Eduard Pichl

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Eduard Pichl (temporary literary pseudonym : Herwig , born September 15, 1872 in Vienna , † March 15, 1955 at the Dachsteinhaus near Ramsau am Dachstein ) was a successful Austrian mountaineer . Long before the Nazi seizure of power in Germany, as a fanatical anti-Semite , he enforced the Aryan paragraph for the first time in 1921 in his Alpine Club Section Austria and subsequently throughout the German and Austrian Alpine Club .

Life and alpine career

As a mountaineer and climber, Pichl managed 60 new tours and first ascents, including the Dachstein south face. After him, the Pichlweg in the Dachstein south face (first ascent by E. Pichl, F. Gams and F. Zimmer on July 17, 1901) and the Pichlweg in the Planspitze north face (first ascent by E. Pichl and F. Panzer on 10 July 1901) June 1900) in the Gesäuse .

Pichl completed an engineering degree at the Vienna Technical University (today Vienna University of Technology ) and later made it into a civil servant career as a councilor . During his studies in 1891 he co-founded the Association of German Technical University Students Gothia , which later became the Gothia Vienna fraternity .

When the First World War broke out, Pichl entered voluntarily, was wounded in Galicia and spent 33 months as a prisoner of war in Siberia . In 1917 he returned as an exchange invalid. Then he was a trainer in the mountain guide replacement and instruction department of the Austro-Hungarian Army and despite his wrist wound , he was the first to climb the 900 m high northern edge of the Langkofel in August 1918 .

After the war, Pichl also worked as a developer of the former front paths of the mountain war in the Carnic Alps . With his idea of ​​developing the military infrastructure for tourism, he was able to convince the main committee of the Alpine Club. The front paths were converted into high-altitude paths, which now connected the war barracks as mountaineering huts (e.g. Carnic High Path ). The hut on Wolayersee in the Carnic Main Ridge , which was destroyed in the First World War, was rebuilt in 1923 by the Austria section of the German and Austrian Alpine Club and named in honor of its chairman, Eduard-Pichl-Hütte . It was not until 2002 that it got its original name back, Wolayerseehütte . The thousand-mark ban and the economic recession, combined with mass unemployment, later led to a drastic decline in tourism, which was only briefly interrupted between the annexation of Austria and the beginning of the Second World War .

Two years before his death, Pichl wrote farewell greetings that were to be read out at his funeral. In this self-obituary, looking back at the end of existence culminated in the closing words: I have lived a long life, and if I were at the beginning of it, I would want to live it exactly that way again .

Eduard Pichl was buried in Bad Goisern on March 20, 1955 .

politics

Eduard Pichl as a functionary and politician can hardly be separated from his mountaineering activity, which he reported on early on in magazines and which gave him a lot of authority in mountaineering circles. He grew up in Vienna and was already under the spell of the German Nationals as a student and fraternity member . He was friends with Georg von Schönerer , who was thirty years his senior . After the First World War he worked on his most extensive work, a Schönerer biography, the first four volumes of which appeared under the pseudonym Herwig until 1923. His political worldview was already shaped by Schönerer before the World War: He represented Schönerer's racial anti-Semitism , polemicized against the “Jewish press”, was an opponent of the Habsburg multi-ethnic state and wanted Austria to be united with the German Empire . He defended the primacy of the “German noble people” over other peoples and the Germanic cult of the leader, he polemicized against the “Jewishized Social Democracy ” as well as against the House of Habsburg . He shared these and other convictions of Schoenerer with Adolf Hitler , who not only adopted Schoenerer's political principles but actually copied them.

When Pichl was elected chairman of the Austria section, one of the largest sections of the German and Austrian Alpine Association, in April 1921, the first thing he enforced was the inclusion of an Aryan paragraph in the association's statutes. On October 27, 1921, the section decided that Jews, who at that time made up around a third of the section members, should be excluded from the section. It followed the Vienna Section (1905), the Vienna Academic Section (1907) and the ÖTK (1920). Pichl then enforced the Aryan paragraph in several sections of the Alpine Association (including the Austrian Mountain Association ) and, against the resistance of Willi Rickmer Rickmers and Johann Stüdl, also in the entire association. In 1921, the excluded founded the Donauland section ( initially accepted by the DuÖAV despite Pichl's agitation ) which, when they did not voluntarily leave the DuÖAV, was again excluded in 1924. In 1925 the German sections obliged the Austrian sections not to submit any further applications for the introduction of Aryan paragraphs in the following eight years.

