Ernst Buermeyer

Ernst Buermeyer (born December 14, 1883 in Meesdorf ; † March 6, 1945 in Ostercappeln ) was a German educator , mayor of Gildehaus and politician ( DVP ).

Life

The Evangelical-Lutheran Buermeyer was born as the son of a farmer in the Melle district. From 1898 to 1904 he attended the preparatory institute and the teachers' seminar for three years in Osnabrück. He then got his first teaching post in the Lower Counties of Bentheim , before moving to the Gildehaus Protestant elementary school in 1906. In November 1909 he married the local farmer's daughter Dina Hermina Koonert. The marriage relationship resulted in two daughters and one son.

Buermeyer did not take part in the First World War as a soldier , but in 1914 he was a volunteer trainer for the Gildehauser Jugendkompanie (off-road sport and shooting training), which had 44 young people. Since the November Revolution in 1918, he was politically active in the right-wing liberal German People's Party (DVP), founded the local group Gildehaus and became its national representative. Election speaker Buermeyer helped the DVP in 1919 in the county of Bentheim to achieve a disproportionate election result (21.7%, nationwide 4.4%). In September 1920 the teacher was elected honorary Gildehauser mayor.

In the following years, many political activities marked his life. He was involved in the Grafschafter Kreislehrerverein (1919), founded the cooperative savings and loan fund in 1921, ran in the district elections in the same year and, as in 1925, 1929 and 1933, was elected straight away. He also emerged as an activist for the local warrior association . He was involved in the Gildehauser Turnverein, at the Gildehauser Schützenfest, was the initiator of the local beautification club, campaigned for the reforestation of the bare Gildehauser Mühlenberg ("Bürgergarten"), established the village's reputation as the "Pearl of the County" and stimulated tourism.

After additional studies, Buermeyer became vice principal of the Protestant elementary school in 1927. In 1929 he moved into the Hanoverian provincial parliament as one of two DVP members of the government district of Osnabrück , to which he belonged until 1933. In 1930 he joined the influential district committee, resigned his district council mandate and served as deputy district administrator for the Grafschaft Bentheim district until 1933 . The goals of his political activities were now the employment of young unemployed people, the improvement of the regional transport infrastructure and the designation of building land.

politics

The relative calm in the village of Gildehaus changed with the arrival of the doctor Josef Ständer , who had been a member of the NSDAP since 1925 and whose district leader he was. There were numerous occasions for confrontation with Buermeyer. In the municipal, district and provincial state elections of November 1929, Buermeyer ran under the key word “Volksgemeinschaft” together with the persecuted labor leader Heinrich Kloppers on the “Gildehaus unit list” and for the provincial state elections on the DVP district list. Ständer (NSDAP; "Anyone who thinks and feels German, who does not want to enslave their children and grandchildren to international finance capital: choose list 12") became the NSDAP's candidate for the provincial parliament. Buermeyer was elected and belonged to the ten-member DVP parliamentary group. Ständer did not make the leap into the provincial parliament. Beyond personal animosities between the two, the party-political front line became visible.

In 1931 Buermeyer celebrated his 25th anniversary with the company. The small textile industry in the village was then marked by economic decline. Political radicalization increased and the extension of Reichsfernstrasse 65 from Bentheim to the Dutch border was politically highly controversial. In particular, farmers and the NSDAP fear the increased import of cheaper Dutch vegetables. At the official inauguration on September 1, 1932, Buermeyer was honored in the Oldenzaal town hall (NL).

The NSDAP criticism of Buermeyer increased. Out of the blue, massive accusations emerged that the financing of the Reichsfernstrasse was not done properly. With the question no. 483 of the Osnabrück NSDAP MP Hans Gronewald , also long-time NSDAP district leader and the most active party speaker in the Osnabrück district, Buermeyer was accused of serious offenses in the Prussian state parliament (Berlin). A full-fledged media campaign began accusing him of mistreating students, misappropriating taxpayers' money, bribery or despising people. In the village there were large pro-Buermeyer citizens' assemblies under the leadership of Heinrich Kloppers . Tangible riots between the Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold and the Free Trade Union on the one hand and the Sturmabteilung (SA) led by Ständer on the other followed.

The apparent calm that followed did not last long. Adolf Hitler took power in January 1933 and the next election campaigns ( Reichstag election March 5, 1933 , provincial state election, district election , local election March 12, 1933) were fierce in the village. The SA Standard 62, under the leadership of Buermeyer's opponent Ständer, made the village a deployment area. Hundreds of foreign SA men carted up several times marched through the village to the sound of a "sounding game" and spread fear and terror among the left-wing textile workers.

