Frank Glatzel

Frank Glatzel

Frank Glatzel (born February 26, 1892 in Altenkirchen ; † May 18, 1958 in Braunschweig ) was a German politician ( DVP ). He helped shape National Socialist spatial research .

Live and act

After attending grammar school in Tilsit and Berlin , Glatzel studied law at the Friedrich Wilhelms University in Berlin . After completing his legal traineeship, he worked for the German National Handicrafts Association , most recently as head of its press department.

From 1915 to 1918 Glatzel took part in the First World War. After the war he began to be active in the youth movement : he was initially editor of the magazine Jungdeutscheimmen , organ of the Jungdeutsche Bund , to whose national wing he is counted. Politically, Glatzel belonged to the German National People's Party (DNVP) for several years before moving to the German People's Party (DVP) in 1927 , in which he belonged to the wing of the young liberals. In the 1920s Glatzel was a director of the Fichte University in Leipzig, a national branch of the adult education movement with facilities in many places in Germany.

In the DVP, Glatzel played a prominent role as the leader of the Reichsgemeinschaft Junge Volksparteiler, the forum for young party members between 25 and 40. Politically significant were above all his attempts in 1928/1929 to expand the political base of the DVP by expanding the party from an interest party of a limited clientele - and with a correspondingly limited electorate - to a large middle party: The Reichsgemeinschaft was to be the focal point serve for the envisaged expansion. In particular, it was supposed to rally diffuse progressive and social forces around it that had hitherto remained absent from the party. Glatzel's first immediate goal was to prevent the Young German Order from founding its own party, which was generally expected at the time , and to bring its members to the DVP. In addition, the imperial community was to serve as a link to the young wing of the DNVP around Gottfried Treviranus and thus pave the way for a later merger of the DNVP and DVP. These attempts failed as early as 1929 / early 1930. One consequence of Glatzel's attempts to influence the DNVP was the split off of the Treviranus group, which separated from the DNVP as the people's conservatives.

During the final years of the Weimar Republic, Glatzel sat in the Reichstag from September 1930 to July 1932 on his party's proposal for a Reich election .

From 1936 Frank Glatzel worked for the Reichsarbeitsgemeinschaft für Raumforschung , RAG. As chief editor (chief editor) he was responsible for their official journal Raumforschung und Raumordnung until 1944 . After the beginning of the war , the RAG launched its "War-important Research Program for the German East", an interdisciplinary spatial research project that was supposed to provide, among other things, scientifically secured data and the legitimation for the complete Germanization of the Polish territories annexed by the Reich. Glatzel was not only heavily involved in this project from an organizational point of view, numerous articles from his pen have appeared in spatial research and spatial planning and in Konrad Meyer's magazine Neues Bauertum .

The RAG's war research program, which was presented shortly after the start of the war in September 1939, defined six "problem groups":

1. "Preparation of a planning atlas for the German eastern region as part of the Reichsatlaswerk"
2. "Investigations into the possibilities of strengthening and strengthening the German Volkstum and the formation of a new German people's soil in the German East"
3. "How can the previously politically and economically separated industrial areas in the entire Upper Silesia area be shaped spatially into a unified economic and living organism, taking into account the fact that this area represents the central industrial area for the central and southern European eastern region?"
4. "What significance does the expansion of the Vistula as a major shipping route and the Baltic Sea ports have for the development and future order of the East?"
5. "What structure and what design should the central locations and their catchment areas receive in the future?"
6. "Public and municipal law investigations"

From 1940 Glatzel got involved on behalf of Paul Ritterbusch for the war effort of the German humanities . Ritterbusch held a professorship at Berlin University, was a ministerial advisor in the Reich Ministry of Education and was also chairman of the RAG (from August 1939 to August 1944) and organizer of the "war mission". Both projects seem to have been closely linked, the employees were partly identical and sat in the same office.

