Adolf Gerteis

Adolf Gerteis (born April 30, 1886 in Freiburg im Breisgau ; † January 27, 1957 in Frankfurt am Main ) was a German railway official and from 1940 to 1945 President of the General Management of the Eastern Railway (Gedob).

Life

Rail career

Born the son of a businessman, Gerteis studied railway and road construction at the TH Hannover from 1905 to 1910 . After graduating in 1911, Gerteis went to the Prussian State Railways and was assigned to the district of the Essen Railway Directorate as government construction manager. He successfully completed this training in 1915 with the second state examination and was taken on as a government master builder. During the First World War he was a front officer.

After the end of the war and the takeover of the Länderbahnen by the Deutsche Reichsbahn , Gerteis remained in the railway service and worked from 1919 to 1930 in changing positions as an "unskilled worker" , head of a new Reichsbahn construction office and assistant director at the Reichsbahndirektion Frankfurt / Main . From 1930 to 1932 he was director of the Arnstadt (Thuringia) works office, from 1932 to 1933 department head at the Reichsbahn Central Office in Berlin and from 1933 to 1934 at the Reichsbahndirektion Münster . In 1934, Gerteis joined the Lübeck-Büchener Eisenbahn (LBE) as a board member , where he played a key role in the introduction of the new double-decker push-pull trains for express traffic between Hamburg and Lübeck , which were designed under the leadership of Paul Mauck , the mechanical engineering director of the LBE . With the nationalization of the LBE, Gerteis came back to the Reichsbahn in 1938, where he became operations manager of the Reichsbahndirektion Essen .

General Directorate of the Eastern Railway

Gerteis joined the NSDAP in 1936 . In 1939 he was appointed Vice President and in 1940 President of the General Management of the Eastern Railway in Krakow . In his role he played a decisive role in the murder of millions of European Jews who were deported on the Eastern Railway to the extermination camps in the east of the Generalgouvernement .

After 1945

From 1948 to 1950 Gerteis was chief operations manager of the general operations management west in Bielefeld . In 1950 he was appointed Vice President of the Deutsche Reichsbahn in the United Economic Area (Headquarters) and then Deputy President of the Deutsche Bundesbahn and permanent deputy to the General Director of the Headquarters of the Deutsche Bundesbahn. He held this position until he retired in 1952. On the occasion of his farewell, he was awarded the Great Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany; the TH Hannover had already awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1951 . At the beginning of the 1950s, he initiated the re-establishment of the Railway Technology Rundschau .

literature

• Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich . Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007. ISBN 978-3-596-16048-8 . (Updated 2nd edition)
• Erwin Massute:  Gerteis, Adolf. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 6, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1964, ISBN 3-428-00187-7 , p. 330 f. ( Digitized version ).

Web links

• Federal Archives / Vita Gerteis

Individual evidence

1. ^ Ernst Klee: Das Personenlexikon zum Third Reich , Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 181
2. ^ Alfred C. Mierzejewski, The most valuable asset of the Reich: a history of the German National Railway, page 79.
3. ↑ Remembrance and Respect - All tracks lead to Auschwitz. (PDF) (No longer available online.) In: www.gruenekoeln.de. Formerly in the original ; accessed on March 7, 2014 .  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )