Erich Koß

Erich Koß (born March 5, 1899 in Schwerin ; † December 24, 1982 in Frankfurt am Main ) was Magdeburg's city planning officer and played a key role in the reconstruction of the city of Magdeburg after the Second World War .

Erich Koß was one of the fathers of the reconstruction of the city of Magdeburg, which was badly damaged in the Second World War .

Professional background

Erich Koß attended a civic boys' school, completed a three-year apprenticeship as a bricklayer with a journeyman's examination and then studied at the Lübeck building trade school, where he passed his final examination as a construction technician with distinction in 1922 . In 1923 he married Emma Warncke. This marriage produced three children, the eldest daughter Ruth and the twins Fritz and Klaus. Erich Koß's professional development led him to the Bauhütten , the then association of social construction companies. From 1923 to 1932 he worked as a site manager and managing director in the Oppeln , Grünberg , Görlitz and Hirschberg construction companies. From 1932 to 1937 he took over the management of the Szczecin branch in the French capital Paris . After the National Socialists banned the building works movement , he set up his own construction business in Dessau from 1938 to 1946 .

City planning officer in Magdeburg

In 1946 he was asked by the mayor of the city of Magdeburg, Rudolf Eberhard , to lead the reconstruction of the destroyed city as city planning officer. The Social Democrat Koß followed the call of Eberhard, who was also a member of the SPD, and threw himself into his huge area of ​​responsibility, which lay in front of him when the city of Magdeburg was destroyed on January 16, 1945. 60 percent of Magdeburg was destroyed, including 40,667 apartments, 1,224 shops, 1,026 handicraft businesses, a vast number of public buildings, streets and squares, etc. - and 220,000 people were also homeless.

In May 1946, Erich Koß explained his plan for the reconstruction of Magdeburg at a mass rally, which had three main focuses:

1. Formation of a working group of war-torn cities in the state of Saxony-Anhalt;
2. Foundation of the new construction Magdeburg GmbH;
3. Introduction of the development work in Magdeburg.

The citizens and most of the local politicians took up these suggestions and tried to put them into practice with their support, for example by doing several hours a week additional construction work in addition to their work.

When the German Economic Commission was formed in 1947 and Fritz Selbmann took over the economics and construction departments, he offered Erich Koß a managerial position. Also Willi Stoph submitted Koß a bid proposing to use him as a manager at the merging of all Berlin construction firms to a construction union. Koß turned down both offers because he first wanted to finish his responsible job in Magdeburg.

Deposition and arrest

But the changing political events in the Soviet occupation zone during this period were also to end Erich Koß's career as town planning officer . The Stalinist orientation of the SED, which began in 1948/49, also left clear signs in the city administration. An open campaign was launched against former Social Democrats, either to bring them to the Stalinist line or, if they refused, to remove them. Erich Koß refused and on June 30, 1950 resigned his mandate as town planning officer. This was a logical consequence, because as early as April 25, 1950 one could read in the Magdeburger Volksstimme : “The Magdeburg district executive removed serious obstacles ..., also with Comrade Koß it becomes apparent that he does no political work and all things only from the technical point of view Standpunkt sees ... It will be necessary to elect strong comrades who are devoted to the party in place of these comrades. ”One month later, on May 28, 1950, under the heading“ Comrade Koß ignores his company group ”:“ Among other things, was also criticized the opportunistic attitude of Comrade City Councilor Koß ... The behavior of Comrade Koß shows that he does not study the resolutions of our party ... "

On July 2, 1950, Erich Koß was lured out of the house and arrested on the pretext of a consultation with Mayor Eberhard. This arrest took place without an arrest warrant on the direct instructions of the General Secretary of the SED, Walter Ulbricht , who at that time in Halle ordered the "liquidation of social democracy". Lord Mayor Eberhard suffered the same fate.

Trial and conviction

On January 17 and 18, 1952, the trial was carried out by the Second Criminal Chamber of the District Court in Magdeburg, chaired by Rote Hilde . During the entire pre-trial detention up to the trial, i.e. about a year and a half, Erich Koß was only questioned twice and he was denied any legal assistance.

The trial was not open to the public, as a large part of the population could not be convinced of the legality of this procedure. That is why there were only selected SED members in the courtroom who were following the trial against Rudolf Eberhard (former Lord Mayor), Georg Dietrich (former city legal adviser on the run) and Erich Koß (former city planning officer).

The indictment, drawn up by Attorney General Ernst Melsheimer (1897-1960) and represented by the Berlin Public Prosecutor Rodewald, accused the three defendants of continuing and deliberately acting in the years 1946 to 1950 of having thwarted economic measures by the German self-governing organs, whereby the economic The construction of Germany, especially the city of Magdeburg, caused severe damage. The indictment ended with the paragraph: “The accused are jointly responsible for the crimes described. The acts of the accused show that it was important to them to sabotage the measures of the German self-government organs, which were taken to protect our reconstruction and to alleviate the lot of the working people. The defendants must face the full severity of the law. "

Erich Koß was then sentenced to five years in prison with confiscation of property. A requested revision of the judgment was rejected without giving reasons. Erich Koß spent the entire period of imprisonment in the Magdeburg prison on Halberstädter Strasse. He never spoke personally about this time because it was so cruel that reports about it would have opened up his spiritual wounds again. All that is known is that he spent some of his imprisonment in solitary cells or in communal cells, in which deliberately convicted serious criminals or murderers were allowed to take control. At the end of May 1955, Erich Koß was released from prison and it took him some time to bring his complicated state of health back into balance. Mentally he was a broken man who had lost his belief in a socialist future, but never lost his courage and morals.

Relocation to the Federal Republic of Germany

On November 3, 1955, he and his wife left the GDR and moved to the Federal Republic of Germany, where he traveled via Hamburg to Dortmund and Frankfurt am Main . There he devoted his labor to rebuilding the building works movement. On February 7, 1956, the Hanseatic Higher Regional Court in Hamburg declared the sentence imposed in the GDR to be inadmissible. Such a constitutional judgment would never have been possible in the GDR, which is why the abolition of this dictatorial state brought about by the fall of the Wall had to give him his rights eleven years after his death. In 1993 the Magdeburg Regional Court declared the judgment unlawful and repealed.

When Deutsche Bauhütten GmbH was founded in 1957, he became the company's managing director. He held this office until his retirement in 1964.

For his meritorious work, he was awarded the Great Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1964 . In this year one of his grandchildren, Thoralf Koß, was born, who in 1989 was classified by the GDR State Security (Stasi) as "PID" (political-ideological diversant), i.e. saboteur (this comes from the 270 pages of his Stasi files, which were created under the name "The Improver".) And the past of his grandfather Erich Koß was cited as one of the reasons for this.

Erich Koß died on Christmas Eve 1982 in Frankfurt.

literature

• Helmut Asmus, 1200 Years of Magdeburg, Volume 4, 1945-2005 , Magdeburg 2009, p. 274 ff.
• Klaus Koß: Koß, Erich. In: Guido Heinrich, Gunter Schandera (ed.): Magdeburg Biographical Lexicon 19th and 20th centuries. Biographical lexicon for the state capital Magdeburg and the districts of Bördekreis, Jerichower Land, Ohrekreis and Schönebeck. Scriptum, Magdeburg 2002, ISBN 3-933046-49-1 , p. 378.