Erich Kiesl

Erich Kiesl (* 26. February 1930 in parish churches ; † 4. July 2013 in Munich ) was a German politician of the CSU . From 1978 to 1984 he was Lord Mayor of Munich.

The grave of Erich Kiesl, Bogenhausener Friedhof, Munich.

Life

The climb

The son of a postal secretary studied from 1949 at the Munich School of Philosophy , which is sponsored by the Jesuits . One of his fellow students was there later CDU - secretary general Heiner Geissler . In 1953 Kiesl moved to the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich to study law . After a brief activity in a trade association, he entered the civil service in 1960. He initially worked at the Bavarian Finance Administration as a department head in several tax offices , from 1963 to 1966 at the Federal Fiscal Court in Munich and from 1967 to 1970 at the Bavarian Ministry of Finance as a consultant for administrative simplification.

In 1960, Kiesl joined the CSU and in 1969, at the suggestion of Franz Josef Strauss, was elected district chairman of the Munich CSU. Under Kiesl's aegis, the membership of the CSU tripled to 12,000 by 1978. Kiesl risked a conflict with Strauss when he announced a “liberal opening” for the Munich CSU. His strategy was successful: In 1974 the CSU won all eleven Munich state parliament mandates. He himself was elected to the Bavarian State Parliament on November 20, 1966 and October 27, 1974 .

From 1970 to 1978 Kiesl, whom the press occasionally dubbed “Propeller-Erich” because of his preference for flights in service helicopters, was State Secretary in the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior and was actually being discussed as the successor to the Bavarian Minister of the Interior, Bruno Merk . Instead, at the end of 1976, he was nominated for the mayoral election in Munich, which had been ruled by Social Democrats uninterruptedly since 1948, a year and a half later. It turned out to be the longest and most extensive OB election campaign in Munich's history. Erich Kiesl profited from the desperate situation of the Munich SPD at the end of the 1970s , which had been wiped out in wing battles. Georg Kronawitter , SPD mayor since 1972, no longer wanted to run and left the candidacy to his inner-party rival Max von Heckel , who was then Munich city treasurer . On March 5, 1978 Erich Kiesl was elected mayor of Munich with 51.4 percent of the vote. The Hamburg weekly newspaper Die Zeit admiringly headlined Erich Kiesl - nimble as a weasel and wrote "A dream result for the CSU ends 30 years of SPD rule in the town hall on Marienplatz".

At the top of Munich

His first security policy measures aroused some astonishment in the liberal press nationwide. Erich Kiesl occupied the Bavarian capital's police force for a while with the physical removal of street musicians , pavement artists and beggars from Munich's pedestrian zone . Later he also worried about the moral condition of the Isar metropolis and had prostitution in the city center deported to the outskirts. The local band Spider Murphy Gang then published the No. 1 hit scandal in the restricted area : "There is a Hofbräuhaus in Munich / but brothels have to go out / so that trucks don't stand a chance in this beautiful city /", Günther Sigl wrote in late 1981. The media saw in these idiosyncrasies a contradiction to the cosmopolitan image of the “ cosmopolitan city with a heart ”. Such occurrences earned the native of Lower Bavaria the nickname "the Wolpertinger ", after the strange Bavarian mythical creature, because of their rural-moral charisma .

On April 25, 1979, Kiesl outlined a focus of his policy as the attempt “in cooperation with the private sector to create the conditions that enable the housing market to ensure housing supply in all areas that meets the demands and needs. That is why the focus of the program is on planning and land policy measures. ”The splendid expansion of the town hall and the increase in mayor's salaries were also criticized in his own party. A 33 percent increase in local public transport tariffs led to protests from the Munich population in October 1979. His achievements later included the continued construction of the underground network established by his predecessors Vogel and Kronawitter, the management of sewage disposal and a temporary upswing in residential construction. From 1981 to 1984 Kiesl was Vice President of the German Association of Cities and from 1982 to 1984 he was the first German local politician to be President of the Standing Conference of the Municipalities and Regions of Europe (today: Congress of Municipalities and Regions of the Council of Europe ).

