Johannes Stumm research project

Did you know that attempts were made in the 1930s to ban the NSDAP? One of the leading figures in these efforts was Johannes Stumm (1897–1978), whose work as a detective for the political police in the Weimar Republic is little known today.

Not only did Stumm gather material to justify banning the party, but he also sought to have Adolf Hitler banished from Prussia as a “troublesome foreigner” to preserve order in the republic at the time of its greatest crisis. Unfortunately, he was not successful in his efforts.

In 2023, Sascha Steger was commissioned by the Ernst Reuter Archives Foundation and the Landesarchiv Berlin to conduct the first comprehensive assessment of Johannes Stumm’s legacy and to compile an academic report on the remarkable life and career of the man who later became West Berlin’s Chief of Police. As part of this project, he also researched the provenance of the collection. The findings were published in summer 2025 as an essay in the 2024 yearbook of the State Archives.

Historian Sascha Steger currently works as a research volunteer at the Topography of Terror Foundation. In early June 2026, he published his dissertation on Kurt Daluege, the head of the Order Police in Nazi Germany.