidhuber headed a völkisch group, the German-Völkischer Officers' Association, in Rosenheim. Responding to the rapid increase in SA membership, Röhm in July 1932 again reorganized the SA, establishing even larger command structures, the SA-Obergruppen, each roughly equivalent to an army corps. On 15 September 1932, Schneidhuber took over the leadership of the newly-formed SA-Obergruppe III, which included not only the SA-Gruppe West, but the SA-Gruppe Niederrhein and SA-Gruppe Westfalen as well. On 1 January 1933, he was among the first group of officers promoted to the new rank of SA-Obergruppenführer.

Schneidhuber's corpse, along with those of the other men were initially buried in a wooden box at Munich's on the night of 1 July 1934. According to a contemporaneous report in The New York Times, a floral wreath with the words: "To Our Dear Father From His Sons" was removed from the grave a few days later on the orders of the authorities and carted away in a wheelbarrow. On 21 July, the bodies were exhumed and cremated in the crematorium at the Munich Ostfriedhof. The families were told to bury the urns containing the ashes of their dead within five minutes. Only five relatives and a clergyman were allowed to take part.