The "building land affair"

In 1981 the so-called "building land affair" preoccupied the public. Josef Schörghuber , a Munich entrepreneur who was friends with Kiesl, and his Bayerische Hausbau were sold around 60,000 m² of urban land in a prime location, well below value. An appraisal by the city of Munich's valuation office had determined a square meter price of DM 840  . In fact, the land was sold for only DM 230 per m². This report had been kept a secret from the city ​​council and the price basis, which was determined orally, was approved with the votes of the CSU and FDP . The CSU city councilor Walter Zöller acted as the notary for this transaction. Parts of the site were resold for a net building land price of DM 930 per m². Schörghuber set other land prices at DM 800 per m². The litigation against the sale of the land, initiated by Georg Kronawitter as Kiesl's successor from the mid-1980s, was unsuccessful.

As an administrative reform project, Kiesl relocated the local building commission and the urban planning department, which he expected to accelerate the building permit process. In addition, Kiesl devoted himself to an accelerated expansion of individual traffic in the area of ​​the middle ring and the subway network at the expense of the tram . He also pursued the construction of vocational training centers, the expansion of the Gut Marienhof sewage treatment plant in Dietersheim , the creation of new cultural institutions such as the cultural center on Gasteig and the expansion of the city ​​museum and the city ​​archive .

Erich Kiesl was voted out of office on April 1, 1984 in a runoff election against his predecessor Georg Kronawitter. 41.9 percent of Munich residents had voted for Kiesl and 58.1 percent for Kronawitter, who had stood for the now re-consolidated SPD.

After being voted out

On October 12, 1986 and October 14, 1990, Erich Kiesl was re-elected to the Bavarian state parliament. It was not until 1988 that the Upper Bavarian government determined in its investigations into the "building land affair" that it had been an "under-value sale". Nevertheless, she approved this deal in 1991 retrospectively. The then responsible Interior Minister Edmund Stoiber refused to instruct his authority not to approve this procedure.

Nevertheless, Erich Kiesl got into the talk again because of dodgy real estate deals. He became known as the “Munich Group” along with other CSU politicians, such as the former member of the Bundestag Hermann Fellner and the former Bonn State Secretary Rudolf Krause. In 1989 Kiesl bought a site in Lohhof for 6.5 million marks, which was sold on for 24.3 million. The later sentenced to a prison term financial juggler Eckehard Hoehn moved the proceeds to money laundering partly abroad and paid in so-called " kick-back procedure" per 250,000 marks to Kiesl and his lawyer pillion back. The initiator of the deal is said to have been the later murdered building contractor Erich Kaufmann.

In the so-called "trustee process", Erich Kiesl was convicted of the false statement . He had denied the tax authorities over a commission of 250,000 DM for the privatization of former East Germany to have received -Außenhandelsgesellschaft. The Berlin Treuhandanstalt had been cheated by around 20 million DM. The verdict in the trust process established that Kiesl was one of the beneficiaries of the fraud. His Braunschweig company TLS had wrongly collected several million marks. Kiesl, however, gave the court the impression that his company was facing bankruptcy and could therefore only repay half of the money to the trust. It was a sum of 2 million marks. Looking ahead, however, Kiesl had previously transferred a TLS property worth DM 15 million to a subsidiary .

The trial of Erich Kiesl, which has been postponed again and again, began on January 20, 1998 in Munich. The public prosecutor's office accused him, in addition to unofficial false testimony and tax evasion, of having shifted the assets of a company he advised as a lawyer at the expense of the Treuhandanstalt . Before that, on January 11, 1998, Kiesl caused a scandal. When a bailiff and police officers came to see him to execute an enforcement warrant to take the “oath of disclosure” against him, he lost his temper, berated the officers, threatened them to “stab them with a knife, and could only be prevented from doing so with great difficulty to throw a bottle at them. Then Kiesl got a heartache, asked for an emergency doctor and was admitted to the clinic. ”In May 1998, Erich Kiesl was sentenced by the Munich District Court I to a 20-month suspended prison sentence and a DM 45,000 fine. In July 1999, however , the Federal Court of Justice partially overturned the judgment and referred it back to the Regional Court for renegotiation. The suspended sentence was eventually reduced to nine months.

