Franz Lawaczeck

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Franz Ernst Lawaczeck (born July 3, 1880 in Bad Camberg ; † January 20, 1969 in Pöcking , Starnberger See ) was a German engineer , professor of hydraulics, inventor and early economic ideologist of the NSDAP and the Nazi regime .

Origin, education and profession

Franz Lawaczeck was born on July 3, 1880 into a well-off Camberger family. He attended the local elementary school. At the humanistic grammar school in Wiesbaden he passed the Abitur examination at Easter 1898 and then did practical training in the Limburg railway workshop at the Limburg (Lahn) train station . He then studied at the Technical University of Braunschweig and Berlin-Charlottenburg . Graduated as a graduate engineer in 1902. With the work "A small steam engine to drive an anchor winch" he became a Dr.-Ing. PhD. In 1907 he was a visiting designer at General Electric in Schenectady , USA. After his return, he ran the Munich-based engineering office for turbine, pump and well construction Lawaczeck-Riepel, in which Otto Kirschmer was temporarily employed. During the First World War , Lawaczeck developed both pump systems for draining trenches and those for the Imperial Navy , which were used on submarines and torpedo boats. After the transfer of power , Lawaczeck was given a professorship for hydraulics at the Technical University of Danzig in 1934 .

Technical inventions and concepts

Balancing machine

In 1907 Lawaczeck developed a new type of "balancing machine" for balancing rotating machines. In 1908 he received a patent for his “device for balancing rotating masses”. The invention was licensed in the same year by the Darmstadt entrepreneur Carl Schenck , and until the 1940s the “Lawaczeck-Heymann system” was one of the standard designs for balancing machines.

Water turbine

→ Main article : Lawaczeck turbine

In the early 1920s, Lawaczeck developed a new type of water turbine . After initial success, the Lawaczeck turbine was soon replaced by the technically superior Kaplan turbine . Viktor Kaplan , the inventor of the Kaplan turbine, covered Franz Lawaczeck for years with nullity suits in order to torpedo the patent filed by Kaplan. Lawaczeck did not prevail with the legal interventions, most recently he failed before the Reichsgericht in Leipzig in 1925, where the proceedings were again dismissed.

Suction lifter / converter

In the early 1920s, Lawaczeck proposed a combination of pumps and turbines, which he called "suction lifters" or "converters". Here, small low-pressure turbines, for which a small barrage was sufficient or which could even be placed directly in the running water, drove one or more pumps that increased the pressure and fed the water to a high-pressure turbine that could stand outside the river. By converting low-pressure water into high-pressure water, large and expensive weir systems should be avoided and the running water of rivers with low gradients should also be made usable.

A test facility built by Lawaczeck at the Muffatwehr in Munich in the 1920s turned out to be inefficient. The efficiency was only 70 percent. As a result of the not fully developed technology, deficiencies in operational safety and operation were found.

As a National Socialist

Franz Lawaczeck was a supporter and advocate of National Socialism , as were his brothers Ernst , who later became mayor of Camberg, and Paul , a pharmacist in Camberg. In the summer of 1931 he founded the Kampfbund Deutscher Architekten und Ingenieure , KDAI, with Gottfried Feder and Schultze-Naumburg . At the request of Konstantin Hierl , who later became the Reich Labor Service Manager , Franz Lawaczeck devoted himself to establishing the Engineering-Technical Department (ITA) in November of that year, which had been set up by the Munich Reich leadership of the NSDAP. He joined the NSDAP in 1931. Lawaczeck one of a group of technicians and economists to Gottfried spring , which is attributed to the left wing of the Nazi. He wanted a from the soil born Ständestaat

In addition to publications on pumps and turbines, Franz Lawaczeck already wrote papers in the early 1930s in which he campaigned for the establishment of a National Socialist corporate state. The focus of his social ideology, which was based on a reorganization of the economy, was the concept of relocating the energy industry to the region and decoupling it from large-scale producers. A publication published by Gottfried Feder in 1932 explicitly deals with the new economic order to be established in the Nazi state, with particular emphasis on the electricity industry. Franz Lawaczeck also wrote in the SS magazine Das Schwarze Korps , where he set out his position on the future importance of the hydrogen economy in 1937.

