Felix Wankel - Wankel and The NSDAP

Wankel and The NSDAP

During the early 1920s Wankel was a member of various radical right-wing and anti-Semitic organizations. In 1921 he joined the Heidelberg branch of the Deutschvölkischer Schutz und Trutzbund and in 1922 he became a member of the NSDAP, which was banned soon afterwards. Wankel founded and led youth groups associated with a cover-up organization of the NSDAP. With them he conducted paramilitary training, scouting games and night walks. Whereas his high esteem for technical innovations was not widely shared among the German Youth Movement, he was offered the opportunity to talk about the issue of technology and education to Adolf Hitler and other leading National Socialists in 1928.

In the meantime Wankel's mother had helped founding the local chapter of the NSDAP in his hometown Lahr. Here Wankel not only rejoined the party in 1926, but also met Gauleiter Robert Heinrich Wagner. In 1931 Wagner entrusted Wankel with the leadership of the Hitler Youth in Baden. But both soon fell out with each other, because Wankel tried to put a stronger emphasis on military training, whereas Wagner wished for the Hitler Youth to be a primarily political organization. In a particularly bitter and ugly controversy Wankel publicly accused Wagner of corruption. Wagner paid back by stripping Wankel of his office by early 1932 and managed to have him expelled from the party in October 1932. Wankel, who sympathized with the social-revolutionary wing of the NSDAP among Gregor Strasser anyway, then founded his own National Socialist splinter group in Lahr and continued his attacks on Wagner. Since the Nazi's seizure of power on 30 January 1933 had strengthened his position, Wagner had Wankel arrested and imprisoned in the Lahr jail in March 1933. Only by intervention of Hitler's economic adviser Wilhelm Keppler with Hitler himself, Wankel was set free in September 1933. Keppler had been a friend of Wankel's and an ardent supporter of his technological endeavors since 1927. He now helped Wankel to get state contracts and his own Wankels Versuchs Werkstätten in Lindau. Wankel tried to rejoin the NSDAP in 1937, but was turned down. By the help of Keppler, however, he was admitted to the SS in 1940 in the rank of Obersturmbannführer. Two years later his membership was revoked, though, for reasons yet unknown.