Family and private

Erich Kiesl married Edigna Hilpoltsteiner in 1959 and had five children. Rupert Kiesl had been chairman of the Munich CSU local association 29b (Denning / Daglfing) since 1990 and was temporarily in discussion at the end of 2002 as a possible successor to the then- affaired member of the Bogenhausen state parliament, Thomas Zimmermann , but ultimately did not even run for nomination.

Awards and memberships

In 1973 Kiesl received the Cross of Merit on Ribbon of the Federal Republic of Germany, in 1978 the Great Cross of Merit, in 1983 the Ring of Honor of the Munich Philharmonic and in 1984 the Maximilian Graf Montgelas Prize. In the 1970s he was President of the Bavarian Gymnastics Association and Vice-President of the Bavarian State Sports Association . In the 1980s , Kiesl was chairman of the German Aid Foundation ( ARD television lottery : "A place in the sun"). He was also awarded the Bavarian Order of Merit. Erich Kiesl was honorary chairman of the Munich CSU.

Quote

• "I mog d'Leit and d'Leit mögn mi." (Erich Kiesl about himself)

See also

• Munich Mayor

Web links

• Literature by and about Erich Kiesl in the catalog of the German National Library
• Biography of Erich Kiesl on the homepage of the City of Munich (Directorate)
• FilzGeschichten (SPD project): The affairs of "Propeller-Erich" ( Memento from September 27, 2007 in the Internet Archive )

Individual evidence

1. ^ Obituary notice in the Süddeutsche Zeitung
2. ↑ Munich "Propeller-Erich" and "Chancellery Affair" . Focus Online. Retrieved January 26, 2017.
3. ↑ Josef Joffe : Erich Kiesl - nimble as a weasel . In: Die Zeit , No. 11/1978
4. ↑ Scandal in the Spider Murphy Gang restricted area , 1981 . LyricsDownload.com. Archived from the original on August 9, 2010. Retrieved January 26, 2017.
5. ↑ Erich Kiesl / 1978–1984 . State capital Munich. Archived from the original on December 16, 2004. Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved January 26, 2017. 
6. ↑ Willi Bock: Munich's former mayor kidney failure: Erich Kiesl is dead. In: Abendzeitung . July 5, 2013, accessed July 5, 2013 . 
7. ↑ Missionary, fanatical, brilliant . Munich Mercury. April 19, 2009. Retrieved January 26, 2017.
8. ↑ Pascal Beucker , Frank Überall : End of the line resignation. Why do German politicians pack up . Econ, Berlin 2006, ISBN 3-430-11619-8 , p. 215.
9. ↑ Wolfgang Krach: Silent help for Erich . In: Der Spiegel . No. 4 , 1998 ( online ).
10. ↑ Peter Fahrenholz: "Propeller-Erich" of the CSU is about to crash . In: Berliner Zeitung , January 20, 1998, p. 6.
11. ↑ evening newspaper: The deep fall of the "propeller-Erich" ( Memento of 11 July 2013, Internet Archive ) , 26. February 2010.
12. ↑ Successors for Zimmermann stand in line . Munich Mercury. March 26, 2009. Retrieved January 26, 2017.
13. ↑ Zimmermann nominated against the will of the CSU party leadership . Munich Mercury. April 4, 2009. Retrieved January 26, 2017.
14. ↑ Announcement of awards of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. In: Federal Gazette . Vol. 25, No. 43, March 9, 1973.
15. ↑ Announcement of awards of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. In: Federal Gazette . Vol. 30, No. 172, September 13, 1978.
16. ↑ Erich Kiesl . bayerischer-verdienstorden.de. Retrieved January 26, 2017.
17. ↑ CSU: Scandals and affairs - a chronicle . Upper Palatinate courier. July 24, 2004. Retrieved January 26, 2017.
18. ↑ The Administrative Advisory Board . FC Bayern Munich. Archived from the original on April 11, 2010. Retrieved January 26, 2017.
19. ↑ Such rabble-rousings even alienate the clientele in Bavaria . In: Die Welt , January 26, 1998.