Erich von Gilsa

Erich von Gilsa

Erich von Gilsa (born August 14, 1879 in Schwerin ; † December 12, 1963 in Tutzing ) was a German officer , lobbyist and politician (DVP).

Live and act

Early years and officer career (1879–1920)

Gilsa came from a resident of Mecklenburg Protestant family on the Althessischen chivalry counted from and to Gilsa back. He attended the royal high school in Erfurt . Then he came to the cadet corps , where he also took the Abitur examination. As an officer he later came to Field Artillery Regiment No. 25 in Darmstadt . Subsequently, Gilsa was trained as a staff officer at the War Academy in Berlin and finally assigned to the Great General Staff . From 1904 to 1905 Gilsa also took part in the suppression of the Herero and Nama uprising as a member of the German protection force in South West Africa .

During the First World War , Gilsa was a major officer in the general staff. Through his work in a commission of the Berlin Reichstag , in which Gilsa was consulted as an expert, he got to know the SPD politician and defense expert Gustav Noske . In the transition period between the fall of the Hohenzollern monarchy in November 1918 and the consolidation of the Weimar Republic in the spring of 1920, Noske held the office of Reichswehr Minister (initially unofficially). During this time, Gilsa was at his side as adjutant and chief of staff.

In the summer of 1919, Gilsa, now with the rank of colonel , proposed subversive plans to Noske: he proposed to the minister that he should declare a military dictatorship and assured him that the army and the officer corps would stand behind him in this case. In contrast, during the Kapp-Lüttwitz Putsch of March 1920 , Gilsa pleaded for a violent suppression of the attempted military coup. However, since no officer loyal to the government was willing to use the Reichswehr against the mutineers apart from Gilsa and the head of the army command Walther Reinhardt - who were both not commanders of the troops , Gilsa could not prevail with his line. Although the Kapp Putsch ultimately failed due to a general strike by the German workers and the refusal of the German civil servants to work with the putschists, Gilsa resigned from the Reichswehr shortly after these events. Although he was no longer part of the Reichswehr in the summer, his official resignation from the army did not take place until September 30, 1920. In the same year he found a job in the economy. He was given a management position as a department head at Gutehoffnungshütte (GHH) in Oberhausen.

Lobbyist and politician (1920–1933)

Soon afterwards Gilsa was entrusted with the management of the office of the GHH in Berlin, where he henceforth represented the interests of the Rhenish heavy industrialists in general and the GHH in particular as a political lobbyist. His client was Paul Reusch , the powerful chairman of the GHH. In keeping with his profession, Gilsa found a political forum in the industry-related German People's Party (DVP), which he joined in 1920. From 1928 to 1930 he was a member of the Reichstag in Berlin as a member of constituency 23 (Düsseldorf-West) . In addition, he was a member of the Evangelical Provincial Synod in the Rhine Province and city ​​councilor in Sterkrade . In addition to the DVP, Gilsa was also a member of the Stahlhelm soldiers' association. As one of the most important links between the two organizations, he tried to prevent the DVP from breaking with the Stahlhelm at the end of the 1920s.

After the death of the DVP party chairman Gustav Stresemann , Gilsa tried to win over the new DVP chairman Eduard Dingeldey for a merger of the DVP with the German National People's Party (DNVP), which stood further to the right . In the spring of 1930 Gilsa played a role in the overthrow of the grand coalition: in January and February 1930 he took part in several confidential meetings on behalf of Reusch, at which the DVP's turnaround was prepared in contact with industry. The tactical concept was to take a new line after the ratification of the Young Plan : The DVP should break with the SPD and enter into coalition negotiations. After the September elections of 1930 - which led to the merging of the DVP into a fringe party and the rise of the NSDAP to a mass party - Gilsa's calculation turned out to be no longer feasible: the DVP could no longer be accepted into the government. According to Gilsa, a “coalition to the right” was now “impossible”. This was mainly because he could see nothing else in the politics of the NSDAP than “ Marxism in its purest form”. He bitterly stated that the bourgeoisie had lost their right to vote “against socialism from the right and left”. Nevertheless, on October 11, 1931, Gilsa took part in the meeting of the “united” political right of the German Reich in Bad Harzburg ( Harzburg Front ). In order to continue to play a political role, Gilsa moved further to the right after the loss of importance of the DVP, despite his rejection of the NSDAP as the main right wing of the time, and from then on was close to the DNVP.

After the end of the Weimar Republic, Gilsa, who the historian Volker Berghahn attests to have been "apparently a very skillful politician", no longer emerged politically. Gilsa's estate has not yet been found.

Web links

• Erich von Gilsa in the database of members of the Reichstag
• Erich von Gilsa in the files of the Reich Chancellery

Individual evidence

1. ^ Wolfram Wette: Gustav Noske. A Political Biography , 1988, p. 176.
2. ^ David Andrew Hackett: The Young Plan in German Politics , 1965, p. 113.
3. ↑ Volker Berghahn: Stahlhelm. Bund der Frontsoldaten 1918-1935 , 1966, p. 122.
4. ^ Wolfram Wette: Gustav Noske. A political biography. 1988, p. 26.