Dietloff von Arnim

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Dietloff von Arnim (with daughter Marie Agnes)

Dietloff Hans Otto Carl von Arnim , also von Arnim-Ragow and von Arnim-Rittgarten (born January 21, 1876 in Güterberg ; † May 3, 1945 in Augustfelde near Prenzlau ), was a large Prussian landowner and from 1933 to 1944 provincial director and governor the province of Brandenburg .

Life

Empire and Weimar Republic

Arnim was the son of the President of the Chamber of Agriculture of the Brandenburg Province , Georg von Arnim (1843-1914), on Güterberg and Rittgarten with Neuhof and Augustfelde and Hermine von Stülpnagel (1845-1932) and attended the Ilfeld convent school and the Putbus pedagogy . He then studied in Goettingen, Greifswald and Marburg jurisprudence . In 1897 he became a member of the Corps Saxonia Göttingen . In the same year he joined the Corps Pomerania Greifswald . In 1900 he entered the Prussian civil service as a trainee lawyer and, after completing his traineeship, passed the government assistant professor's examination.

Arnim worked as an assessor in various authorities: among others in the Berlin police headquarters, in the government of the Prussian province of Posen and in the Reich Colonial Office . In 1914 he was appointed district administrator of the Jüterbog-Luckenwalde district, but shortly afterwards called up for military service. He commanded a battalion of infantry and received various awards, including the Iron Cross first and second class. Before the end of the war he was able to return to his office in the district administration, but refused to take the oath on the republican Weimar constitution and therefore resigned from civil service in 1919.

In 1909 Dietloff von Arnim married Marie Luise von Witte (1888–1968), with whom he had three children. Karl Silex was his son-in-law, he married Arnim's daughter Rosemarie. In the 1920s he managed Ragow , the manor of his in-laws, and called himself von Arnim-Ragow during this time . The marriage ended in divorce in 1930 , after which Arnim again took the name of Arnim-Rittgarten . In 1931 Arnim married Marie Agnes von Tresckow (1902–1945), a daughter of the Prussian general of the cavalry Hermann von Tresckow and sister of Henning von Tresckow . From this marriage a daughter was born.

During the Weimar Republic, Arnim was involved in numerous agricultural associations, such as the Landbund and the Association of Prussian rural communities. He was a member of the board of directors of the German Land Community Conference . Like many aristocratic landowners in Brandenburg, Arnim was initially a member of the anti-republic and anti-democratic DNVP . He fought fierce political battles against the conservative opposition in the Landbund and DNVP, whose spokesman was Dietlof von Arnim-Boitzenburg . These conflicts involved, on the one hand, participation in government by the DNVP, which the conservatives rejected, and, on the other hand, the nobility's birthright rights. Dietloff von Arnim vigorously agitated for greater support for agriculture by the DNVP and considered foreign policy compromises to be acceptable. In 1929 he converted to the Christian National Peasant and Rural People's Party and in a public statement emphasized the “free German peasant class” as the foundation for a “healthy German state life”. On December 1, 1931, he became a member of the NSDAP . In 1932 he was already running on a NSDAP list for election to the board of the Landbund.

National Socialism

On March 12, 1933, a week after the Reichstag election on March 5, Arnim was elected to the Brandenburg provincial parliament on the NSDAP list. The election campaign was marked by a “wave of National Socialist terror”, the NSDAP won an absolute majority of the seats. The provincial parliament in turn elected Arnim to the provincial committee. Wilhelm Kube , who was elevated to the post of Upper President of the Province in February 1933 , now wanted to replace the State Director of the Province of Brandenburg , Hugo Swart , with a National Socialist as quickly as possible . Kube appointed Arnim country director in April 1933. Arnim's inaugural speech to the provincial parliament, which was rich in anti-Semitic attacks, "impressively", according to Fabian Scheffczyk, demonstrated his National Socialist sentiments. The DC circuit of the County Council was completed with the 1 January 1934 at the latest: By law got the upper president of the leader principle all the tasks of the county council, the provincial committees and the country director and became its Dienstvorgesetztem. Arnim remained state director until 1944 (in 1937 the official title was changed to state governor , in 1940 the province was renamed to Mark Brandenburg ). He also took over the office of chairman of the board of the Oberlinhaus association , which Swart had previously held. Arnim belonged to the Kaiser Wilhelm Society for the Advancement of Science and, as governor of Brandenburg from 1940, was also responsible for the Nazi euthanasia measures there .

