Bruno Boettge

Bruno Boettge

Bruno Böttge (born August 29, 1891 in Halle (Saale) , † January 7, 1967 ) was a German politician of the SPD, USPD and SED. He was Mayor of Eisleben and President of the State Parliament of Saxony-Anhalt.

biography

The son of a working-class family learned the trade of a locksmith and in 1908 became a member of the workers' youth and the SPD in Bernburg (Saale) . From 1911 to 1917 he served in the Imperial Navy . In 1917 he was sentenced to three years' imprisonment for "decomposing the imperial army". Released from prison after the November Revolution, Böttge returned to Bernburg. There he led the district association of the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany and was a city councilor. From 1920 to 1922 he represented the USPD and the VKPD as a member of the Anhalt State Parliament . In 1922, Böttge left the KPD to return to the SPD. From 1923 to 1924 Böttge was local editor of the Mansfelder Volkszeitung , then secretary of the SPD in Eisleben.

From 1924 to 1933 Böttge was mayor of Teutschenthal near Halle. He was arrested in February 1933 and severely mistreated in Lichtenburg concentration camp . After his release in 1934, he worked as a sales representative until he was drafted into the air raid police in 1940 . In June 1945 he became district leader of the SPD for Saxony-Anhalt. When the SPD and KPD were forcibly united to form the SED , he became a member of the SED. He was a member of the SED party executive from 1946 to 1948. With Bernard Koenen , Böttge was chairman of the SED in Saxony-Anhalt. From 1946 he was President of the State Parliament of Saxony-Anhalt . The rules of procedure of the state parliament secured him a high degree of influence in this office, which he used in the interests of the SED. So he was responsible for the allocation of resources to the parliamentary groups. In the shortage situation after the war there was the allocation of food, fuel and the printing capacities important for political work. He set the agenda, allocated speaking times to the political groups and determined the order in which to speak. He used this power specifically to prevent the SED from losing votes in the Saxony-Anhalt state parliament (1946–1952) (the semi-free state elections in 1946 had resulted in an arithmetical majority of the CDU and LDP). So he had a vote on December 18, 1946, in which the CDU and LPD had announced that they would vote against the SED, when by chance some of the CDU and LDP members were not in the room without ringing the doorbell (as usual) or give the political groups time to call the MEPs back into the chamber.

In the late summer of 1948 he got caught up in the beginning party purges of the SED. When he was accused of irregularities in the use of party finances, Böttge resigned from his office. He was expelled from the SED in 1949 and arrested in March 1954. Adam Wolfram (SED) was his successor as President of the State Parliament . The Halle District Court (GDR) sentenced Böttge to eight years in prison on May 14, 1955. Until his pardon in April 1956, he was imprisoned in the Naumburg correctional facility . Later re-accepted into the SED, Böttge was an instructor in the FDGB's holiday service department in Rostock.

Works

• The white city by the sea - Ostseebad Heiligendamm. The health resort and recreation center for working people of the Mecklenburg Social Insurance Institution . Heiligendamm 1950.
• The self-administration. Presentation on the occasion of the conference of district presidents, district administrators, lord mayors, city councilors and district council chairmen on March 5, 1947 . Hall 1947.

See also

• Country (GDR)
• List of members of the State Parliament of Saxony-Anhalt (1946–1952, 1st electoral period)

Web links

• Short biography (ddr-biografien.de)
• Böttge, Bruno (Federal Foundation for Coming to terms with the SED Dictatorship)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Christina Trittel: The parliamentary groups in Saxony-Anhalt from 1946 to 1950. 2006, ISBN 978-3-8350-9668-4 , pp. 64–66 ( limited preview in the Google book search).
2. ^ GDR biographies