Adolf Sauerland

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Adolf Sauerland

Adolf Sauerland (born June 4, 1955 in the Walsum district of Wehofen , today a district of Duisburg ) is a former German local politician . The CDU politician was Lord Mayor of Duisburg from October 2004 to February 15, 2012 . On February 12, 2012, he was voted out of his office as Lord Mayor by a referendum by the citizens' initiative “New beginning for Duisburg”.

Education and employment

Sauerland studied mechanical engineering , history and education at the comprehensive university in Duisburg and worked until his election as senior teacher at the vocational college in Uerdingen in the neighboring city of Krefeld . He has been a member of the CDU since 1980. As a local politician, Sauerland first worked in the Duisburg district of Walsum and then on the City Council of Duisburg.

Mayor of Duisburg

First term and re-election

In 2004, Sauerland ran for the office of Lord Mayor of Duisburg. In the runoff election against incumbent Bärbel Zieling ( SPD ), he received 61.3% of the vote and took office in October 2004. In July 2005, Adolf Sauerland resigned from his party positions so that he could be more neutral towards other interests in his function as Lord Mayor (OB).

After his election began the construction of the planned under the leadership of his predecessor Casino complex CityPalais , of the LEG realized successor of the failed 2004 "Urbanum" project, and the planning of the new shopping center Forum Duisburg , which opened in September, 2008. Sauerland was criticized above all for the move of the city council from the planned MultiCasa shopping center , the construction of which he recommended as head of the city administration based on an expert opinion, but rejected as a council member together with his parliamentary group of the CDU.

The DITIB Merkez Mosque is one of the projects he has supported and implemented . The re-staging of the World Games in 2013, which was planned in cooperation with the city of Düsseldorf, was given back by a council resolution in December 2008 after the Düsseldorf district president Jürgen Büssow issued a budget ruling to the city. Other projects under his direction were the Logport II logistics project, the Wedau water world in the Duisburg sports park, the vision of the “Living Bridge” by the Hamburg architect Hadi Teherani and companies such as Hitachi and Ikea .

The Urban Land Institute signed a partner contract with the city of Duisburg in 2005 to further design the inner city area. As part of the further development of a holistic re-planning of Duisburg's inner city, the British architect Norman Foster developed a master plan for Duisburg's inner city and approved it by mutual agreement by the city council. In addition, together with the management consultancy Roland Berger Strategy Consultants, an austerity program was decided to consolidate the city's budget. The city of Duisburg's total debt is currently around 1.6 billion euros.

On January 21, 2009, the CDU party congress unanimously nominated Sauerland as the new OB candidate for the 2009 municipal elections in Duisburg . On August 30, 2009, Sauerland was re-elected for another term of office with a share of 44.6% of the votes. Due to changes in local electoral law, this term of office is six years. After a change made by the state parliament, there is no longer a runoff election.

State archive NRW at the Duisburg inner harbor

The costs for the state archive , which is being built in Duisburg, have risen from the originally estimated 80 million to 160 million. According to a report by WDR, there should have been agreements when purchasing the property. Adolf Sauerland gave a real estate company the crucial information.

In advance, various locations for the future state archive were examined within the black and yellow state government. A property purchase price of two million euros had been agreed with a seller from Duisburg. A notary appointment was announced for February 2, 2007, contracts were in place but not yet signed. On January 31, 2007, according to the information available to the WDR, a confidential meeting took place in Jürgen Rüttgers' state chancellery . Participants were the then State Secretary for Culture, Hans-Heinrich Grosse-Brockhoff , Adolf Sauerland and the head of the state's own building authorities. A protocol of the conversation is not known.

Jürgen Rüttgers had made the decision to build the archive in Duisburg's inner harbor. The real estate development company Kölbl Kruse GmbH from Essen bought the property shortly afterwards, before the planned notary appointment, on February 2, 2007 for 3.75 million euros. In a letter to the seller, the real estate developers wrote: "Mr. Sauerland himself advised us to make an appointment with a notary at short notice". Oliver Scherenberg, lawyer for the Kölbl Kruse company, confirms the authenticity of the letter. The property was then sold on to the state of North Rhine-Westphalia for 21.6 million euros, i.e. with a premium of 17.85 million euros.

