Fritz Koch (Councilor)

Thuringia magazine

Friedrich Ernst Karl Richard "Fritz" Koch (born December 16, 1880 in Meiningen , † November 2, 1968 in Erfurt ) was a German administrative lawyer and cultural politician .

Life

He studied law and initially lived in his hometown, where he dealt with questions of social housing and design statutes. In 1907 he succeeded Robert Mielke as managing director of the German Federal Homeland Security, founded four years earlier by Paul Schultze-Naumburg . In 1911 he was also involved in setting up a homeland security foundation. He also understood homeland security as a means of international understanding, as he wrote in a newspaper of the international peace movement a few months before the First World War . Among other things, he initiated cross-border projects such as the protection of the High Fens between Belgium and Germany or the regulation of the Rhine near Laufenburg between Germany and Switzerland. When Paul Schultze-Naumburg resigned as President of the Federation in 1914, Fritz Koch was also dismissed as managing director.

In the 1920s, Koch was a member of the German Democratic Party . In 1922, the government of the newly founded state of Thuringia , led by social democrats, appointed him to the position of employed government councilor as the first head of a newly founded "Advice Center for Heritage Protection and Monument Preservation" . After the 1923 elections, the advice center came to the Ministry of Education and Justice under Minister Richard Leutheußer . With a group of employees he published a monthly magazine "Thuringia" . In the area of ​​environmental protection, he advocated cooperation with the Friends of Nature . He also worked on the draft of a Thuringian "Heimatschutzgesetz", on the basis of which u. a. expropriations should also be possible to secure the goals, and he called for the establishment of a central, instructive nature conservation authority. However, these intentions met with fierce opposition from both the state government and the economy.

After the state elections on January 23, 1930, Koch was finally dismissed, especially since the DDP was no longer involved in the new government. In 1931 Paul Schultze-Naumburg hired him as managing director of the newly organized University of Buildings, Fine Arts and Crafts Weimar .

After 1945 Koch held the office of a government councilor in the Thuringian ministry of education and was head of the state office for homeland security and monument preservation.

Fonts

• Important local statutes according to the Prussian defacement law , published by the Bund Heimatschutz, Meiningen 1908
• Maintaining the beauty and uniqueness of home as a social task, especially for our poor times , in: Meininger Tagblatt No. 165, Meiningen, November 12, 1921
• The state organization of homeland security and local history in the state of Thuringia , in: Thuringia, Jg. 3, Weimar 1927/28.
• Germany in Color Photography , Vol. 13: Thuringia, Publishing House for Color Photography Carl Weller, Berlin 1930

literature

• William H. Rollins: A Greener Vision of Home: Cultural Politics and Environmental Reform in the German Heimatschutz Movement, 1904-1918 , University of Michigan Press, 1997 (332 pp.)
• Willi Oberkrome: "Deutsche Heimat": national conception and regional practice of nature conservation, landscape design and cultural policy in Westphalia-Lippe and Thuringia (1900-1960) , Verlag Ferd. Schöningh GmbH & Co KG, Paderborn 2004 (666 pages)
• Friedemann Schmoll : Remembrance of nature: the history of nature conservation in the German Empire , Campus, 2004 (508 pages)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Thuringian Main State Archive Weimar, personnel files from the field of popular education, No. 16238.