Erich Gaertner

Erich Gaertner

Gaertner's grave in the main cemetery in Freiburg

Erich Gaertner (born March 19, 1882 in Neckarbischofsheim , † January 15, 1973 in Freiburg im Breisgau ) was a German local politician ( DVP , NSDAP ). He was Lord Mayor of the city of Osnabrück .

Life

The son of a notary attended the humanistic grammar school in Freiburg im Breisgau and studied law at the universities in Freiburg, Munich and Berlin. In 1927 he became mayor of Osnabrück and remained in office after 1933. He was a member of BNSDJ and DBB .

From November 1929 to 1932 he was a member of the Hanover Provincial Parliament for the DVP . In 1933 he joined the SA and in 1937 the NSDAP.

In 1938 Gaertner ordered the immediate demolition of the old synagogue in Osnabrück, in which a fire had raged during the night of the Reichspogrom the day before , for obvious “building police reasons” . As a result, the prayer house was significantly damaged, but not so severe that it would have been unthinkable to reopen. With the demolition, Gaertner nipped this possibility in the bud. Gaertner was probably not involved in the arson, but he took the opportunity to bring the Jewish community - as he had intended for a long time - to the synagogue property in which the Gestapo was interested. To this end, he had previously taken various measures that were intended to ruin the community financially and ultimately force them to sell the property .

Shortly before the end of the war, Erich Gaertner tried to flee to Bremen in a car together with the NSDAP district leader Fritz Wehmeier and the former district leader Willi Münzer . On the outskirts of Osnabrück they broke into a farm on which a white flag was hoisted, which was punished with death in the sphere of influence of the National Socialists. One of them shot the farmer Anna Daumeyer, who had accused herself of raising the flag to protect her son. This murder was never atoned for. In Ostercappeln near Osnabrück, the group was caught in the machine gun fire of British tanks. Wehmeier was seriously injured by a shot in the stomach and died soon after in the Meller hospital in Ostercappeln.

In the post-war period, Gaertner's work was initially rated as mild or even positive by the Osnabrückers. He was considered a prudent mayor with a vision who - albeit a National Socialist - saved the city, which had been hit by many Allied air raids, from an even worse fate. In 1955 he was praised in the Osnabrücker Tageblatt on the tenth anniversary of the devastating attack on Palm Sunday 1945 for the timely construction of air raid bunkers and tunnels . This assessment changed only gradually, especially when his involvement in the murder of Anna Daumeyer and later his machinations with regard to the Old Synagogue came to light.

Gaertner was buried in the main cemetery in Freiburg in 1973 .

literature

• Herrmann AL Degener : Who is it , Berlin 1935, p. 466.
• Karola Fings: War, Society and Concentration Camps: Himmler's SS Building Brigades , 2002, p. 61
• Beatrix Herlemann , Helga Schatz: Biographical Lexicon of Lower Saxony Parliamentarians 1919–1945 (= publications of the Historical Commission for Lower Saxony and Bremen. Volume 222). Hahnsche Buchhandlung, Hanover 2004, ISBN 3-7752-6022-6 , pp. 118–119.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Rainer Lahmann-Lammert: Mayor Gaertner and the Synagogue - How Osnabrück drove the Jewish community to ruin. In: noz.de. NOZ Medien, March 6, 2015, accessed on March 29, 2020 . 
2. ↑ Jann Weber: Murdered because of a white flag. In: Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung, June 20, 2009. PDF
3. ↑ Ute Müller-Detert: Osnabrück newspapers between 1933 and 1949 , 2005, p. 32.
4. ↑ Joachim Dierks: Finale of the bombing war - 75 years ago today, the Sunday “Palmarum” became “Qualmarum” for Osnabrück. In: noz.de. NOZ Medien, March 25, 2020, accessed on March 29, 2020 .