Albert grace

Albert Gnade (born January 25, 1886 , † July 4, 1966 ) was a German politician ( NSDAP ), SS leader and mayor of the city of Göttingen .

Life

Gnade was originally an officer in the Reichswehr and joined the NSDAP in 1922 (membership number 2.798). He received his membership number again after the party's ban in 1925. In 1923 he took part in the Hitler putsch in Munich. Since then he has been particularly valued in the party as an “ old fighter ”. In the 1920s and early 1930s, Gnade ran the "Kaiser-Wilhelm Park" (KWP), an inn located outside of Göttingen, in which Adolf Hitler also stayed a few times. In 1929 he became a member of the citizens' council in Göttingen and thus gained in-depth knowledge of the processes and people in the Göttingen city administration even before the actual synchronization .

In 1933, grace took over the post of police senator of Göttingen. In this capacity he participated in the initiation and suppression of the unrest known as the Göttingen riots . From 1934 to 1945, Gnade was mayor (from 1938 mayor) of the city of Göttingen. He was seen as a sociable administrator, which he was particularly reproached for by the local leadership of the NSDAP. In addition to the NSDAP, Gnade had been a member of the SS since 1931 , in which he achieved the rank of Standartenführer on March 1, 1934 and was temporarily commander of the SS Standarte Harz . By Heinrich Himmler , he was with the SS Death's Head ring excellent.

In April 1945, after a long hesitation, which resulted in further destruction, Gnade handed the city of Göttingen over to the advancing American troops. A few years later, with the help of the "report [s] on the events during the handover of the city on April 8, 1945", Gnade tried to present the surrender without a fight as his merit. Sources and secondary literature, however, give no indication that the call to surrender the city without a fight ever reached the population. Matthias Heinzel also worked out in a contemporary witness project that Grace's actions as Lord Mayor are unclear and controversial. Furthermore, the "Committee to Clarify the Events of the Capitulation of Göttingen in April 1945", which examined the events of April 8, 1945 from 1955 to 1957, came to the conclusion that no individual could be named who would ensure the peaceful surrender of the city .

During the denazification , Grace succeeded in portraying itself as a less burdened fellow traveler. Only in the second attempt was he classified as a “beneficiary”.

In the Federal Republic of Germany , Gnade was again active in right-wing extremist parties. In 1952 he was elected to the Göttingen City Council as a candidate for the German Reich Party (DRP). He also ran for the Bundestag several times - albeit unsuccessfully - in 1953 in the Göttingen-Münden constituency for the umbrella organization of the National Collection (DNS) and in 1957 and 1961 on the Lower Saxony state list of the German Community .

literature

• Michaela Böttcher: " What begins the following morning is a new chapter" - The first days under Allied occupation in Göttingen. In: Maren Büttner, Sabine Horn (eds.): Everyday life after 1945. The post-war period using the example of the city of Göttingen. Universitätsverlag Göttingen , Göttingen 2010, pp. 11–30. ISBN 978-3-940344-81-6
• Dietrich Denecke , Helga-Maria Kühn , Rudolf von Thadden, Ernst Böhme, Günter J. Trittel, Marc-Dietrich Ohse, Rudolf Vierhaus : Göttingen, history of a university town. Göttingen 2002, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht ISBN 352536198X .
• Matthias Heinzel: 1945 - End of the war in Göttingen. Contemporary witnesses report. Göttinger Tageblatt GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen 2005.