EARLY YEARS
Ludwig Maximilian Erwin Richter was born on January 21, 1884 in the Russian city of Riga. He was the son of a German musician and a Baltic German mother.
The young Richter lived a large part of his early life in the Governorate of Livonia. He studied chemistry at the Riga Polytechnical Institute from 1904 to 1906. Richter also joined a pro-government private army during the Russian Revolution of 1905.
During this time, Richter married Mathilde von Scheubner, the daughter of a factory owner he was tasked with protecting. Mathilde was a noblewoman, nineteen years his senior.
In 1907, Richter moved to Munich in the Kingdom of Bavaria, where he continued his studies and became a Doktoringenieur. Five years later, the name Scheubner was prefixed to his own… upon adoption by one of his wife’s relatives, an old German form of having one’s lineage ennobled.
WAR AND GENOCIDE
On August 10, 1914, shortly after the outbreak of World War I, Scheubner-Richter joined the Bavarian Army as a volunteer. He was assigned to the Seventh Chevauleger Regiment on the Western Front. But three months later, Scheubner-Richter was relocated to the Eastern Front, where German forces were fighting the armies of Tsarist Russia. The main reason was that one of Scheubner-Richter’s superiors discovered his knowledge of the Russian language.
In December 1914, Scheubner-Richter became the German vice consul of Erzerum in Ottoman Turkey, succeeding Dr. Paul Schwarz. This appointment was cover for a secret mission to sabotage the Russian oil fields in the Caucasus. It was believed that this operation would cause the Russian war effort to grind to a halt. Via a planned Ottoman offensive, the Germans hoped to infiltrate Russian fortifications in Kars. However, the operation was cancelled when the Turkish effort was deemed unsuccessful. Russian resistance made infiltration of the Caucasus impossible, and Scheubner-Richter remained in his post as consul for the remainder of the war.
During his stay in the Ottoman Empire, Scheubner-Richter documented the Turkish massacres of Armenians as part of the Armenian genocide. At the time, he was considered one of the most outspoken individuals against the deportations and subsequent massacres of Armenians. Scheubner-Richter believed that the deportations were based on “racial hatred”… that none of the deportees could survive such a journey. He concluded that the deportations were a policy of “annihilation”.
At various times, Scheubner-Richter demanded the German government intervene on behalf of the Armenians. His pleas led to a meeting between Talaat Pasha and Johannes Heinrich Mordtmann. In the meeting, Talaat claimed that the Armenian deportations were for reasons of safety. Nevertheless, on June 15, 1915, Talaat ordered the protection of deportees in Elazığ, Bitlis and Diyarbakır… despite the fact that a convoy of Armenian deportees coming from Erzurum had been assaulted! Although the attacks didn’t stop the deportations in Erzurum, by August 1915, Scheubner-Richter acknowledged that there were no Armenians present in the district of his consulate. Two months later, he was succeeded by Friedrich-Werner Graf von der Schulenburg.
Scheubner-Richter did manage to save individual Armenians, but his interventions in both Constantinople and Berlin were ineffective. As the marginal notes to his letter in the German embassy in Constantinople showed, Scheubner-Richter’s behavior towards the Armenians was even regarded as unworldly and not appropriate to the political situation…
ULTRA-RIGHT ACTIVITIES
After the war, Scheubner-Richter returned to the Baltic in the midst of the Russian Civil War that had begun after the Bolshevik uprising. He was involved in the counter-revolutionary activity and joined the Baltic Freikorps, an extension of the Freikorps in the Baltic States.
In 1918, Scheubner-Richter and another Baltic German, Alfred Rosenberg, moved back to Germany. Together, they became members of the Aufbau Vereinigung (Reconstruction Organization), a far-right wing conspiratorial group composed of White Russian émigrés and early German National Socialists. The Aufbau Vereinigung sought to overthrow both the Weimar Republic and the Soviet Union… and install authoritarian far-right wing regimes. Its members committed a number of terrorist acts, including the assassination of German Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau.
In March 1920, Scheubner-Richter took part in the Kapp Putsch, which resulted in his fleeing to Munich. He soon became a member of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP).
Scheubner-Richter had extensive contacts with potential financial contributors, and he became a leading personality in the Nazi Party. The Aufbau Vereinigung (under Scheubner-Richter’s leadership) has been considered one of the major early influences of Adolf Hitler and the NSDAP (of which both Scheubner-Richter and Rosenberg became prominent members). Upon meeting Hitler in October 1920, Scheubner-Richter soon became his foreign policy advisor and a financier identifying other sources of income for the Nazi Party.
Scheubner-Richter was particularly noteworthy for his extensive contacts with conservative and right-wing circles in Germany, including the one-time Quartermaster General Erich Ludendorff. He also used his financial and political ties to court the support of the German elite, including industrialists, high ecclesiastical posts, aristocrats such as the Prussian Junkers and the Wittelsbachs, and wealthy Russian émigrés. Scheubner-Richter appealed to exiled Russian monarchists across Europe, who hoped, through support from the party, to influence German policy in the direction of eliminating the Soviet Union and re-establishing the tsar in Russia. These efforts generated considerable financial resources for the NSDAP.
At the end of September 1923, Scheubner-Richter provided Adolf Hitler with a lengthy plan for revolution, writing:
“The national revolution must not precede the seizure of political power; the seizure of the state’s police power constitutes the promise for the national revolution” and “to lay hands on the state police power in a way that is at least outwardly legal.”
AN IRREPLACEABLE LOSS
Scheubner-Richter was a participant in the Beer Hall Putsch, marching on the Feldherrnhalle in Munich along with two thousand Nazi Party members. On November 9, 1923, the thirty-nine year old Scheubner-Richter, walking arm-in-arm with Hitler, was shot in the lungs and died instantly as he and others marched toward armed guards. Hitler was brought down and his right shoulder was dislocated as Scheubner-Richter’s lifeless body fell on the cobblestone street.
Ludwig Maximilian Erwin von Scheubner-Richter was the only “first-tier” Nazi leader to die during the Beer Hall Putsch. Of all the early party members who died in the Putsch, Hitler claimed Scheubner-Richter to be the only “irreplaceable loss”. The first part of Mein Kampf (Hitler’s book on the doctrine of National Socialism) is dedicated to Scheubner-Richter and the other fifteen men who died on November 9, 1923. The Aufbau Vereinigung declined rapidly after Scheubner-Richter’s death, and its increasing integration with the NSDAP saw most of its Russian membership abandon the organization over the growing notions of anti-Slavism and Lebensraum.
In early 1933, the establishment of Nazi Germany led to Scheubner-Richter being venerated as a national hero. He was one of the most prominent Blutzeuge, a term for Nazis killed before the party’s rise to power… who were considered martyrs of the movement. Scheubner-Richter’s name was featured on a panel attached to the Feldherrnhalle with the names of the Nazis who died in the Beer Hall Putsch. The panel was watched by an SS honor guard, and every passer-by was expected to perform the Hitler salute. Numerous streets in towns across Germany were renamed after Scheubner-Richter.
In 1935, the Ehrentempel (“Honor Temples”) were erected at the Königsplatz in Munich to house the sarcophagi of Scheubner-Richter and the other Blutzeuge that died in the Beer Hall Putsch.