Eugen Nesper

Eugen Nesper (born 2 August 1913) was a young mechanic who became interested in politics early on, joining the Young Communists when he was 16. His first experience of the inside of a jail came in 1932, even before the Hitler government had taken power, and was the result of political activism that included leafleting. After 1933 he was subject to security service surveillance, and in 1935 was invited for a meeting with the Stuttgart police chief, Friedrich Mußgay. He was given the option of working as an informant/agent for the Gestapo. There was an alternative available, which would involve concentration camp detention. Nesper agreed to the first option, but he did not lose instantly all his existing political beliefs. Some sources suggest that he hoped to be able to "help his friends" by having a closer and more open relationship with the Gestapo. He has come to be classified as a double agent. He is best remembered for his role in the betrayal in 1944 of the group around the resistance activist Friedrich Schlotterbeck and his family.

Life Provenance and politicisation Born at Aufhausen (Aalen) in the hill country east of Stuttgart, one year before the outbreak of the First World War, Eugen Nesper was a member of the generation politicised and radicalised by the worldwide Great Depression. Membership of the Roter Frontkämpferbund seems to have brought him into contact with more uncompromisingly militant communists than he had encountered up to this time. When he was arrested in 1932, however, it was not for membership of an illegal paramilitary organisation, but in connection with a leafleting campaign involving "militant" printed material, calling on readers to join the fight against fascism ("... zum Kampf gegen den Faschismus"). It has never become clear just why, how and when Nesper became a Gestapo informant. A similar absence of clarity surrounds various aspects of his biography. It seems likely that the development was an iterative one, occurring over many months. A number of Gestapo employees subsequently stated that Nesper was already supplying information before the end of 1934. It was at the meeting with Mußgay that Nesper found himself presented with two mutually exclusive options. He could co-operate with the security services or he could be sent to a concentration camp. Nesper chose the first option, while hoping that he would be able to continue to be helpful to comrades. Mußgay passed Nesper a list of names. These were Communist Party members and people of interest to the authorities. Helpfully, Nesper found that they were all people whom he already knew. He was to provide regular reports on each of these once every two or three months. After 1945 Nesper would recall that in each of his reports he had written the same formulaic couple of lines: the individual in question no longer wanted to know anything about politics and was no longer [politically] active. Two generations later, commentators highlight the extent to which Nesper's own recall of his years as a double agent was necessarily incomplete. Solo missions of this nature under Soviet auspices would have been unusual, and Nesper was to be the junior member of a two-man team. His comrade, Hermann Kramer, was also originally from Stuttgart. A committed communist, Kramer had been captured by the German authorities during or soon after 1933, but by 1936 he had escaped from the concentration camp to which he had been sent, and made his way to Spain where between 1936 and 1938 he fought in the Spanish Civil War. Before the outbreak of war Kramer had already settled at Chelyabinsk in the Soviet Union and started to build a new life for himself as an ordinary worker, employed at the city's tractor plant.

1943-1944: Parachute agent Between January and October 1943 comrades Kramer and Nesper underwent an extensive training programme in Moscow to prepare them for their new roles as "parachute agents".

In addition to completing their training, the British supplied Nesper and Kramer with further necessities, including and a lesser quantity each of US Dollars, sterling and Swiss francs. The money came with some food, German food coupons, army maps, Mauser pistols with ammunition, a couple of hand grenades and a suicide pill. The flight crew waited till they were satisfied that all three parachutes had opened and then headed back to England. The ensuing conversation continued through most of the night, lasting approximately seven hours. Nesper probably admitted that he had already been active as a Gestapo spy when he had been the Schlotterbecks' lodger in the later 1930s. The meeting concluded with the decision that the time had come to escape across the Swiss border to the south. would cross into Switzerland with Else Himmelheber, a comrade who had become Friedrich's fiancée a few months following his release. Friedrich's brother, Hermann Schlotterbeck, would cross with Karl Stäbler. In the event Friedrich Schlotterbeck was the only one of the four who managed to reach Switzerland. He would learn the fate of his family, fiancée and other activist comrades only after the war ended.

For Mußgay the escape of the two main protagonists in one of his surveillance schemes represented a significant personal setback: he now feared disciplinary sanctions emanating from Berlin. For its part, the RHSA gave orders for the strongest possible measures to be taken against anyone associated with Eugen Nesper. That meant the Schlotterbecks and their antifascist associates. On 10 June 1944 Gotthilf and Marie Schlotterbeck, the parents, were arrested. Also arrested at the same Luginsland address was their daughter Gertrud Lutz who was visiting with her infant daughter Wilfriede. The two year-old Wilfriede was removed to a children's home at Waiblingen. That same day, in another part of town, Erich Heinser, Emil Gärttner und Sophie Klenk (the girl-friend of Hermann Schlotterbeck) were arrested at the Kodak factory. Hermann Seitz was detained one day later. His sister-in-law, Emmy Seitz, worked out of town at Hofheim-am-Taunus (near Frankfurt) but was arrested and transferred to Stuttgart to be dealt with alongside the others. Her husband, Theodor Seitz, was a soldier: he was arrested by an agency of the army department. Else Himmelheber managed to avoid the initial series of arrests, but was then "picked up" by a police patrol near Aalen a couple of weeks later.

