The Potempa murder of 1932 was a cause célèbre during Germany's Weimar Republic and the rise of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party.
On the night of 9 August 1932, five uniformed Nazi Stormtroopers (Sturmabteilung) burst into the apartment of Konrad Pietzuch, a Communist miner and trade unionist, in the Upper Silesian village of Potempa (now part of the rural community of Krupski Młyn in Poland) and beat him to death in the presence of his mother.
Chancellor von Papen was not keen to see the five murderers executed soon after the crime as he feared an escalation of Nazi violence nationwide.
In September 1932, the government commuted the sentences to life imprisonment, on the ground that the new decree was unknown to the defendants at the time of the murder.
On 21 March 1933, the Nazi government introduced legislation that granted amnesty to anyone in prison who had committed a crime “for the good of the Reich during the Weimar Republic”.