Friedrich von Basse

Friedrich "Fritz" Wilhelm von Basse (born March 16, 1893 in Hagen ; † July 17, 1972 in Oberhausen ) was a German government official, confidant of the resistance to the assassination attempt of July 20, 1944 on Adolf Hitler , mayor of Weißenfels and Lutherstadt Wittenberg , member of the state parliament in Saxony-Anhalt , lecturer at the universities of Leipzig and Halle .

Life

He was born as the son of the then District Administrator Paul von Basse . After attending the preschool in Marienwerder, he went to the grammar school in Hildesheim , where his father had been transferred to the senior government in 1902. In 1911 von Basse passed his school leaving examination and then studied law and economics at the universities of Heidelberg , Munich and Göttingen . At the beginning of his studies he became a member of the Corps Vandalia Heidelberg . In September 1914 he passed the trainee examination. From August 1914 to December 1918 he was in the army, since 1915 as a lieutenant in the reserve. On January 1, 1919, he began working as a trainee lawyer, passed the government assessor exam in August 1921 and was transferred to the government of the Aurich district as an assessor . After employment in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior (municipal department), the district office in Hagen and the government of the Münster administrative district , he came to Schmalkalden in 1925 as a provisional district administrator , where he remained after confirmation from 1926 to 1931. On July 1, 1931, he became Vice President of the Opole District . In August 1932 he was given a compulsory leave of absence by von Papen and released in 1933 on the basis of Section 4 of the Professional Civil Service Act . Von Basse joined the SPD in 1930 and was therefore no longer acceptable for the new rulers. The district of Upper Silesia had delegated it to the SPD party congress in 1933, but this no longer took place due to the new political situation. On April 1, 1933, Friedrich von Basse moved with his family (wife and two children) to Berlin . Since he could not find employment, he carried out extensive studies in the fields of political economy, sociology, history and antitrust law. At the beginning of 1941, through the mediation of an acquaintance, he found a job with the electrical industry group of the Reich Chamber of Commerce , where he stayed until 1945.

In Berlin, Friedrich von Basse had contacts primarily with Ernst von Harnack and Julius Leber, who were friends in many ways . They also gave him access to the Beck , Goerdeler , Stauffenberg and von der Schulenburg resistance groups . Because all accessible documents of the attempted coup were burned in the last evening and night of July 20, the Gestapo did not find any documents that indicated Basses' name. So he stayed free. After the war, in June 1945, he joined the economics department of the Berlin magistrate under City Councilor Hermann Landwehr . On August 15, 1945 he was appointed mayor of Weißenfels and on February 1, 1947, went to Lutherstadt Wittenberg in the same capacity , where he stayed until December 31, 1950. From January 15, 1951, he was deputy head of the state finance office of Saxony-Anhalt. In the state elections in the Soviet Zone in 1946 , after the forced unification of the SPD and KPD to form the SED , he was elected to the SED as a member of the state parliament of Saxony-Anhalt in the first electoral period.

In September 1952 von Basse took over a lectureship at the University of Leipzig for the subject "State and Law". At his own request, he moved from the University of Leipzig to the University of Halle-Wittenberg in April 1953 and took on the same subject there. However, the “ management department ” of the University of Halle-Wittenberg raised considerable concerns about this change of appointment and the assumption of a full lectureship. The reason for this was that his daughter and son-in-law had fled to the Federal Republic of Germany . V. Found a particular proponent of his lectureship. Basse in the then Dean of the Economics Faculty of the University of Leipzig, Fritz Behrens . At times he was one of the GDR oppositionists at the time. Above all in the party and university intelligence, critical voices increased, calling for a more decisive distance from the personality cult and greater freedom of expression and academic freedom. With effect from September 1, 1958 at the age of 65, Friedrich von Basse was retired.

Fonts

• Basic questions of civil service law, esp. D. prussia. Local civil servant law, CA Weller, Berlin 1931.
• The orders of the business group for the electrical industry as the Reich Office for electrotechnical products: Management of electrotechnical products, collective work with supplementary deliveries, Lutzeyer, 1943.

literature

• Andreas Schmidt: "... ride along or be thrown": the compulsory unification of KPD and SPD in the province of Saxony / in the state of Saxony-Anhalt 1945 - 1949 , LIT Verlag Münster 2004.
• Klaus Däumichen: The Hitler attack . The districts of Wittenberg and Torgau in the vortex of the events of the Hitler assassination on July 20, 1944 - people and incidents. Drei Kastanien Verlag, Wittenberg, 2005, ISBN 3-933-028-89-2 , p. 66.
• Christina Trittel: The members of the first state parliament of Saxony-Anhalt 1946-1950: on the failure of democratic hope , Mitteldeutscher Verlag, 2007.

Web links

• Basse, Friedrich Wilhelm von. Hessian biography. (As of July 24, 2019). In: Landesgeschichtliches Informationssystem Hessen (LAGIS).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Kösener Corpslisten 1960, 68 , 823