In addition to Hans Heinze , the head of the state institution in Görden , and Friedrich Baumann, the head of the sanatorium and nursing home in Sorau , Arnim was one of the few people who were completely familiar with the implementation of the T4 campaign in Brandenburg from the start. Without his consent, patients could not be transferred to killing centers. In the literature it has occasionally been suggested that Arnim had concerns about the homicide. Reference is made to an internal note from Irmfried Eberl , the head of the Bernburg killing center , who wrote around 1941/1942 that Arnim should be “treated with a certain degree of caution”, while the governor of the province of Saxony Kurt Otto was “unreservedly positive” about the killings . However, there is no tangible evidence of such concerns, and Arnim's speech or action in this regard is nowhere documented. The district judge Lothar Kreyssig , who actually resisted the transfer of patients to killing centers, received no support from him. In a letter to several institutions, Kreyssig had prohibited them from transferring patients who were under the tutelage of the local court. Thereupon Arnim, in his function as governor, asked him in writing to withdraw these letters. It is about "military interests that are important to the war effort" and the state agencies have already received instructions from him to carry out such transfers without Kreyssig's consent.

Following the assassination attempt on July 20, 1944 , Arnim was arrested on August 22. The reason was that his brother-in-law Henning von Tresckow, one of the heads of July 20, had lived in the Villa von Arnim in the summer of 1943 ; the Gestapo suspected him of having learned of Tresckow's assassination plans. On September 8th, Arnim was “honored” from custody, as the suspicion had not been confirmed. On September 22nd, Arnim wrote a letter asking for his retirement for reasons of age (he was already 68 years old). The President of the Province of Brandenburg and Gauleiter Emil Stürtz approved this request and Arnim was retired on November 1, 1944. Stürtz organized a farewell event for him in December, emphasized the “exemplary cooperation between the party and the provincial administration” and promised him a future participation in the provincial administration. In his farewell speech, Arnim thanked the Gauleiter, but criticized the subordination of the governor to the senior presidents - "probably for the first time publicly," as Fabian Scheffczyk comments.

Arnim retired to his Rittgarten estate with his wife and their 11-year-old daughter . At the beginning of May 1945, when the Soviet troops approached, the Arnims committed suicide with poison and also poisoned their daughter. A tombstone in the Rittgarten cemetery commemorates her.

reception

The last days of Arnim and his family play a role in Sabine Friedrich's novel Who We Are . Their presentation is based on historical literature and the memories of Christoph Silex, a grandson of Dietloff von Arnim.

