Ernst Spiro

Ernst Spiro (born June 4, 1873 in Ostrowo , Posen Province ; died January 7, 1950 in London ) was a German engineer and railroad worker. After studying engineering, he joined the Prussian State Railways . By 1933 he rose to the position of Reichsbahndirektor and head of the Reichsbahn Central Office for Purchasing at the Deutsche Reichsbahn-Gesellschaft . After 1933 he was persecuted as a Jew by the National Socialists and relieved of his job. He managed to emigrate to Great Britain in 1939 .

Life

Ernst Spiro was born into an assimilated Jewish family in Ostrowo, where he also went to school. The chemist and Nobel Prize winner Fritz Haber was his cousin. After graduating from high school in 1892, Spiro studied mechanical engineering at the Technical University of Charlottenburg in the same year . His fellow students also included Carl Friedrich von Siemens , who later became President of the Board of Directors of the Deutsche Reichsbahn-Gesellschaft . Spiro developed an interest in electrical machines and hoists during his studies . He completed his studies in 1896, and one year later he joined the Prussian State Railways as a government construction manager for training . Spiro completed this internship on November 25, 1901 with the master builder examination.

At the Royal Railway Directorate (KED) Frankfurt / Main he took up his first job as an " unskilled worker ", in 1903 he changed to KED Saarbrücken in the same position . In Saarbrücken he got to know Julius Dorpmüller , who later became the Reichsbahn General Director and Reich Minister of Transport , who was also active in the railroad management . In Saarbrücken, Spiro was primarily concerned with the introduction of electrical energy to the Prussian State Railways. In 1908 he was promoted to building inspector.

The director's villa of the Trier repair shop, where the Spiro family lived from 1911 to 1920

In 1909 Spiro received the order to build a new main workshop for the repair of steam locomotives in Trier - Euren , which later became the repair shop in Trier . Above all, Spiro took care of the appropriate technical equipment in the plant, which was equipped with modern crane systems and hoists in the repair shop as well as a turning shop , foundry and other workshops. After completion and opening on July 1, 1911, he took over the management of the plant as a board member of the Trier Railway Workshop Office. In the same year Spiro married Margarete Sachs from Breslau in Trier . The couple had a son and a daughter.

In addition to the technical equipment, Spiro also tried to provide social security for the workers. In 1912 he became chairman of the board of the plant's housing association , which built a housing estate with 124 houses next to the workshop. Contrary to the wishes of the then Minister for Public Works, Paul von Breitenbach , Spiro implemented toilets integrated into the houses for the first time. In honor of his work, a street on the estate was soon given the name Spirostraße .

In response to a tender by the Association of German Machine Engineers, Spiro wrote a study on the use of hoists in workshops. This work, based on his experience with the construction of the Trier workshop, was accepted on June 30, 1914 by the TH Charlottenburg as a dissertation entitled The economic influence of the most common hoists on the locomotive repair workshops of the railways . The supervisors of Spiro's doctoral thesis were professors Johannes Obergethmann and Otto Kammerer . In the same year Spiro published the work at Friedrich Carl Glaser's publishing house in Berlin.

During the First World War , Spiro remained the head of the Trier workshop. For his work during the war he received the Red Cross Medal and the Oldenburg Friedrich August Cross .

When the Deutsche Reichsbahn was founded in 1920, Spiro left Trier and joined the Reichsbahndirektion Altona as a board member , where he became the department head for workshop organization. Soon he took over the management of the Altona workshop department. As the managing directorate , the Reichsbahndirektion Altona was also responsible for the workshops and repair shops of the Oldenburg , Schwerin , Hanover and Münster departments. The repair shops in Lingen , Oldenburg , Bremen-Sebaldsbrück , Hanover-Leinhausen , Osnabrück , Stendal , Wittenberge , Glückstadt , Neumünster and Rostock as well as the workshop authorities in Harburg and Malchin fell into Spiro's area of ​​responsibility . During this time, Spiro was advised to be baptized if he wanted to become president of a Reichsbahn directorate . He refused, just as he resented Fritz Haber for being baptized for career reasons.

