Artur von Behr

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Artur von Behr (born March 20, 1904 in Tomsk ; † 1974 ) was a German-Baltic publisher and political activist.

Life

His parents were Arthur Freiherr von Behr (* 1862 in Behnen, † 1909 in Mitau ), a German-Baltic police master in Mitau and Libau , and Wanda Baronin von der Ropp (* 1877 in Paplacken ).

Nazi movement

From 1926 to 1929 von Behr founded and headed the National Socialist Student Union in Berlin and spoke out against an apolitical “philistine ideology”.

Through his sister Josefine , who worked as a secretary for Joseph Goebbels and was probably also in a relationship with him, he had insights into the Nazi leadership. But he then relied on the alleged left-wing Nazi conspiracy of Walther Stennes , for whom his sister now worked as a secretary. With her failure, his chance for a career went under. According to von Oertzen (see below), he is said to have already sought contacts with socialist leftists.

Before the Nuremberg Party Congress in 1929 , Behr gathered Baltic German supporters, including Alfred Rosenberg , to work with 20-year-old Theodor Lawrynowicz (from Miedzyzdroje ) to design a Nazi magazine Der Baltische Beobachter for Baltic Germans, with a circulation of up to 800 copies (1933) appeared in order to establish cohesion between the Baltic Germans living abroad. As the paper rose to become a paper close to the government, especially in the course of the resettlement of the Baltic Germans after the Hitler-Stalin pact or the German-Soviet border and friendship treaty in 1939, the circulation grew to around 5000. But then the term disappeared Baltic from the title (now Ost-Rundschau ) before the paper was discontinued in 1941. Later he published a few issues of the following Remter for which the German-Baltic journalist and Rosenberg confidante Harald Siewert was responsible.

After 1945

Since 1948, Baltic Letters have been published in West Germany for refugees and displaced persons from this region , edited by Wolf Jaroslaw von Kleist (1922–2000) and printed from 1949 in the small Behrs print shop in Bovenden near Göttingen . However, from 1950 the latter published the Baltic Rundschau as a new magazine, which in 1954, after some disputes, was also included in the letters within the Association of Baltic Germans ( German Baltic Landsmannschaft from 1950) .

Behr, who joined the SPD soon after 1945 - his sister had been the wife of Hinrich Wilhelm Kopf , who was elected Prime Minister of Lower Saxony since 1940 - now shifted his interest to left-wing socialism. So he printed Leo Kofler's Marxist or Ethical Socialism in 1955 ? to the dispute with the followers of Leonard Nelsons in the SPD leadership. In Göttingen he came into contact with young social democrats of the left wing like Peter von Oertzen and Trotskyists , for whom he printed the magazine pro and contra . With the renowned Ernest Mandel and Göttingen comrades, von Oertzen published the socialist policy .

In 1956, Behr began to publish a newsletter on Socialist Democracy , which was published until the 1970s. He left the SPD and ran for the Democratic Voters' Association of Lower Saxony in the Göttingen local elections in 1960 , where many communists became involved after the KPD was banned . An arrest warrant was overturned after protests, including from the GDR. He ran for the German Peace Union in the 1961 and 1965 federal elections . In 1963, after four months of pre-trial detention at the Lüneburg Regional Court, a trial against von Behr for endangering the state began . He ran for the Democratic Progress Campaign in the 1969 Bundestag election as the top candidate in Lower Saxony.

The author and US émigré Karl Otto Paetel , whom he knew from before 1933, published the newsletter, Conversation Scraps, which Behr printed in Germany, primarily for his friends in Germany .

Fonts

  • Youth and Politics , in: The Young Revolutionary , No. 3, 1927
  • (Ed.): Baltische Rundschau, monthly magazine of the Baltic Germans (magazine), 1950–1954

literature

Web links

References and comments

  1. ^ Baltic Historical Commission (ed.): Entry on Arthur Baron von Behr. In: BBLD - Baltic Biographical Lexicon digital
  2. ↑ Heinz-Elmar Tenorth u. a .: History of the University of Unter den Linden: The Berlin University between the world wars 1918 to 1945 . tape 2 . Academy, Berlin 2012, p. 228 f .
  3. ↑ Joseph Goebbels: Diaries . Ed .: Elke Fröhlich. tape I , no. 1 . Saur, Munich.
  4. ↑ Michael Garleff (Ed.): Baltic Germans, Weimar Republic and Third Reich . tape 2 . Böhlau, Cologne 2008, p. 182 .
  5. ^ Baron Wolf J. von Kleist. Retrieved February 8, 2019 .
  6. ^ Hans-Jürgen Gaida: The official organs of the East German country teams. A contribution to the journalism of the expellees in West Germany . Duncker and Humblot, Berlin 1973, p. 47 f .
  7. ↑ Peter von Oertzen: No god, no emperor, no tribune. ISO, 1970, accessed February 6, 2019 .
  8. ↑ So poor. Der Spiegel, 1969, accessed February 6, 2019 .
  9. ^ Wolfgang D. Elfe: Karl Otto Paetel . In: John M. Spalek, Joseph Strelka (ed.): German-language exile literature since 1933 . B 2 New York, Part I. Francke, Bern 1989, p. 748 .
personal data
SURNAME Behr, Artur von
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-Baltic publisher and political activist
DATE OF BIRTH March 20, 1904
PLACE OF BIRTH Tomsk
DATE OF DEATH 1974