Ernst Ring

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Ernst Ring (born April 27, 1921 in Stettin , † April 11, 1984 in Riehen ) was a German local politician and racing driver. In 1945 he was the first mayor of the city of Chemnitz after the end of the Second World War . Ring repeatedly appeared when Dr. jur. for the title he said he had obtained his doctorate from the University of Rostock , the certificate was taken from him when he was arrested in Chemnitz in 1945. According to the public prosecutor's office in West Berlin, his name should not have been ring , but wise .

Live and act

Mayor of Chemnitz

During the Second World War, Ring posed as first lieutenant and, with the help of forged documents and orders, set up his own rescue team for dispersed soldiers in Annaberg . He avoided sending the soldiers back to the front and successfully fended off investigations by the Wehrmacht and an occupation of his office. On May 3, 1945, Ring urged the Chemnitz division staff to hand over the city to the Allies without a fight by the next morning and threatened the destruction of the division building. Thereupon he was arrested by the Wehrmacht and was supposed to be executed on May 4, 1945, but managed to escape. On May 7, 1945 he handed over the soldiers who were subordinate to his reception staff as prisoners to the advancing Red Army and was used as city commander of occupied Chemnitz.

On May 8, 1945, the Allied High Command of the city of Ring installed as Mayor of Chemnitz, the official appointment followed on May 9. He stayed in office for only a few days and was deposed as mayor on May 15 and imprisoned by the Soviet rulers for six weeks. His successor as head of the city of Chemnitz was Fritz Gleibe .

Businessman in West Germany

After his release, Ring was briefly deputy district administrator in the Wolmirstedt district and soon afterwards left for West Berlin . Here he married the twenty-year-old Gerda Progatzky on March 15, 1946, whom he left soon after to move to Bavaria. The marriage ended in divorce. In Mittenwald he founded the "Service for the Return of Church Bells of the State of Bavaria". Ring had to serve a ten-month prison sentence in Munich for fraud in two cases, one case of extortion and one case of incitement to forge documents . On March 31, 1950, he married Bernhardine Sahl in St. Gallen .

After his release, Ring ran a bar in Westerland on Sylt and worked as a racing driver. With a 1.5-liter Veritas racing car, he came third in the 1950 Eifel race at the Nürburgring and took part in the 1950 German Grand Prix . While he was competing in a race on the Sachsenring near Hohenstein-Ernstthal in the GDR , his bar was officially closed in August 1950 due to outstanding debts. Ring was to be arrested when he re-entered the Federal Republic and forced to pay the outstanding claims.

Asylum in the GDR

Ring applied for asylum in the GDR against redemption of his debts and moved there. On September 30, 1950, Ring was solemnly welcomed to the GDR by Wilhelm Pieck as a resettler from the Federal Republic of Germany at a racing event in Dessau . The Neue Berliner Illustrierte quoted Ring who promised "to do everything possible for the future and the well-being of the GDR". The West German authorities had "robbed him of his existence".

Ring was banned from starting in the Federal Republic of Germany because of his relocation and entered the second Dessau motorcycle and car race in Dessau on October 1, 1950, which he won.

Ring succeeded in convincing the GDR leadership around Wilhelm Pieck that the GDR's success in motorsport would promote the reputation of the young country. The GDR regime then commissioned Ring to put together and manage a state racing collective in the testing and testing office of the German Office for Material and Goods Testing (DAMW) in Berlin-Johannisthal , which was supposed to construct a competitive racing car in order to improve the performance of the socialist ones in road racing Demonstrate industry. He informed the GDR leadership that the racing collective's soon to be successful was due to the material from the state-owned industry, but in fact he had parts procured from the Federal Republic. In the summer of 1951 Ernst ring and his wife, who used it pose as nobles, were charged with fraud by the Ministry of State Security arrested. His successor as head of the racing collective, which moved to Eisenach in 1953 , was affiliated with the Eisenacher Motorenwerke and was to achieve success with the AWE racing cars by 1956 , was the previous technical director Arthur Rosenhammer .

Rings track is lost in Switzerland in the 1960s, nothing is known about his further life. He died in 1984 in Riehen in the canton of Basel-Stadt .

literature

  • Benno Kirsch: Lord Mayor, Racing Driver - Spy! The adventurous story of the impostor Ernst Ring, epubli 2018. ISBN 374509901X .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e Spiegel 9/1951: If you're good at something - Dr. Ernst Ring , accessed April 23, 2014
  2. ↑ a b Andre Seitz: Our cool mayor , jungle-world.com, accessed on April 18, 2014
  3. ↑ Chemnitzer Nachrichten , issue from 12./13. May 1945
  4. ^ Ernst Ring - Results , racingsports.com, accessed on April 18, 2014
  5. ↑ Rennsport 1949/50 on w311.wiki, accessed on April 19, 2014
  6. ^ Motorsport in the GDR , mdr.de, accessed on April 19, 2014
  7. ↑ Horst Ihling : Auto racing in the GDR: 90 years of racing cars and motor sports, Delius Klasing Verlag , Bielefeld, 2006, ISBN 3-7688-5788-3 , page 96 et seq.
personal data
SURNAME Ring, Ernst
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German racing driver and politician
DATE OF BIRTH April 27, 1921
PLACE OF BIRTH Szczecin
DATE OF DEATH April 11, 1984
Place of death Riehen