Reichsbahn general director Julius Dorpmüller finally brought Spiro, who was recognized as a specialist and also emerged in other publications, to Berlin in 1929. He was supposed to reorganize the Reichsbahn-Zentralamt (RZA) responsible for the entire vehicle construction as well as the procurement of vehicles and operating materials of the Reichsbahn and take over its purchasing department. Due to close proximity between individual department heads, trading companies and the authorities responsible for shopping Reichsbahn Executive Gustav Hammer were allegations of corruption emerged. Spiro took on the task of dividing the RZA into four divisional offices in implementation of suggestions made by the President of the Reich Audit Office , Friedrich Saemisch , and thus clearly separating construction and purchasing. On December 1, 1930, the RZA was divided according to Spiro's proposals. On the same day, Dorpmüller appointed Spiro director of the Reichsbahn Central Office for Purchasing and also chairman of all four central offices, the latter for a limited period until the end of 1933. Paul Levy was his successor in Altona . Spiro gradually succeeded in reducing Hammer's direct interventions in the RZA.

As a Jew, Spiro had already experienced insults and attacks by railroad workers who were sympathetic to the National Socialists before 1933. The NSDAP had repeatedly vehemently criticized the Reichsbahn board and accused the director general Dorpmüller as well as other board members and senior Reichsbahn officials of corruption. In particular, the RZA for Purchasing was targeted by the National Socialists due to its close ties to heavy industry . Dorpmüller, who was initially heavily criticized by members of the Reichsbahn- NSBO and the NS-Fachschaft Reichsbahn as a “ plutocrat ” and assistant to the Weimar fulfillment politicians after the “ seizure of power ” , felt compelled to remove most of the few Jewish senior Reichsbahn officials in February 1933 To take leave of absence from the Reichsbahn headquarters and the central offices. In addition to Spiro, this also affected Alfred Baumgarten , the creator of the Reichsbahn timetable . Nevertheless, in May 1933, at an event organized by the Nazi student council, Dorpmüller was confronted with publicly raised allegations that he wanted to entrust Spiro with important tasks again. On September 30, 1933, Spiro was finally formally retired after he was retired with full earnings in July 1933 with a letter from Dorpmüller on the basis of the Professional Civil Service Act . Spiro was deeply disappointed by Dorpmüller's behavior, with whom the Spiro couple had also maintained private contacts before 1933. The various allegations of corruption were ultimately insubstantial, and no corresponding legal proceedings took place. The Trier Spirostraße was renamed Gartenstraße in 1934.

Spiro and his wife first traveled to Egypt in the spring of 1933 , where the local state railway made him an offer as a consultant. However, he could not make up his mind and returned to Germany in the summer of 1933. After his children had already emigrated before the couple Spiro decided only after the Kristallnacht in November 1938 his emigration . In May 1939, shortly before the start of World War II , both managed to emigrate to England, where their son lived. After the war began, Spiro was briefly interned in 1940 as an " Enemy Alien ". His brother Max, who had taken over the family business, was murdered in Auschwitz in 1942 .

After the end of the war, Spiro was reinstated in his old civil service rights in 1949 by the newly founded Deutsche Bundesbahn . The city of Trier had previously given Spirostraße its name back in 1948. Spiro himself did not manage to return to Germany; he died in London in January 1950. The Deutsche Bundesbahn paid tribute to him and Alfred Baumgarten, who died in 1951, in a joint obituary in the magazine " Die Bundesbahn ". In 1961 his widow was a guest at the 50th anniversary of the Trier repair shop.

Publications

• Tunnel investigation vehicle of the Kgl. Railway Directorate Saarbrücken , in: Elektro Kraftbetriebe und Bahnen 17, 1909, p. 249
• About the economic efficiency of the hoists most commonly used at the moment in locomotive workshops of the railway administration. Berlin 1914
• Rationalization in the workshop system of the Deutsche Reichsbahn in: VDI-Zeitschrift 1928, p. 293
• The Reichsbahn Central Office for Purchasing in: Die Reichsbahn 8 (1932), p. 502
• Reichsbahn and economy . in: Deutsche Wirtschafts-Zeitung (Berlin), edition of March 23, 1933, p. 271

literature

• Alfred Gottwaldt : A life for the railroad: memory of Ernst Spiro, workshop manager and director of the Reichsbahn Central Office for Purchasing , in: Eisenbahn-Geschichte No. 27, 2008, pp. 24-29. ISSN  1611-6283 .
• Alfred Gottwaldt: The Reichsbahn and the Jews 1933–1939. Anti-Semitism on the railways in the pre-war period . Marix, Wiesbaden 2011, ISBN 978-3-86539-254-1 .
• Alfred Gottwaldt: Ernst Spiro. A Jewish Reich Railway Director (= Jewish miniatures. Vol. 150). Hentrich & Hentrich Verlag, Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-95565-044-5 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Ernst Spiro in the catalog of the German National Library
• Ernst Spiro on the pages of the Trier memorial