Horst W. Baerensprung

Horst Wolfgang Sigmund Baerensprung (born March 27, 1893 in Torgau , † November 29, 1952 in Braunschweig ) was a lawyer , district administrator in Nordhausen and police chief of the Braunschweig Police Department .

Professional background

During the First World War , Horst W. Baerensprung was a cavalryman and aviator. Given his wartime experience, he turned to the political left. He became a member of the soldiers' council in Halle . From 1917 to 1920 he studied law and in 1923 settled in Magdeburg as a lawyer. Here he was one of the founders of the republican self-defense in 1923 and of the republic protection organization Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold , whose first managing director Horst W. Baerensprung was. He defended Reichsbannner men in numerous trials. From 1927 to 1929 he was district administrator of the Grafschaft Hohenstein district in Nordhausen (predecessor: Wilhelm Koehne ), from 1930 police chief of Magdeburg. After the " Prussian strike " of the Papen government , against which he wanted to tackle the chairman of the Reichsbanner Karl Höltermann and the Lord Mayor Ernst Reuter by sending police troops and Reichsbanner to Berlin, he was relieved of his post. He was arrested in April 1933 and expelled from the bar in May.

emigration

At the end of June 1933 he first emigrated to Warsaw . After Baerensprung worked as an interpreter at an international police congress in the USA (he mastered English , French and Russian ), he became an advisor to the Chinese government at the beginning of 1934 through the mediation of the League of Nations . After Germany exerted diplomatic pressure against his employment in 1935, he was fired. So he got by first as a language teacher and hotel leaseholder, then he received a professorship for criminology at the Shanghai Law School and worked in 1938/39 as an organizer and trainer for the Chinese field police. In 1939 he went to the USA, where he was a lecturer in Prussian administrative history at Harvard University until the end of the war .

Exile and political activity

In 1941 he became a member of the board of directors of the German-American Council for the Liberation of Germany from Nazism, founded by Albert Grzesinski , and from November 1941 a member of the board of directors. From 1942 he was treasurer of the AFGF and a member of the German-American Emergency Conference . Between 1941 and 1946 he lived with Elisabeth Hauptmann and wrote radio features with her . (According to Hauptmann's report, she also worked as a “ ghostwriter ” on his memoirs for two years because Baerensprung was an “excellent narrator, but unable to put a line on paper”.) From April 1944, Baerensprung was a member of the preparatory committee for the Council for a Democratic Germany (CDG).

return

In 1946 Baerensprung returned to Germany and was a member of the Lower Saxony Police from September 1947 to March 1951 as Police President of Braunschweig .

literature

• Beatrix Herlemann : Baerensprung, Horst Wolfgang Sigmund , in: Guido Heinrich, Gunter Schandera (Hrsg.): Magdeburg Biographical Lexicon 19th and 20th centuries. Biographical lexicon for the state capital Magdeburg and the districts of Bördekreis, Jerichower Land, Ohrekreis and Schönebeck. Scriptum, Magdeburg 2002, ISBN 3-933046-49-1 .
• Werner Röder, Herbert A. Strauss (Eds.): Biographisches Handbuch der Deutschensprachigen Emigration nach 1933 / International Biographical Dictionary of Central European Emigrés 1933–1945. Volume 1: Politics, Economy, Public Life. Munich 1980. Volume 2: The Arts, Sciences, and Literature. Munich 1983. Volume 3: Complete register. Munich 1983.
• Biographical manual of German-speaking emigration after 1933. Volume 1, 1980, p. 32.
• Note regarding Horst W. Baerensprung, in: Walter Gödden, Inge Krupp: Elisabeth-Hauptmann-Lesebuch. Nyland Foundation, Cologne 2004, ISBN 3-936235-06-6 . (PDF)
• Alexander Sperk: Dr. Horst W. Baerensprung , in: From the Royal Police Headquarters to the District Authority of the German People's Police. The Magdeburg police in the Halberstädter Strasse 2 building between 1913 and 1989, ed. from the Ministry of the Interior of Saxony-Anhalt, Halle (Saale) 2010, ISBN 978-3-941057-02-9 , pp. 200-201.

Web links

• Exile organ. New York