The brutal interrogation sessions to which the detainees were subjected involved torture. The prisoners were then distributed across a number of different prisons, but all remained under direct Gestapo surveillance and control. From Berlin, the RHSA had directed that all should be held in solitary confinement. During the next few weeks, at their Stuttgart main office in the former "Hotel Silber", Mußgay's political police prepared a series of reports for the RHSA which were submitted to Berlin with a "Sonderbehandlung" ("Special Treatment") application, the granting of which would provide for the prisoners to be "extrajudicially executed". The reply came through immediately, by "express mail". Ten prisoners were named for "liquidation": Gotthilf and Maria Schlotterbeck, Gertrud Lutz (born Schlotterbeck), Else Himmelheber, Erich Heinser, Emil Gärttner, Sofie Klenk, Emmy Seitz, Hermann Seitz and Frida Schwille. They were all transferred to Dachau concentration camp, near Munich, on 29 November 1944. Earky the following morning, they were taken to the camp's execution area and killed by shooting.

After the war was over, one former Gestapo officer volunteered the insight that most of those executed in November 1944 as members of the "Schlotterbeck group" had little involvement in anti-government resistance, and had simply been included because their names appeared on Eugen Nesper's contacts list. The truth of the matter is likely to remain unfathomed. Two people who were by definition members were the brothers Hermann and Friedrich Schlotterbeck, however. At the time when ten supposed group members - including the brothers' parents, sister and, in the case of Friedrich, fiancée - were executed, both brothers were still at liberty. Friedrich Schlotterbeck had successfully crossed to Switzerland, where he remained till after the war. Hermann Schlotterbeck had failed to cross, and had made his way back to Stuttgart where he remained in hiding till September 1944. His presence was then betrayed to the authorities and on 16 September he was arrested and, following initial interrogation, transferred by Gestapo officer Hagenlocher to the "Police prison" (as the badly overcrowded detention camp was commonly termed with increasingly savage irony) at Welzheim. The Schlotterbeck name was acquiring a certain level of unwelcome fame at this time, and the deputy camp governor was instructed to register prisoner Hermann Schlotterbeck under a false name and hold him in solitary confinement. That was done. During April 1945, however, as the approach of American troops heralded the end of the war, the "Police prison" was evacuated, on an instruction received from Himmler: surviving inmates were to be transported on trucks towards the Austrian Alps. During July 1945, a few weeks after the end of the war, three bodies were found in a hastily dug grave in a small forest just outside Riedlingen. They belonged to three Welzheim evacuees who had been shot on orders received from the Gestapo main office in Stuttgart. One of those had been Hermann Schlotterbeck. .

On 14 July 1948 the Stuttgart Denazification Court ("Spruchkammer") identified Nesper as a "major culprit" on account of his "involvement with National Socialism", and sentenced him to a ten-year term of internment. Two years later, on 19 July 1950 the Assizes Court at Konstanz added three more years of imprisonment on convicting him of the murder of Karl Weber, the border official whom he had shot - and evidently killed - during his escape from Germany in 1945.

Reflections Nesper clearly deserves a major share of the responsibility for the executions during 1944 and 1945 of eleven individuals identified in his records as members/associates of the "Schlotterbeck group". Nevertheless, the way in which the case was viewed and treated in the immediate post-war period invites a number of questions which were apparently overlooked at the time. In the deliberations the Denazification Court dealing with Nesper's case, those murders were central to the case. Yet in the cases of the former Gestapo officials who ordered and implemented those killings were treated as peripheral, and excluded from serious consideration in evaluating either culpability or atonement measures imposed. There was never any requirement for a judicial evaluation of the RHSA decision (and insistence) that ten of the eleven Schlotterbeck group verdicts and sentences should be determined and implemented outside any judicial process.

Another question which has intrigued commentators, and which arises naturally in the case of anyone identified as a "double agent", concerns Eugen Nesper's true loyalties and their political underpinnings. Eugen Nesper appears in sources as an exceptionally ambivalent figure. As a young man he was a committed communist, and when he fell into the hand of Soviet handlers they and their British counterparts were sufficiently persuaded of his anti-Hitlerite credentials to send him on an important mission on enemy territory. Yet in 1935 he was persuaded - admittedly through a "hard to refuse" offer - to agree to work covertly for National Socialist security services, and the people he betrayed in ways that led to their being killed were all associated with Communist anti-Nazi resistance. One conclusion put forward is that Eugen Nesper were through life driven by an exceptionally strong need for a father figure. The need for an authority figure - whether it was the police chief Friedrich Mußgay or a powerfully charismatic communist - was far more important to him than some fixed political conviction, and the result in terms of his activism was a constant tension between political extremes, between which his beliefs swung. The tensions probably remained unresolved throughout his life. That, certainly, was the verdict of Schaffhausen Cantonal President Walter Bringolf who was much involved in the Nesper case during and after the latter's time in Switzerland as a refugee from Nazi justice during the mid-1940s. It is also reflected in the version of Nesper featured in a 1948 synopsis for a film about his career in espionage. The film was never made, although "Je dunkler die Nacht, desto heller die Sterne", the long-forgotten semi-novel by Clara Nehmitz (in which Nesper is renamed "Noller") and on which the film would have been based, implies similar conclusions.