Gertzlaff from Hertzberg

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Gertzlaff von Hertzberg (born December 1, 1880 in Lottin , Neustettin district , in Western Pomerania ; † March 1945 in Neustettin ) was a German administrative lawyer and politician of the Völkisch movement .

Life

Gertzlaff came from the Pomeranian noble family Hertzberg and was the third son of Ernst von Hertzberg-Lottin , a manor owner and Prussian politician. He attended the Fürstin-Hedwig-Schule in Neustettin and graduated from high school at Easter 1898 .

He studied law and administration at the University of Lausanne , the Georg-August University of Göttingen and the University of Greifswald . From Michaelis 1898 to Easter 1900 he was active in the Corps Saxonia Göttingen . On December 7, 1901, he passed the legal trainee examination. He then worked as a trainee lawyer at the Tempelburg District Court ( Köslin District Court ).

In 1905 he entered the civil service of the Kingdom of Prussia . On August 3, 1907, he was appointed government assessor. In this function he was representative of the district administrator in the Hamm district until October 11, 1910 . Until November 1912 he worked for the government in Merseburg . Since November 13, 1912 provisional district administrator, he was finally appointed district administrator of the Neustettin district on July 7, 1913 .

From October 11, 1914 to 1916, Hertzberg took part in the First World War. He was named Captain d. R. seriously wounded on foot in the 2nd Guards Regiment and received the Iron Cross 2nd and 1st class. He was temporarily as District Chief in Volkovysk in Belarus used. In 1916 he took up his position again as District Administrator of Neustettin, where his father had acted as his father .

According to his own statements, v. Hertzberg “rejected the government of Maximilian von Baden as unconstitutional” and refused to carry out ordinances of the revolutionary government during the November Revolution. Therefore, he was ousted as district administrator and put into temporary retirement on May 13, 1919 .

Hertzberg was then appointed Deputy Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Sales Association of Norddeutscher Molkereien eGmbH. The association comprised 225 dairies from Mecklenburg, Pomerania, East Prussia, Grenzmark Posen-West Prussia and Silesia. The turnover of the association, which had 155 own shops in Berlin, Dresden, Wroclaw and Rostock and had departments in these cities, was around 65 million Reichsmarks in 1928. Hertzberg was also a member of the general committee of the Reich Association of German Agricultural Cooperatives.

Through his father, who was a close friend of Heinrich Claß and a sponsor of the Pan-German Association in Pomerania , Hertzberg then came into contact with the Pan-Germans, where he soon belonged to the closest circle around Class; so he was actively involved in its overturning plans from late summer 1919 and in August 1919 traveled with Leopold von Vietinghoff-Scheel (1867–1946) to the Baltic States on an Pan-German mission to get the local Freikorps to stay . In addition, he was one of the founders of the German newspaper of the Pan-German Association. He was deputy chairman of the supervisory board of the Neudeutsche Verlags- und Treuhand-Gesellschaft, which published this newspaper.

In January 1920, coordinated Gertzlaff Hertzberg with his father and his brother Rüdiger von Hertzberg an ethnic initiative signed in their, of 127 nobles call for the "already heavily Jew-ridden" Pomeranian nobility to "Cleaning the nobility of Jewish blood" an Aryan clause required after which only members should be accepted who should not have more than "⅛ Jewish blood". In addition to seven Hertzbergs, the signatories included several representatives of the Arnim , Blücher , Heydebreck , Kleist and Puttkamer families . A month later, on February 14, 1920, Hertzberg published an article entitled “Bolshevism at the Gates!” In the Volkischer Beobachter , in which he promised the most terrible consequences for Germany in the event of a Russian attack on Poland.

On April 30, 1920, Hertzberg was appointed by Konstantin von Gebsattel as executive chairman of the German National Protection and Defense Association . After the Schutz- und Trutzbund got into financial difficulties relatively quickly, Hertzberg made available 50,000 marks from Pan-German funds to the Deutschvölkische Verlagsanstalt in December 1921. At the end of the same year he tried to raise funds in the Rhenish-Westphalian industrial area around Kettwig , but failed.

Despite his high office, Hertzberg had only comparatively little influence on internal management in the Schutz- und Trutzbund, at least since the decisions of the German Day in Weimar from October 1st to 3rd, 1920. From his residence in Berlin, he was only inadequately informed of the course of business, which was usually carried out by the chief executive Alfred Roth, who opposed the pan-German dominance in the Schutz- und Trutzbund . Attacked since his tenure by internal personal and organizational rivalries (which were the rule in the entire völkisch movement ), he was unable to prevent the break up of the Schutz- und Trutzbund after the murder of Walter Rathenau and the subsequent ban on this organization in most German countries. After the State Court of Justice had declared the prohibition provisions on the basis of the republic protection laws to be legal on January 19, 1923 , Roth and Hertzberg founded the German Liberation Association as a substitute organization at a meeting of the former and still incumbent Gauleiter, of which Hertzberg was appointed sole head. A little later, however, Roth founded his own organization with the same name and refused subordination or cooperation, whereupon Hertzberg left the Liberation Bund to Roth, but together with Gebsattel reserved the right of disposal over the still existing local groups of the Schutz- und Trutzbund. Until his last official acts in May 1923, Hertzberg was still planning at the end of February to incorporate the Danzig and Austrian members of the Schutz- und Trutzbund into the Pan-German Association. Hertzberg was involved in establishing the latter through his mediation in 1921/22.