literature

  • Degeners who is it? , Berlin 1935, p. 35.
  • Hermann Fricke: The state directors of the province of Brandenburg 1876–1945 . In: Yearbook of the history of Central and Eastern Germany 1957, pp. 297-325.
  • Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945 . 2nd Edition. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-596-16048-8 .
  • Fabian Scheffczyk: The Provincial Association of the Prussian Province of Brandenburg 1933-1945. Regional performance and steering administration under National Socialism , Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2008, ISBN 3-16-149761-9 .
  • Genealogical manual of the nobility, Volume AV III, CA Starke-Verlag, Limburg.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Genealogical Manual of the Nobility, Volume A VIII, page 87, CA Starke-Verlag, Limburg, 1966
  2. ↑ Kösener corps lists 1910, 85 , 478
  3. ↑ Kösener corps lists 1910, 93 , 512
  4. ^ Fabian Scheffczyk: The Provincial Association of the Prussian Province of Brandenburg 1933–1945. Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2008, p. 55.
  5. ^ Fabian Scheffczyk: The Provincial Association of the Prussian Province of Brandenburg 1933–1945. Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2008, pp. 55-56.
  6. ^ Janne Gärtner: Free • Time • Spaces. On the history of youth work in the Evangelical Church Community Frohnau 1913–2009 . Norderstedt 2010 ( online ). There chapter 6: The youth home in Fuchssteinerweg . The community had acquired the property from Silex, which Gärtner takes as an opportunity to write a short biography of the seller.
  7. ^ Fabian Scheffczyk: The Provincial Association of the Prussian Province of Brandenburg 1933–1945. Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2008, p. 55; Rainer Pomp: Brandenburg land nobility and the Weimar Republic . In: Kurt Adamy, Kristina Hübener (eds.): Nobility and state administration in Brandenburg in the 19th and 20th centuries . Akademie, Berlin 1996, pp. 185–218, here: p. 191.
  8. ^ Rainer Pomp: Brandenburg landed nobility and the Weimar Republic . In: Kurt Adamy, Kristina Hübener (eds.): Nobility and state administration in Brandenburg in the 19th and 20th centuries . Akademie, Berlin 1996, pp. 185-218; Fabian Scheffczyk: The Provincial Association of the Prussian Province of Brandenburg 1933-1945. Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2008, p. 56.
  9. ^ Fabian Scheffczyk: The Provincial Association of the Prussian Province of Brandenburg 1933–1945. Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2008, p. 43.
  10. ^ Fabian Scheffczyk: The Provincial Association of the Prussian Province of Brandenburg 1933–1945. Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2008, pp. 56–57, with meaningful quotations from the speech.
  11. ^ Fabian Scheffczyk: The Provincial Association of the Prussian Province of Brandenburg 1933–1945. Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2008, p. 75.
  12. ↑ a b Ernst Klee: Das Personenlexikon zum Third Reich , Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 19
  13. ^ Fabian Scheffczyk: The Provincial Association of the Prussian Province of Brandenburg 1933–1945. Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2008, p. 177.
  14. ↑ For example Christian Engeli: Berlin and the Province of Brandenburg 1933–1945 . In: Gerd Heinrich, Friedrich W. Henning, Kurt GA Jeserich (eds.): Administrative history of East Germany 1815-1945. Organization - tasks - services of the administration . Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 1993, pp. 805-833. Engeli suspects there that Arnim's involvement in the euthanasia campaign “increasingly bothered” (p. 822).
  15. ↑ Quoted from Peter Sandner: Verwaltung des Krankenmordes. The Nassau District Association under National Socialism . Historical series of publications by the State Welfare Association of Hesse, University publications Volume 2. Giessen 2003, pp. 382–383. Sandner quotes from an "organizational plan of the Dr. Eberl ”, which is printed in the indictment of the“ Medical Trial ”from 1965 against Aquilin Ullrich , Heinrich Bunke , Kurt Borm and Klaus Endruweit .
  16. ^ Fabian Scheffczyk: The Provincial Association of the Prussian Province of Brandenburg 1933–1945. Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2008, p. 178.
  17. ^ Kurt Adamy, Kristina Hübener: Province of Mark Brandenburg - Gau Kurmark. An administrative history sketch . In: Dietrich Eichholtz, Almuth Püschel (Hrsg.): Tracking everyday resistance. Brandenburg during the Nazi era . Volk und Welt, Berlin 1993, pp. 13–31, here: p. 30.
  18. ^ Fabian Scheffczyk: The Provincial Association of the Prussian Province of Brandenburg 1933–1945. Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2008, p. 215.
  19. ↑ Jochen von Arnim, Martin von Arnim: The family of Arnim: Chronicle of the family in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries . Degener, Neustadt ad Aisch 2002, p. 392.
  20. ↑ Photo on the dorfkirchen-in-mv.de page.
  21. ↑ Sabine Friedrich: Who we are. Workshop report. dtv, Munich 2012, pp. 123 and 125.
personal data
SURNAME Arnim, Dietloff from
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Arnim-Rittgarten Dietloff from
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German local politician
DATE OF BIRTH January 21, 1876
PLACE OF BIRTH Güterberg
DATE OF DEATH May 3, 1945
Place of death Augustfelde near Prenzlau