In 1923, together with supporters of the Kapp Putsch who fled to Austria, Pichl founded the German national alpine defense association '' Edelweiß '' and the Deutsche Wacht , which carried out various assassinations.

Alpine Museum Munich , description of the object “Memorandum of the Austrian Sections of D. u. Ö. Alpine Association in the Donauland Affair "(Vienna 1924)

It is not known whether Eduard Pichl belonged to the Austrian NSDAP , which was banned on June 19, 1933, before the Anschluss .

In the Third Reich , as a Schönerer disciple, like Hitler's childhood friend August Kubizek , Pichl was one of those whom the now Chancellor remembered. Through the Reich Institute for the History of the New Germany, Hitler supported the printing of the two missing volumes of the Schönerer biography of Pichl in 1938 and had half the edition (500 of 1000 copies) purchased. Schonerer's 100th birthday was celebrated in 1942 with an exhibition in the Vienna Messepalast , organized by Pichl and Franz Stein , another of Schönerer's disciples.

After the Allied victory in Europe, the Austria section was banned in 1945. The elderly Pichl was no longer involved in the re-establishment in the following year. The newly founded Section Austria subsequently set itself apart from its brown past. The 80th birthday of one of the most important club officials in the first half of the century was not even mentioned in the communications of the Austrian Alpine Club (born in 1952).

Publications

Awards and honors

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Herwig ( ie -): Georg Schönerer and the development of Pan-Germanism in the Ostmark . A picture of life . Four volumes. The Pan-German Association for the Ostmark, Vienna 1873–1923, OBV .
  2. Famous Goths . In: Wiener akad. B! Gothia: gothia.at , accessed on July 24, 2013. - R. Girtler "Korporations-Studenten: Pioniere des Bergsteigens" in Acta Studentica, 44/1982, p. 3. - Paulgerhard Gladen, Kurt U. Bertrams: Die deutsch- national corporation associations. German Armed Forces, Waidhofener Verband et al. WJK-Verlag, Hilden 2009, ISBN 3-933892-11-2 . P. 70.
  3. M. Heinrich, - (arr.): Four maps of the central and western Carnic main chain . German and Austrian Alpine Association, “Austria” branch, Vienna 1925–1929, OBV .
  4. a b Hofrat Dipl.-Ing. Eduard Pichl †. In: Mitteilungen des Österreichischer Alpenverein , Born 1955, Volume 10 (80), Issue 4/5 April / May 1955, p. 41, center left. (Online at ALO ).
  5. - (Herwig): Georg Ritter von Schönerer . Popular edition. Deutscher Verlag Jugend und Volk, Vienna 1940, OBV .
  6. ^ Brigitte Hamann: Hitler's Vienna. Apprenticeship as a dictator , p. 361
  7. ^ Eduard Pichl:  To the members. In:  News from the “Austria” section of the German and Austrian Alpine Club , born in 1921, p. 26 f. (Online at ANNO ). Template: ANNO / Maintenance / nsa.
  8. Andreas Jentzsch: "Against intolerance and hatred 1921 - 1945 as a warning to us mountaineers". “Austria” thinks about its past . In: oeav-events.at , OeAV section Austria, Austria Nachrichten, issue 5/02. PDF online ( Memento from May 5, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
  9. Robert Streibel : No place for Dr. Seligmann. The Alpine Club and its suppressed history ( Memento from November 10, 2005 in the Internet Archive ). In: Wiener Zeitung , EXTRA Lexikon, March 1, 2005, accessed on July 24, 2013.
  10. ^ Helmut Heiber: Walter Frank and his Reich Institute for the History of the New Germany. Stuttgart 1966. p. 356
  11. Staff news . Honor. The board of S. Austria (…) In: Mitteilungen des Deutschen und Österreichischer Alpenverein , born in 1928, (Volume LIV), p. 86, center right. (Online at ALO ).
  12. Staff news . Honor. Hofrat Ing. Eduard Pichl (…) In: Mitteilungen des Deutschen und Österreichischer Alpenverein , born in 1928, (Volume LIV), p. 218, center right. (Online at ALO ).
  13. ^ Hofrat Eduard Pichl - 3rd honorary citizen. In: Communications from the German and Austrian Alpine Club , born in 1934, (Volume LX), p. 42, center left. (Online at ALO ).