The Camberger step power plant

With the Camberg multi -stage power plant, Franz Lawaczeck planned a hydroelectric power plant designed according to Nazi ideology, which was supposed to supply the rural population with cheap electricity. The stage power plant is assigned to the category of small hydropower plants , which are still used today in developing countries and in regions far away from the general electricity supply. Franz Lawaczeck had already described the project, which was seamlessly integrated into Nazi economic ideology, in 1932, i.e. before the so-called seizure of power, in the party's own Nazi publication series, National Socialist Library , headed by Gottfried Feder . The aim of the project, which was intended as a prototype for power generation in the Nazi state, should be the systematic elimination of the "Jewish" defined big capital from the energy industry. By means of the communal energy industry, a front was made against the constructed stereotype of the operators of the "money and goods usury", the "highwaymen" and "speculators ... mostly Jews". Lawaczeck opposes the “foreigners who do not sow” with the national doctrine of the primacy of “common good over self-interest”, by means of which the systematic plundering of the Jews was ideologically prepared. The fact that supporters of the NS had “fruitful ideas” (like the step power plant) was “racially determined”. The essentially anti-liberalist, partially socialist orientation of the economic concept represented by Franz Lawaczeck in the concept of the multi-stage power plant is based on a primarily "Jewish", capitalist private economy that uses the electricity market to the detriment of "German-blooded" craftsmen and farmers for their own profit. The Stürmer rhetoric evokes the image of the Jew damaging the “German national body” as a “parasite”. With the economic model of the multi-stage power plant, the Nazi ideologist Lawaczeck is promoting an economy that corresponds to the “racially conditioned ideal” according to Gottfried Feder's idea and should give the “Germanic peoples” the economic ability “to finally erect the permanent wall against low-races through their union and to push this wall permanently closed towards the east. "

In order to distinguish the Camberg project from other municipal models of electricity generation, Lawaczeck assumed systematic corruption and taking advantage of the Limburger Lahnkraftwerke AG building on January 15, 1926, which was built not far from Camberg . He denounced the scientists, politicians and authorities involved as “gentlemen” who had been “recruited from the black-red parties” and who had in some cases made “multiple” profits on the project, which resulted in higher electricity prices . Despite multiple political protection, u. a. Through the Gauleiter of Hessen-Nassau, Jakob Sprenger (politician), the Camberg step power plant remained in the trial phase, although in 1938 the commitment for an investment grant of RM 91,000 was made. The inefficiency of the project itself, technical inadequacies and the paradigm shift in the (energy) economy carried out by the National Socialists themselves are documented as reasons for the failure.

The ruins of the pilot plant of the Camberg multi-stage power plant are still on site, on the Emsbach , about halfway between Würges and the core town of Bad Camberg.

In regional historiography, Franz Lawaczeck is mentioned as an "inventor-engineer" to the present day. In the reporting (2013) of the regional press about a lecture event on the Camberger step power plant, the step power plant is presented as a "revolutionary idea of ​​electricity generation" which was not successful due to "financing problems and material shortages".

Fonts (selection)

• Technology and Economy in the Third Reich. A job creation program. (= National Socialist Library 38). Franz-Eher-Verlag , Munich 1932.

literature

• Camberg. 700 years of city rights. Contributions to local history. Ed. Magistrat der Stadt, Camberg 1981.
• Hermann Degener: Our contemporaries. Who is it Biographies (of around 20,000) living contemporaries. Information about origin, family… Degener, Leipzig 1905 to 1935 (continuations).
• H. Kesten (Ed.): Hundred years of state high school and secondary school in Wiesbaden. 1951.
• Limburg in the flow of time. Highlights from 1100 years of city history. Published by the City Council, Limburg 2010.
• 1000 years of life in Camberg. Edited by the City Council, Bad Camberg, 2000.
• Otto Renkhoff : Nassau biography. 1992, No. 2502, p. 452.
• Andreas Haka: Social networks in mechanical engineering at German university and non-university research institutions 1920–1970 . Stuttgart Contributions to the History of Science and Technology, Volume 6. Berlin: Logos Verlag, 2014, ISBN 978-3-8325-3695-4 , pp. 119ff., 211ff., 224ff., 313.

