August zu Sayn-Wittgenstein-Hohenstein

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August zu Sayn-Wittgenstein-Hohenstein (around 1912)

August zu Sayn-Wittgenstein-Hohenstein (born April 5, 1868 at Wittgenstein Castle ; † June 22, 1948 ibid) was a German prince and nobleman .

Live and act

August Alexander Ludwig Ferdinand Alexis Karl Wilhelm Moritz Albrecht Adalbert was the eldest son of five children of his father, Prince Ludwig zu Sayn-Wittgenstein-Hohenstein , and his wife Marie Luitgarde zu Bentheim and Steinfurt .

He completed his military service and finished it as a Prussian lieutenant a. D.

After the death of his father, he followed him in 1912 at the age of 44 as the 4th Prince of Sayn-Wittgenstein-Hohenstein and head of the House of Sayn and Wittgenstein. During his reign there was a risk that the House of Sayn-Wittgenstein could no longer exist according to the traditional house law . A transfer of the rights to the younger brother Georg Prinz zu Sayn-Wittgenstein-Hohenstein (1873-1960) was not possible according to the house law, because he had entered into a morganatic marriage with Marie Rühm (1892-1975) in 1913 : The youngest brother did not come either Wilhelm (1877-1958) into consideration, since he was unmarried at the time of the decision and later married a commoner Clara Maria Schäfer.

When it became clear that Prince August would remain unmarried and childless, he adopted Christian Heinrich Prince zu Sayn-Wittgenstein-Berleburg (1908-1983), the second eldest son of the late Prince Richard zu Sayn-Wittgenstein-Berleburg (1882-1925) and in 1927 his wife Madeleine, b. Princess of Löwenstein-Wertheim-Freudenberg (1885–1976).

With this adoption , there was also a change in the legal name, which made it possible for Christian Heinrich Prinz zu Sayn-Wittgenstein-Hohenstein to use the historical title “5th in private correspondence from 1948 after the death of his adoptive father in August. Prince of Sayn-Wittgenstein-Hohenstein ”. A legal name change including the new "title" is not possible under the German Civil Status Act , at least controversial. Already in the German Reich in 1919 the privileges of the nobility were abolished with the introduction of Article 109, Paragraph 3 of the Weimar Constitution . The up to then current titles were from then on considered part of the name and could no longer be awarded.

In the fall of 1943, Prince August allowed the valuable Heine collection to be stored in the chapel of Wittgenstein Castle and saved it from alleged demise. August knew that Heinrich Heine and his grandfather, Prince Alexander zu Sayn-Wittgenstein-Hohenstein, were fellow students at the University of Bonn and friends.

With the "Law on the Implementation of Land Reform and Settlement in North Rhine-Westphalia" of May 16, 1949, the aim was to create new settlement areas through the sale or expropriation of larger areas of land. In Wittgenstein, the two princely houses in Berleburg and Laasphe were affected by this law as large landowners

Against the background of this threatened land reform, August zu Sayn-Wittgenstein-Hohenstein, who originally owned 13,000 hectares, bequeathed his large estates to a dozen family members after the end of the Second World War. The new owners of the forest estates then merged into the Fürst Wittgenstein'sche Waldbesitzergesellschaft GBR, which managed the forest ownership across the board until the end of the 1980s.

August zu Sayn-Wittgenstein-Hohenstein died on June 22, 1948 at the age of 80. With him the Wittgenstein-Hohenstein line became extinct.

literature

  • Ulf Lückel and Andreas Kroh: The Princely House of Sayn-Wittgenstein-Hohenstein . Börde-Verlag, Werl 2004
  • Family tree of the mediatized house Sayn and Wittgenstein . 1907, Unchanged reprint of the 1907 edition, Heimat-Verlag und Antiquariat, Angelika Wied, Bad Laasphe 2009, No. 9/100.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Hermann Reuter: The rescue of the Heine collection . Reprint of the publication from Rheinische Post, No. 99, December 13, 1947 In: Wittgenstein. Leaves of the Wittgensteiner Heimatverein, Vol. 87, September 1999, Vol. 63, H. 3, pp. 101-103.
  2. ↑ Fürst Wittgenstein'sche Waldbesitzergesellschaft GBR Rentkammer Wittgenstein: http://www.rentkammer-wittgenstein.de/html/geschichte.htm Last accessed: October 15, 2018, 8:10 p.m.
personal data
SURNAME Sayn-Wittgenstein-Hohenstein, August to
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German prince and nobleman
DATE OF BIRTH April 5, 1868
PLACE OF BIRTH Wittgenstein Castle
DATE OF DEATH June 22, 1948
Place of death Wittgenstein Castle