Franz Pfeffer von Salomon (19 February 1888 – 12 April 1968) during the Nazi regime known as Franz von Pfeffer, was the first Supreme Leader of the Sturmabteilung (SA) after its re-establishment in 1925. Pfeffer resigned from his SA command in 1930 and was expelled from the Nazi Party in 1941. He died in 1968.
Pfeffer was born the son of a Prussian bureaucrat, the oldest of seven children. He was from a noble family of the Lower Rhine. After graduating from the gymnasium he studied law at the University of Heidelberg. He worked briefly as a law clerk prior to starting a military career. He attended military school for two years and entered military service in October 1910. He became a Fahnenjunker (officer candidate) and served in Infantry Regiment No. 13 (1st Westphalian) throughout the First World War on the Western Front in both combat and staff positions, earning the Iron Cross 1st and 2nd Class. Discharged with the rank of Hauptmann at the war’s end in November 1918, he became active in the Freikorps. He formed and led the Westphalian “Freikorps von Pfeffer” in the Baltic states, the Ruhr and Upper Silesia until March 1920. He then participated in the failed Kapp Putsch and was detained for a time, but granted an amnesty in 1921. He was very active in organizing resistance groups to put an end to the French occupation of the Ruhr (1923–25). He began to be involved in right wing politics, joining the Völkisch-Social Bloc in 1924 and becoming the Chairman of its Landesverband (State Association) in the Province of Westphalia from May 1924 to March 1925.
Pfeffer joined the Nazi Party in March 1925 (membership number 16,101) shortly after the ban on it in the aftermath of the Beer Hall Putsch was lifted. He was named Gauleiter of Westphalia on 27 March 1925. In September 1925, he became a member of the National Socialist Working Association, a short-lived group of northern and western German Gauleiters, organized and led by Gregor Strasser, which unsuccessfully sought to amend the Party program.
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Rudolf Walter Richard Hess (Heß in German; 26 April 1894 – 17 August 1987) was a German politician and a leading member of the Nazi Party in Nazi Germany. Appointed Deputy Führer to Adolf Hitler in 1933, Hess held that position until 1941, when he flew solo to Scotland in an attempt to negotiate the United Kingdom's exit from the Second World War. He was taken prisoner and eventually convicted of crimes against peace. He was still serving his life sentence at the time of his suicide in 1987.
The Beer Hall Putsch, also known as the Munich Putsch, was a failed coup d'état by Nazi Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or NSDAP) leader Adolf Hitler, Generalquartiermeister Erich Ludendorff and other Kampfbund leaders in Munich, Bavaria, on 8–9 November 1923, during the Weimar Republic. Approximately two thousand Nazis marched on the Feldherrnhalle, in the city centre, but were confronted by a police cordon, which resulted in the deaths of 16 Nazi Party members and four police officers.
A Gauleiter (ˈɡaʊlaɪtɐ) was a regional leader of the Nazi Party (NSDAP) who served as the head of a Gau or Reichsgau. Gauleiter was the third-highest rank in the Nazi political leadership, subordinate only to Reichsleiter and to the Führer himself. The position was effectively abolished with the fall of the Nazi regime on 8 May 1945. The first use of the term Gauleiter by the Nazi Party was in 1925 around the time Adolf Hitler re-founded the Party on 27 February, after the lifting of the ban that had been imposed on it in the aftermath of the Beer Hall Putsch of 9 November 1923.