Otto Raggenbass

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Otto Raggenbass (born October 11, 1905 in Sirnach ; † February 8, 1965 in Orselina , entitled to live in Toos ) was a Swiss educator and local politician .

Life

Otto Raggenbass, son of a justice of the peace, studied at the teachers' college in Kreuzlingen from 1921 to 1925 and worked in school in Rickenbach from 1926 to 1933 and in Kreuzlingen from 1933 to 1938. In 1938 Raggenbass became district governor of Kreuzlingen. He was controversial because of his attitude towards National Socialist Germany.

Raggenbass was also technical director of the Swiss Federal Athletics Association from 1937 to 1948 .

Raggenbass is considered to have shaped politics in the region towards the refugees from Nazi Germany; the Konstanz historian Jürgen Klöckler writes: "The border canton of Thurgau in particular represented an extremely restrictive refugee policy under the Kreuzlingen district governor Otto Raggenbass."

In April 1945 he became involved - according to his own statements - as a mediator between the French and German troops and achieved a peaceful surrender of the city of Constance . Historians now say that Raggenbass' contribution was not decisive.

In 1996 he was in the public eye because in 1944, following the restrictive Swiss refugee policy, he had extradited the Berlin half-Jew Auerbach, who was persecuted by the Gestapo and who swam from the island of Reichenau to Ermatingen in Lake Constance , to the German Reich. As the new district governor, he had already decreed in 1938 that Jewish schoolchildren from Konstanz would no longer be allowed to go to schools in Kreuzlingen in the future.

At the end of 1945, Raggenbass also showed himself to be an anti-Semite and, by virtue of his office, refused entry to a number of Jews from Constance to a memorial service in Kreuzlingen for the dead of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp .

Otto Raggenbass was said to have “good relations” with the Gestapo.

Raggenbass's 1964 work, Despite Barbed Wire 1939–1945 , was increasingly in need of evidence in the 1990s. Important files, such as the investigation files of the Thurgau canton police from 1938, have disappeared.

Honors

  • Honoring the city of Konstanz (1947)
  • Name giver of Otto-Raggenbass-Straße in Konstanz (1968) (2020 under discussion of the renaming)

Fonts

literature

  • Arnulf Moser: Otto Raggenbass: history of a reappraisal without consequences. In: Wolfgang Proske (Ed.): Perpetrators, helpers, free riders. Volume 5. Nazi victims from the Lake Constance area. Kugelberg, Gerstetten 2016, ISBN 978-3-945893-04-3 , pp. 173-186.
  • Bruno Helmle : ceremony Otto Raggenbass: Despite barbed wire on November 11, 1964. Dr. u. Verl.-Anst. Constance 1964.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jürgen Klöckler: Self-assertion through self-alignment. The Konstanz city administration under National Socialism. Thorbecke, Ostfildern 2012, p. 312.
  2. ^ Karl Moersch, Reinhold Weber: The time after the war: Cities in reconstruction. W. Kohlhammer Verlag, Stuttgart 2008, p. 205.
  3. ↑ Sabrina Bächi Otto Raggenbass - the savior of Constance? St. Galler Tagblatt , May 23, 2019
  4. ^ A b c Arnulf Moser: Wilhelm von Scholz, Otto Raggenbass and the Nazis. In: Südkurier , September 27, 2008.
  5. ↑ Lean and tight. In: Konstanz Museum Journal. Rosgartenmuseum, Konstanz 2002, p. 67.
  6. ↑ Constance: The names of the streets. In: Südkurier, September 25, 2010
  7. ^ Entry on Otto Raggenbass in the Swiss State Archives , accessed on September 26, 2010
  8. ↑ a b Notes by Hans-Ulrich Wepfer. In: Writings of the Association for the History of Lake Constance and its Surroundings. Edition 90. Thorbecke, Ostfildern 1972, p. 193.
  9. ↑ Citizens' hearing on street renaming. Website of the city of Konstanz, June 23, 2020.
personal data
SURNAME Raggenbass, Otto
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss educator and local politician
DATE OF BIRTH October 11, 1905
PLACE OF BIRTH Sirnach
DATE OF DEATH February 8, 1965
Place of death Orselina