The Wuppertal public prosecutor's office has been investigating Adolf Sauerland since November 2011 because of the initial suspicion of accepting benefits . Sauerland knew of "thank you donations" totaling 38,000 euros to the CDU, which had the goal of "possibly influencing him in some way". The investigation against Sauerland was discontinued at the beginning of 2017 due to a lack of suspicion. It turned out, among other things, that the Kölbl Kruse company had been negotiating the property with the seller since 2003, several years before the state archive project. An attempt by the Duisburg city administration to forestall a sale to Kölbl Kruse at the beginning of 2007 by making its own purchase offer failed because the seller decided in favor of Kölbl Kruse. This sequence of events, which invalidates the original suspicions, was documented and confirmed in an interrogation by the head of the municipal real estate development company "IDE" in front of the investigative committee of the state parliament of North Rhine-Westphalia in June 2014.

Accident at the Love Parade 2010

Sauerland at the press conference for the Love Parade 2010 (far right in the picture)

After the accident at the Love Parade on July 24, 2010, which killed 21 people and injured at least 652 visitors during the entire event, Sauerland came under public criticism. As Lord Mayor, he headed the city administration, which officially approved the event as the competent authority.

He was asked - also from his own party - to take on political responsibility and to resign from his office, although such a step is not provided for in North Rhine-Westphalian municipal law and a possible dismissal from the civil service for Sauerland at his request will result in the loss of his pension entitlements would also have meant from his previous teaching activity.

Sauerland rejected political and personal responsibility for the accident and refused to resign at least until he had clarified whether the city administration was actually responsible through external and internal investigations. Sauerland stated that he had no knowledge of safety concerns before the accident. According to media reports, the minutes of the Duisburg city administration meeting on June 18, 2010 indicated that Sauerland's safety concerns must have been known to the building regulations office. Sauerland rejected media speculation that he would reject the resignation, especially in view of the resulting loss of his pension entitlements. On August 2, 2010, Sauerland announced that he would welcome the establishment of an investigative committee of the state parliament .

According to critics, the conflict about the coming to terms with the consequences of the accident experienced a “media personalization” that focused on the person of Sauerland. Sauerland withdrew from the public, gave only a few selected media interviews and published personal statements in writing. As previously announced, he stayed away from the central ecumenical funeral service on July 31, 2010 to commemorate the victims in Duisburg's Salvatorkirche. On August 14, 2010, he said to WDR : “Of course I ask myself whether you can continue to exercise this office after such a tragic event. But I will only give this answer when I have the answers to the questions that press us all. "

On behalf of the city of Duisburg, the law firm Heuking Kühn Lüer Wojtek prepared a legal opinion on the course of the Love Parade 2010 for € 300,000. According to the interim report, the city of Duisburg was not to blame for the accident and there was no evidence that “employees of the city of Duisburg fulfilled their legal obligations would have injured and in this way contributed to the accident or even caused it ”. The neutrality of the expert report is controversial. The law firm relies on documents that are, however, in the non-public part. The Duisburg council members also had no insight into these appendices.

On August 17, 2010, on behalf of the city of Duisburg, the law firm issued a warning to the Duisburg weblog Xtranews for the publication of these confidential attachments to the city's official interim report on the Loveparade disaster against the threat of a contractual penalty of € 250,000 because copyrights had been violated and personal data had been unredeemed . The resulting Streisand effect ended when the documents were published on WikiLeaks . According to Spiegel Online , the documents show that Sauerland was informed in detail about the planning chaos in advance. According to the weblog, the documents showed that the Love Parade had been approved with an explicit “deviation” from regulations. In addition, the mayor's unconditional will to carry out the event became clear from the documents. The ZDF magazine Frontal21 reported errors in the organizer's security concept approved by the city administration. The city later gave in and did not want to take any further legal action against copies of the documents.

On July 11, 2011, the public prosecutor's office in Duisburg announced that the approval for the 2010 Love Parade was illegal. Sauerland apologized publicly and stated that he "should have assumed moral responsibility earlier", but admitted no mistakes of his own.