Despite massive pressure from the NSDAP, the “Buermeyer Unit List” clearly won the municipal election (72.3%). Buermeyer was again confirmed in the mayor's office with the help of the two NSDAP mayors. As a result of the great losses of the DVP - the NSDAP owned a stronghold in the county of Bentheim and, with the exception of Gildehaus, won almost all previous DVP voters - this time it was not Buermeyer but Ständer that moved into the Hanoverian provincial parliament.

On March 31, 1933, however, the civil servant teacher Buermeyer surprisingly resigned from his office, as it became clear that his election would not be confirmed by the district administrator due to resistance from the NSDAP district leadership. With the decrees of the Prussian interior minister Hermann Göring on the "leave of absence of socialist members in community boards and deputations" and "to remedy abuses in the community administration" it was possible for Buermeyer to again discredit the " system of Weimar " in July 1933 because of earlier accusations "And the emphasis on the role of the NSDAP as" clean man "to be completely dismantled. This task was now taken over by his opponent, the NSDAP district leader Ständer. With the help of his SA auxiliary police, he summoned Buermeyer, questioned him at night in his private house and threatened him with arrest.

Because he supposedly wanted to fetch documents from home that were supposed to relieve him, Buermeyer managed to cross the green border to the Netherlands with his bike at Bardel and flee to Oldenzaal that night . He found refuge with the printer's owner Brüggemann, who in 1934 also took in the Jesuit priest Friedrich Muckermann , who had fled to the Netherlands , and published his exiled literature. The Twentse Courant newspaper, published by Brüggemann, immediately publicized the case in 1933 in the Netherlands and Germany. Buemeyer's wife sent Interior Minister Göring a desperate telegram in which she said that Ständer wanted to hunt her husband to death.

The Buermeyer case drew wide international circles. The NSDAP ordered an internal investigation into the political situation in the county of Bentheim. The situation report of the Osnabrück District President (September 10, 1934) certified the Grafschafter NSDAP “impossible conditions”: “The mayor question in Gildehaus also has a certain foreign policy significance insofar as the removal of the former, politically impeccable mayor in neighboring Holland, where he was in high regard, has sparked strong criticism. "

Buermeyer, who had fled abroad, returned to Germany, reported sick and had to be taken care of by a neurologist because of the smear campaign against him. The former mayor had to leave the community and moved to Bad Rothenfelde . In order to ease the pressure on him, he joined the National Socialist Teachers' Union (NSLB) on October 1, 1933 . The proceedings brought against him by the NSDAP district leader were discontinued in 1934 - as with all Nazi corruption allegations against representatives of the “Weimar system” in the region. District President Eggers (NSDAP) saw the "reputation of the new state" being severely damaged by Buermeyer's co-ordination .

In 1937 Buermeyer, who was again working as a teacher, became a member of the NSDAP. During the war he gave air defense courses. Seriously ill with cancer, he was relocated in 1945 as an inmate of an Osnabrück hospital and died in Ostercappeln.

Honors

• In 1946 the community of Gildehaus honored him with a memorial stone.
• In addition, a street was named after him.

literature

• Lahmann, Heide: Elementary school at the time of National Socialism. The example of the Gildehaus elementary school . Unpublished thesis at the Westphalian Wilhelms University of Münster in 1985.
• Lensing, Helmut: Ernst Buermeyer . In: Studiengesellschaft für Emsländische Regionalgeschichte (ed.), Emsländische Geschichte Vol. 6, Meppen 1997, pp. 172–176.
• Mohrmann, Wolf-Dieter: Stand, Josef . In: Hehemann, Rainer: Biographical manual for the history of the Osnabrück region . Osnabrück 1990.
• Steinwascher, Gerd (edit.): Gestapo Osnabrück reports ... Police and government reports from the Osnabrück administrative district from 1933 to 1936 . Osnabrück 1995, pp. 86-87.
• Herbert Wagner: The resignation of the Gildehauser mayor Ernst Buermeyer - at the same time a historical-political lesson about democracy and dictatorship . In: Bentheimer Jahrbuch 1998 (Das Bentheimer Land vol. 143), Bad Bentheim 1997, pp. 211-234.
• Herbert Wagner : The Gestapo wasn't alone ... Political social control and state terror in the German-Dutch border area 1929–1945. LIT publishing house. Münster 2004. ISBN 978-3-8258-7448-3 .

Web links

• Biography of the study society Emsland-Bentheim

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Archive link ( Memento of the original from October 18, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
2. ↑ Archived copy ( Memento of the original from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.