Fonts (selection)

• Social and demographic effects of the small settlement . In: Archive for Population Science and Population Policy, 5th year (1935), Issue 2, pp. 95-101.
• The settlement work protects your family . Edited by the Reichsheimstättenamt of the German Labor Front. Berlin: Settlement and Economy, (ca.1936).
• The distribution of German soil , Berlin undated [1936]
• Spatial planning as new territory for the administration . In: Der Vierjahresplan 2nd vol. (1938), pp. 543-544.
• City planning of Heilbronn . In: Raumforschung und Raumordnung, 2nd year (1938), Issue 4/5, SS 184-185.
• Implementation of the war research program . In: Raumforschung und Raumordnung, 3rd year (1939), pp. 577-579.
• The consolidation of the German nationality in the eastern regions . In: Raumforschung und Raumordnung, Ed. Konrad Meyer , 1940, pp. 128–130.
• Settlement of the eastern areas through rural colonization from the old kingdom . In: Raumforschung und Raumordnung, 4th year (1940), Issue 3/4, pp. 183-184.
• The practical starting point of spatial political science in the Führer state . In: Raumforschung und Raumordnung, 4th year (1940), issue 11/12, pp. 481–484.
• Science - part of warfare . In: Raumforschung und Raumordnung, 4th year (1940), Issue 10, pp. 412–413.
• Spatial research as a prerequisite for the management of economy and settlement . In: Monthly Issues for Nazi Social Policy, Volume 8 (1941), Issue 5/6, pp. 52–55.
• Science in the service of Eastern and Southeastern Europe . Working conference of the working group of the scientific east and south east institutes . In: Raumforschung und Raumordnung, 6th year (1942), pp. 126–128.
• Country planning in Switzerland . In: Raumforschung und Raumordnung 7th year (1943), Issue 1/2, pp. 61–62.
• Spatial research as an applied social science in the field of politics . In: Zeitschrift für Raumforschung. Official organ of the Institute for Spatial Research , Bonn (1950), Issue 1/2, pp. 6-11.
• (with Erich Walter Lotz ) Lower Saxony landscape structure . Published by the statistical office of the city of Braunschweig. Braunschweig 1950.
• The zone border area in German economic development. The location of Braunschweig compared to other cities in West Germany . In: Raumforschung und Raumordnung, 11th year (1953), Issue 1, pp. 30–37.
• Braunschweig, city on the edge of the zone . Investigation of their economic area and their social structure in a regional comparison . With the collaboration of Edeltraut Hundertmark. Braunschweig: Office for Statistics and Elections 1956 (Kommunalpolitische Schriften der Stadt Braunschweig. 18).

literature

• Frank-Rutger Hausmann: German Humanities in World War II , Heidelberg 2007.
• Mechtild Rössler: "Science and living space." Geographical research on the East under National Socialism. A contribution to the history of the discipline of geography . Berlin, Hamburg: Reimer 1990.
• Jörg Gutberger: People, space and social structure. Social structure and social space research in the "Third Reich" . Münster u. a .: Lit 1996.
• Dieter Münk: The organization of space under National Socialism. A sociological investigation of ideologically based models in architecture, town planning and spatial planning of the Third Reich . Cologne: Pahl-Rugenstein 1993.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ See here
2. ↑ Information on the Fichte University in Leipzig in: Hans Linde : Sociology in Leipzig 1925-1945 . In: M. Rainer Lepsius (Ed.): Sociology in Germany and Austria 1918-1945. Materials on development, emigration and impact history. Westdeutscher Verlag, Opladen 1981, pp. 112, 127.
3. ↑ Larry Eugene Jones / James N. Retallack: Elections, Mass Politics, and Social Change in Modern Germany , 1992, p. 361.
4. ↑ The war-important research program of the Reichsarbeitsgemeinschaft für Raumforschung . In: Raumforschung und Raumordnung , Ed. Konrad Meyer, 1939, p. 502.

Web links

• Literature by and about Frank Glatzel in the catalog of the German National Library
• Frank Glatzel in the database of members of the Reichstag