Bernhard Pawelcik

Pawelcik around 1925

Bernhard Pawelcik (born March 7, 1880 in Sensburg , East Prussia province , † April 17, 1970 in Delmenhorst ) was a German administrative lawyer and judge. During the Weimar Republic he was first mayor of the town of Marienburg.

Life

Pawelcik came from an old Masurian family in Sensburg. His ancestors provided East Prussia with forest and local government officials, farmers and merchants. His grandfather was the mayor of Nikolaiken .

After the first school lessons at his father's residence in Friedrichshof, Ortelsburg district, Pawelcik attended high school in Allenstein . After graduating from high school in 1899, he began to study law and political science at the Albertus University in Königsberg . In the summer semester of 1899 he became active in the Corps Masovia . As an inactive person , he moved to the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich in 1901 . He was trained as a court trainee in East Prussia and Kassel . In 1907 he returned to East Prussia as a court assessor and became a district judge in Landsberg (1909) and Wehlau . He was awarded the Cross of Merit for War Aid (Prussia) for his efforts to establish war damage in his circle in 1914/17 . He broke off the promising career of judges when he was appointed to the magistrate of the provincial capital Königsberg i in 1917 by Mayor Siegfried Körte . Pr. Was appointed.

Marienburg

The Hohen Lauben in Marienburg, in the background the castle

Unanimously elected First Mayor in 1918, Pawelcik served the religious city of Marienburg for fifteen years . This historic and contested border town was the eastern outpost of the Teutonic Order in the Middle Ages . Leading it was not easy, especially not in the difficult years after the First World War. Since 1920 the city had been on the Polish Corridor , like Marienwerder on the western edge of the isolated East Prussia. Pawelcik's skill and prudence in the Allenstein voting area (1920) was praised. The city experienced a new heyday under him. The new town hall, the open-air festival, the airfield and the bus service, green and bathing areas, trade schools and an electricity company were built. The port and industry were expanded. From 1925 he represented Marienburg and the German People's Party in the provincial parliament of the province of East Prussia .

Bernhard Schmid later wrote in Pawelcik's official file of the Schleswig administrative district :

“Thanks to political and religious tolerance and prudent treatment of people, he always had a safe majority in the urban corporations. The successors could draw on what had been created. The period from 1918 to 1933 was unprecedented work, worthy of the cultural work of the Teutonic Order. "

- Bernhard Schmid

Pawelcik had the two creators of the West Prussian song , Hugo Hartmann and Paul Felske , erected a simple memorial in the city park of Marienburg in 1920. He initiated it himself. The first notes of the song could be seen in gold under the inscription.

1933

Pawelcik, who always enjoyed Paul von Hindenburg's esteem , also survived the National Socialist upheaval and his impeachment. At first still a lawyer in Königsberg, after Hindenburg's intervention in 1934 he became a government employee and soon afterwards a councilor. He was appointed to the newly created examination office and head of the Königsberg price monitoring office. With tutoring from Berlin, the new local giants recognized his competence and performance. Delegated from Berlin in the same capacity to Pomerania and Silesia , he was brave enough everywhere to solve tricky tasks and to bring grievances to the Gaussians in Konigsberg, Stettin and Breslau. On his 62nd birthday he was awarded the War Merit Cross. In August 1944, despite his 64 years of age, he was drafted to do excavation work on the panther position . When the Russian siege of Koenigsberg began and all the authorities withdrew, Pawelcik stayed at his post with a few other officials. During the East Prussian Operation (1945) , a few days before the Königsberg Fortress was surrendered on April 9, 1945, he escaped to the west via Pillau and the Baltic Sea. In May 1945 he was taken over by the government in Schleswig as head of municipal and savings banks and retired in 1946 as a senior councilor.

Age

As an administrative lawyer, he represented the interests of displaced persons at the Schleswig Administrative Court and the Lüneburg Higher Administrative Court . He helped with reparations and ran 20,000 denazification proceedings in just over a year . He was a co-founder and later an honorary member of the Landsmannschaft West Prussia . When he moved to Mainz in 1952, he became its regional chairman in Rhineland-Palatinate . As before, he traveled from city to city, gave lectures on the Marienburg and recalled the importance of the German East for Europe, even at the age of 81 in Hamburg.

Pawelcik was married to Helene Krantz from Tilsit , a sister of two Corps brothers. She was chairman of the DRK in Marienburg , which awarded her the badge of honor. Of the couple's four children, their two sons died, one of them with the Condor Legion ; the other, also a member of the Masovia, remained missing in Romania since 1944. The couple celebrated their golden wedding anniversary in the Schleswig Cathedral on October 25, 1959, in the most solemn form and with great sympathy . Pawelcik was showered with honors. The mayors of Hamburg, Mainz and Duisburg congratulated the former head of a city with 26,000 inhabitants. A picture came from the Hindenburg house with the signature of the former field marshal and president. After the death of his wife, Pawelcik spent his last years with his younger daughter in Delmenhorst.

Works

Pawelcik and Marienburg

• The economic importance and future of the Marienburg district , 1921
• Marienburg 1918–1923. A municipal review of the first five years of the post-war period , Marienburg 1923
• Marienburger Heimatbuch: Comprehensive d. large u. small Werder with adjacent edge of the hill , Marienwerder 1926 (by Pawelcik and others)
• Marienburg , Berlin: Publishing Society for Urban Development, 1930
• Fifty Years of the West Prussian Song , in: Der Westpreuße , vol. 2, 1950, No. 10, p. 10
• Ferdinand Schulz - A memory of our great West Prussian glider pilot , in: West Prussia Yearbook, Vol. 2, pp. 64–65

literature

• East Prussia Observatory , October 1959.

Web links

• Literature by and about Bernhard Pawelcik in the catalog of the German National Library
• Search for Bernhard Pawelcik in the SPK digital portal of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation
• WorldCat

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Kösener Corpslisten 1960, 87/903
2. ↑ Directory of members of the East Prussian Provincial Parliament (Korfmacher)
3. ^ Marienburger Zeitung number 29 from August 1950.
4. ↑ In 1951, Duisburg sponsored Königsberg.
5. ^ H. Lippold: Obituary for Bernhard Pawelcik . In: Altmärker-Masuren newspaper, issue 47, Kiel 1970, pp. 977–979