Friedrich Kienzl

Friedrich Kienzl (born July 8, 1897 in Liezen , Upper Styria , † March 12, 1981 in Berlin-Charlottenburg ) was an Austro-German political functionary.

Live and act

Kienzl was born the son of an Austrian state railroad official. After attending school, he studied at the Philosophical Faculty of the University of Innsbruck . There he distinguished himself as a right-wing student functionary from 1919 to 1921. At that time he worked as a correspondent for the German National German University Newspaper and as a secretary for the Tyrolean Antisemite Association. In the summer of 1920 he also took part in the demolition of a lecture by Karl Kraus at the University of Innsbruck. In 1921 he then took on the role of organizing the deployment of Innsbruck students in the border battles in Upper Silesia as part of the Oberland Freikorps . During his studies he became a member of the Germania Innsbruck fraternity in 1920 .

Around 1921 Kienzl moved to Munich , where he - in the words of Rolf Steininger - performed "the function of a kind of liaison man" for the leadership of the federal Oberland to the Tyrolean Oberland units. After the occupation of the Ruhr area by French troops in the spring of 1923, Kienzl was involved in the organization of active resistance against the occupation forces.

When the Duisburg mayor and leading DVP politician Karl Jarres, in the wake of the Germany-wide labor disputes over the eight-hour day in 1924, set up a so-called "Central Commission" financed by the Ruhr industry, whose task it was to prevent the emergence of "anti-communist company cells" Kienzl was entrusted with the organization and management of this commission to prevent strikes and to put down strikes that had broken out. As a result, the commission was sometimes referred to as "Büro Kienzl". The Central Commission had its seat at Kaiserin-Augusta-Strasse 80 in Berlin .

The practical day-to-day business of the Central Commission - which Paul Heinz Dünnebacke characterized as a “white factory cell organization” - consisted of gathering information about the revolutionary labor movement, especially about the Communist Party and its affiliated organizations. On the one hand, this was done by evaluating publications (especially newspapers and magazines) and propaganda materials from the left-wing camp (election posters, appeals, flyers, etc.). Secondly, this was done by evaluating informers' reports. For this purpose, informers had been smuggled into left-wing circles and organizations , who sent their information to the central office via various branch offices spread across the country. The original defensive function of the commission soon faded into the background in favor of a private intelligence service . The knowledge gathered by the Central Commission about the plans and activities as well as the internal structure and functioning of the left organizations were finally passed on by Kienzl and his staff to their financiers, who used them for their own purposes or used them as a basis for their political and economic decisions .

Fonts

• The Jewish question and the Innsbruck University . In: German university newspaper. (DHZ) 11 (November 8, 1919), episode 28, p. 2 f.

literature

• Paul Heinz Dünnebacke: Karl Jarres in the German Empire and in the first years of the Weimar Republic. 1976.
• Helge Dvorak: Biographical Lexicon of the German Burschenschaft. Volume I: Politicians. Volume 3: I-L. Winter, Heidelberg 1999, ISBN 3-8253-0865-0 , pp. 85-87.
• Rolf Steininger, Sabine Pitscheider: Tyrol and Vorarlberg in the Nazi era. 2002.
• Petra Weber: Failed Social Partnership - Republic at Risk? 2010.