Gebsattel and Hertzberg withdrew in their political activities to the Pan-German Association, in whose main management Hertzberg joined in 1924 and replaced Gebsattel as deputy chairman in 1929 and in which he remained active until its dissolution in 1939. Michael Peters believes that the statement by Uwe Lohalm (see literature ), Hertzberg and Gebsattel asked the members of the still existing local groups of the Schutz- und Trutzbund to join the NSDAP in 1924 , believes Michael Peters to be wrong, since the aristocratic Gebsattel was never a member of the NS mass movement had been. The more recent representation of the Schutz- und Trutzbund by Walter Jung follows the representation of Lohalm.

In a review of the year 1933, which Hertzberg published in December in the Alldeutsche Blätter , he welcomed the first anti-Semitic measures taken by the new National Socialist rulers:

“For months we have been delighted to see the ruthless struggle of state violence against the supremacy of Judaism in all areas of life for the German people, in state administration, in the economy and in the areas of culture. When the Aryan paragraph came about to clean up public life, many good people had their minds silent in front of so immeasurably new things that they had never thought of - and they had just forgotten that they had been thinking about all these questions years ago, approving or disapproving. "

Gertzlaff von Hertzberg and his wife, who had been married in 1944, died when the Red Army marched into Neustettin.

Hertzberg's book Auf dem Landwege zu Deutschlands Wiederaufbau , published in 1920 by Verlag Lehmann in Dresden, was placed on the list of literature to be segregated in the Soviet occupation zone in 1948 .

The estate (running from 1920 to 1932) is in the Berlin Federal Archives .

Individual evidence

  1. a b Wolfgang von der Groeben : Directory of the members of the Corps Saxonia in Göttingen 1844 to 2006 . Düsseldorf 2006
  2. Kösener Corpslisten 1960, 45 , 500
  3. ^ Georg Wenzel: German business leader . Life courses of German business personalities. A reference book on 13,000 business figures of our time. Hanseatic Publishing House , Hamburg / Berlin / Leipzig 1929, DNB 948663294 .
  4. a b Lohalm 1970, p. 364 f.
  5. ^ Franz Stelter: The district of Neustettin - A Pomeranian home book . Holzner, Würzburg 1972, p. 163.
  6. Lohalm 1970, p. 364, note 44.
  7. ^ German business leader , edited by Georg Wenzel, 1929.
  8. Lohalm 1970, p. 96.
  9. a b Stephan Malinowski: From King to Leader: Social Decline and Political Radicalization in the German Nobility between the Empire and the Nazi State . 3rd, reviewed edition, Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 2003, pp. 341f. ISBN 3-05-004070-X .
  10. Walter Jung: Ideological requirements, contents and goals of foreign policy programs and propaganda in the German national movement in the early years of the Weimar Republic: the example of the German national protection and defensive association . University of Göttingen 2000, p. 370f.
  11. Lohalm 1970, p. 97.
  12. Lohalm 1970, pp. 101f.
  13. Lohalm 1970, pp. 98f.
  14. Lohalm 1970, p. 267.
  15. Lohalm 1970, pp. 270f.
  16. Jung 2000, p. 428, note 2309.
  17. Jung 2000, p. 431.
  18. Lohalm 1970, p. 274.
  19. Lohalm 1970, p. 424, note 9.
  20. Lohalm 1970, p. 281.
  21. See Michael Peters: "Konstantin Freiherr von Gebsattel (1854–1932)", in: Fränkische Lebensbilder . Vol. 16, Neustadt an der Aisch 1996, pp. 184f.
  22. Jung 2000, p. 21.
  23. Alldeutsche Blätter No. 25 of December 16, 1933; quoted in Lohalm 1970, p. 331.
  24. ^ Matthias Schmettow: Memorial book of the German nobility . Starke, Limburg / Lahn 1967, p. 134.
  25. polunbi.de
  26. nachlassdatenbank.de

literature

  • Uwe Lohalm: Völkischer Radikalismus: The history of the Deutschvölkischer Schutz- und Trutz-Bund. 1919-1923 . Leibniz-Verlag, Hamburg 1970, passim. ISBN 3-87473-000-X .

Web links