The public prosecutor's office in Duisburg, however, as with the organizer Rainer Schaller and in contrast to other parties involved, never initiated investigations against Sauerland, so that he has been legally rehabilitated at the latest since the statute of limitations began on July 27, 2015. According to the public prosecutor's office, Sauerland “did not influence the incorrect planning or the granting of the illegal permit” and “could trust that those responsible for the planning and approval would properly examine the project based on their specialist knowledge.” In the trial about the accident says he acted as a witness before the Duisburg regional court on May 2 and 3, 2018.

In July 2020, Sauerland stated in an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that he was traumatized by the accident himself. In addition, legal advice strongly advised him not to express any legally usable admission of guilt in his name or in the name of the city of Duisburg, which severely restricted his options for action.

Voting in 2012

After the Love Parade accident, Sauerland rejected calls for resignation. On September 13, 2010, a motion to vote out received 41 votes in favor of 28 against in the city council, thus missing the required two-thirds majority . Apart from Sauerland himself, who was not allowed to take part in the vote due to bias , five council members stayed away from the vote.

On May 18, 2011, at the request of the left , the state parliament of North Rhine-Westphalia passed the law to initiate voting procedures for mayors and district administrators through citizens' petitions . A citizens' initiative “New start for Duisburg” then collected over 79,000 signatures for a referendum by mid-October 2011, of which the electoral office recognized 68,000 (this corresponds to almost 22% or almost 19% of those eligible to vote). In the vote on February 12, 2012 , Adolf Sauerland was voted out with a turnout of 41.53% with 129,626 votes (85.75% of the votes cast = 35.52% of those eligible to vote) and 21,538 votes against (14.25%). Sauerland himself did not believe in the success of the voting process until the end. The election committee of the city of Duisburg confirmed the result on February 15, 2012, whereby Sauerland resigned from office at the end of that day and was released from further "political responsibility". Sauerland largely withdrew from politics and worked in the family's travel agency.

