Background
Walter Buch was born in Bruchsal, Baden, on 24 October 1883, the son of an eminent judge.
Walter Buch was born in Bruchsal, Baden, on 24 October 1883, the son of an eminent judge.
Buch became a soldier in the First World War as a career officer. In 1918, he was released from the army as a major and then busied himself in the Baden Veterans' League.
A professional officer who served in World War I, Major Buch left the army after 1918 and worked with the Baden association of ex-servicemen. Entering the NSDAP in 1922, he became leader of the SA commando, Franconia, in Nuremberg in August 1923. In 1927 he was appointed Chairman of the USCHLA (the Investigation and Adjustment Committee), a much feared and secret Party commission in Munich which was sometimes referred to as the ‘Cheka in the Brown House’. Essentially a disciplinary body whose functions were to watch unreliable Party members, to crush and expel dissidents as well as to arbitrate in disputes between NSDAP members, it became to the Party what the Gestapo was for Germans as a whole. The Party tribunal came to exercise an almost unlimited power of life and death over Party members and no appeal against its judgement was possible. The hard-faced Major Buch was able to build up a powerful, independent organization of espionage and secret police within the Party which engaged in surveillance of other Party organizations inside and outside Germany.
In the 1930s it was especially active in Czechoslovakia and other neighbouring countries, controlling foreign groups loosely linked with the Nazi Party. After the Nazi seizure of power. Buch was officially appointed Supreme Party Judge and SS-Gruppenführer on 9 November 1934.
A few months earlier he had played a leading part in the Blood Purge, accompanying Hitler to Wiessee to arrest Ernst Rohm and directing the SS commando which shot the leading Brownshirts in the courtyard of the Stadelheim prison.
After the war, Buch was sentenced to five years’ forced labour and at his second de-Nazification trial in July 1949 he was classified as a ‘Major Offender'. He committed suicide on 12 November 1949, slashing his wrists and drowning himself in Ammer Lake, according to the report of the Bavarian State Police.
He presided over the Nazi Party Supreme Court which conducted a secret investigation into the Crystal Night pogrom of 8 November 1938 and concluded that the Nazi rank-and-file, who had murdered more than a hundred Jews, were innocent of any crime and had faithfully obeyed ‘orders from above’. In an article in Deutsche Justiz (21 October 1938) Buch wrote: ‘The Jew is not a human being. He is an appearance of putrescence. Just as the fission-fungus cannot permeate wood until it is rotting, so the Jew was able to creep into the German people, to bring on disaster, only after the German nation . . . had begun to rot from within.'
Eye-witnesses of the Blood Purge described Buch’s sadistic enjoyment as he watched his victims expire, some of them old Party comrades whom he killed with his own hand. During the Third Reich, no one was safe from the hatred or vengeance of the supreme executioner of the Party. Buch was also a virulent anti-semite, who did not hesitate to assert that from the Nazi standpoint the Jew was outside the law.