Web links

• The Camberger Stufenkraftwerk: Anti-Semitism cast in concrete , on vtaktuell , accessed on December 18, 2013.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Franz Lawaczceck: Theory and construction of the balancer machine . 1907.
2. ↑ Michael Stöcker: Balancing technology: The force of 100 years. ScopeOnline, March 1, 2008, accessed December 12, 2013 . 
3. ↑ 100 years on the trail of unbalance. Schenck RoTec, accessed December 12, 2013 . 
4. ↑ Martin Gschwandtner: Gold from the waters. Viktor Kaplan's path to the fastest water turbine. 2007.
5. ↑ Gschwandtner (2007) p. 10.
6. ↑ ^{a b} Polytechnic Show. In: Polytechnisches Journal . 336, 1921, pp. 259-265.
7. ^ Wilhelm Teubert: The world in the cross section of traffic . Kurt Vowinckel, Berlin 1928, ISBN 3-8460-0481-2 , p. 117 ( limited preview in Google book search - new edition: Salzwasser Verlag, Paderborn 2012).
8. ↑ ^{a b} Martin Gschwandtner: Once upon ^a time there was a "coal theft". Technology under the yoke of the Nazi dictatorship 1939–1945. Arno Fischer and the wrong track of the “underwater power plants” . 2009, p. 22nd f .
9. ↑ Andreas Haka: Social networks in mechanical engineering at German university and non-university research institutions 1920–1970. Logos, Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-8325-3695-4 , p. 224.
10. ^ Social networks in mechanical engineering at German university and non-university research institutions 1920–1970 (=  Stuttgart contributions to the history of science and technology . Volume  6 ). Logos, 2014, ISBN 978-3-8325-3695-4 , pp. 41 .
11. ↑ Wolfgang Hardtwig (Hrsg.): Utopia and political rule in Europe in the interwar period (=  writings of the Historical College Munich: Colloquia . Volume 56 ). Oldenbourg, 2003, ISBN 3-486-56642-3 .
12. ^ Matthias Heymann : The history of the use of wind energy, 1890–1990 . Campus-Verlag, 1995, ISBN 3-593-35278-8 .
13. ↑ Paper from 1932, p. 26
14. ↑ The black corps. Vol. 3 1937. Episode 17 from April 29, 1937.
15. ^ Franz Lawaczeck: Technology and Economy in the Third Reich. A job creation program . In: Gottfried Feder (Ed.): National Socialist Library . Issue 38, 1932.
16. ↑ Lawaczeck (1932) p. 28 ff.
17. ↑ Lawaczeck (1932) p. 44.
18. ↑ Lawaczeck (1932) p. 44.
19. ↑ Lawaczeck (1932) p. 90 f.
20. ↑ Lawaczeck (1932) p. 91.
21. ↑ Lawaczeck (1932) p. 82.
22. ↑ See also: Christoph Waldecker: Satisfying the constantly growing demands on electricity. The history of electricity supply in Limburg. In: Limburg in the flow of time. Highlights from 1100 years of city history. Pp. 539-560.
23. ↑ Johannes Koenig: Stufenkraftwerk and RAD. Nassauische Neue Presse, September 11, 2013, accessed December 10, 2013 . 
24. ↑ 1000 years of life in Camberg. Published by the City of Bad Camberg 2000.
25. ↑ Camberg. 700 years of city rights. Contributions to local history. Ed. Magistrate of the City of Bad Camberg, 1981.
26. ^ Nassauische Neue Presse. 3rd December 2013.