literature

Web links

Commons : Adolf Sauerland  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ derwesten.de
  2. ↑ a b Overall results for the city ​​of Duisburg
  3. ↑ Wolfgang Gerrits: 100 percent vote for Sauerland. In: The West - Portal of the WAZ media group . Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung , January 22, 2009, accessed on July 28, 2009 .
  4. ^ Letter from the real estate development company "Kölbl Kruse". (PDF) (No longer available online.) January 31, 2007, archived from the original on November 17, 2011 ; Retrieved May 12, 2011 .
  5. ^ Adolf Sauerland: Public prosecutor's office determined against "Love Parade" -OB. December 8, 2011, accessed December 16, 2011 . ; Public prosecutor closes parts of the investigation file for the Duisburg Eurogate . WAZ April 8, 2013.
  6. ↑ Loveparade criminal proceedings: Anonymized charge . lg-duisburg.nrw.de, December 12, 2017, page 2.
  7. ^ Duisburg ticker: Funeral procession through the tunnel - Kraft indirectly calls for resignation. In: Spiegel Online . July 28, 2010, accessed May 20, 2015 (Love Parade disaster. All articles and backgrounds).
  8. ↑ Joint press release by the public prosecutor's office and the police on the Love Parade in Duisburg - state of injuries ( memento from June 16, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 15 kB) Duisburg public prosecutor's office, July 26, 2010.
  9. ↑ Resignation demands on Sauerland "Question of decency and dignity" . n-tv , July 27, 2010
  10. ↑ Politicians demand resignation - Mayor Sauerland stays . The West , July 26, 2010
  11. ↑ "Anything but resignation would be a scandal" . Handelsblatt , July 27, 2010
  12. ^ A b c Duisburg Lord Mayor: Sauerland is allegedly planning its own election. In: Spiegel Online . July 31, 2010, accessed July 31, 2010 .
  13. ↑ Protocol: Day three after the Love Parade tragedy. In: rp-online.de. July 27, 2010, accessed January 12, 2019 .
  14. ↑ The minutes of the meeting burden Duisburg's Mayor Sauerland. Zeit Online, accessed July 27, 2010 .
  15. ↑ Minutes of the meeting of June 18, 2010. (PDF; 1.3 MB) Wikileaks.org, archived from the original on August 27, 2010 ; Retrieved September 22, 2010 .
  16. ↑ Karin Schädler: “This is how real hatred develops.” Media ethicists on Love Parade reports. Interview, August 4, 2010, taz.de, accessed on August 4, 2010
  17. ↑ http://www.suedkurier.de/news/brennpunkte/Hinweise-auf-fatale-Fehler-bei-Loveparade;art407,4398638,2-pg0,1-pg0 (link not available)
  18. ↑ zeit.de of July 30, 2010: Duisburg's double failure - reckless and unapologetic: The way the city of Duisburg acted before and after the disaster, it endangers trust in state authorities. A comment
  19. ↑ Mayor Adolf Sauerland's personal statement on the Love Parade disaster ( memento from November 25, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) from August 2, 2010 on duisburg.de, accessed on February 22, 2012
  20. ↑ Interview with Mayor Adolf Sauerland - Loveparade 2010 ( Memento from August 16, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) WDR.de
  21. ↑ Made-to-measure reports. sueddeutsche.de, September 1, 2010, accessed June 24, 2011 .
  22. ↑ Two reports, two culprits. stern.de, September 13, 2010, accessed June 24, 2011 .
  23. ↑ Interim report Loveparade by Dr. Ute Jasper. scribd.com, accessed September 22, 2010 .
  24. ^ Love Parade: Duisburg's Mayor Sauerland warns bloggers . Augsburger Allgemeine , August 17, 2010.
  25. ↑ Sauerland was informed about planning chaos. In: Spiegel Online . August 7, 2010, accessed September 4, 2015 .
  26. ↑ Loveparade report: The matter with the escape routes. xtranews.de, accessed on October 17, 2010 .
  27. ^ Loveparade report: The appendices at the beginning. August 12, 2010, accessed June 24, 2011 .
  28. ↑ Harsh criticism of the organizers of the Love Parade. ZDF.de, August 3, 2010, accessed June 15, 2011 .
  29. ^ Duisburg prohibits the publication of documents . World online
  30. ^ Prosecutor: Love Parade should not have been approved. Sauerland apologizes. ( Memento from July 12, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) WDR.de, July 12, 2011, accessed on July 12, 2011
  31. ↑ Love Parade disaster: Sauerland's second-rate apology. In: stern.de. July 11, 2011, accessed July 25, 2011 .
  32. ^ Bergmann, J. Isringhaus, C. Schwerdtfeger: The tragic figure of Adolf Sauerland. In: Rheinische Post . July 23, 2015, accessed September 4, 2015 .
  33. ↑ Thomas Richter: Why there could still be new charges. In: Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung . July 28, 2015, accessed September 4, 2015 .
  34. ↑ Christian Parth: Adolf Sauerland in the Love Parade process: “No knowledge, don't know, can't remember”. In: Spiegel online , May 2, 2018.
  35. ↑ Kathrin Jakob, Elena Witzeck, Daniel Blum: Duisburg's ex-mayor: "My name was synonymous with the 21 dead of the Love Parade" . In: FAZ.NET . ISSN  0174-4909 ( faz.net [accessed July 25, 2020]).
  36. ↑ http://www.adolf-sauerland.de/ ( Memento from August 14, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
  37. ↑ Ruhrnachrichten from September 13, 2010: Mayor deselection failed: Sauerland sits out Loveparade - blockade threatens ( Memento from September 16, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
  38. ↑ Duisburg: Rejection request: Mayor Sauerland remains in office ( Memento from September 14, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) in Rheinische Post from September 13, 2010
  39. ↑ Law to initiate voting procedures for mayors and district administrators through citizens' initiative of May 24, 2011.
  40. ↑ Lord Mayor Adolf Sauerland was voted out . City of Duisburg. February 12, 2012. Archived from the original on February 14, 2012. Retrieved on February 12, 2012.
  41. ↑ Successful voting procedure in Duisburg
  42. ↑ Sauerland is now officially leaving office. www.derwesten.de, accessed on February 15, 2012 .
  43. ↑ Stephanie Hajdamowicz: Three years after the Love Parade disaster. "Organized Irresponsibility". wdr.de, July 24, 2013
personal data
SURNAME Sauerland, Adolf
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician (CDU), Lord Mayor of Duisburg
DATE OF BIRTH 4th June 1955
PLACE OF BIRTH Wehofen