Grand Ducal Oldenburg Gendarmerie Corps
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The Grand Ducal Oldenburg Gendarmerie Corps became the successor of the (Grand) Ducal Oldenburg Land Dragon Corps in 1867 as a result of the entry of the Grand Duchy of Oldenburg into the North German Confederation and the Oldenburg- Prussian Military Convention . Even after the revolution and the abdication of Grand Duke Friedrich August on November 11, 1918, its structure remained in principle untouched. The Oldenburg gendarmerie existed as the state police of the now Free State of Oldenburg until it was dissolved in 1936.
Establishment, territorial jurisdiction and structure
Due to the Oldenburg-Prussian military convention of July 15, 1867, the (Grand) Ducal Oldenburg Land Dragon Corps was detached from the previous Oldenburg military structure and was not subject to the new North German federal troops or their commanders.
Like the Land Dragon Corps, the current gendarmerie was only responsible in the Oldenburg heartland (Duchy of Oldenburg). It was not until 1905 that the gendarmerie of the Principality of Lübeck was integrated into the corps. The gendarmerie of the Principality of Birkenfeld was until the dissolution in 1937, the organization has no connection was from its founding in 1817 an independent, non-military entity for Gendarmerie Corps.
In place of the military command as the superior authority, the Department of the Interior of the Grand Ducal Government now appeared. Nevertheless, the gendarmerie corps also retained a military character. It was still under a military commander (usually the highest-ranking Prussian officer in the Oldenburg garrison). The Oldenburg Military Criminal Law of September 7, 1861, remained in force for the corps until the 1918 revolution.
The immediate military superiors of the gendarmes were until 1918:
- the commander
- the staff sergeant
- the Oberwachtmeister (Mounted Leader) for their mount.
The civil superiors were:
- the Minister of the Interior
- the lecturing council at the Grand Ducal Ministry, which was entrusted with handling gendarmerie affairs
- the governor and his representative within the offices. In the cities, 1st class, the mayors (Oldenburg, Delmenhorst and, from 1910, Rüstringen , today Wilhelmshaven and Jever)
Corps commanders:
- Major General Johann Ludwig Mosle , January 1, 1828 - January 1, 1870.
- Colonel (of the Prussian Army) Becker, January 1, 1870 - October 19, 1885.
- Major (of the Prussian Army) Müller, January 1, 1886 - November 1, 1895.
- Colonel a. D. (of the Prussian Army) Gustav Frels (born June 5, 1843 Varel , + November 2, 1915 Oldenburg), October 1, 1896 - November 14, 1909.
- Colonel a. D. (of the Prussian Army) Rudolf Kellner (1850–1927), November 15, 1909 - December 31, 1920, from April 2, 1918 with the character and title of Major General of the Grand Ducal Oldenburg .
- Lieutenant Colonel of the Security Police, later Colonel of the Ordnungspolizei Oldenburg Oskar Wantke (born October 17, 1872, † November 2, 1940) in personal union as commander of the Sipo / Orpo and the gendarmerie, January 1, 1921 - August 1932.
From 1919 until his retirement in 1932, Colonel of the Oldenburg Order Police (Orpo) Oskar Wantke was in personal union the commander of the Order Police and the Gendarmerie.
The territorial structure of the corps was taken over by the land dragons. In addition to the command in the city of Oldenburg in the Gendarmeriekaserne Heiligengeistraße 23 (built in 1836, demolished in 1974, from 1937 to 1945 the seat of the Gestapo office in Oldenburg) there have been seven so-called Beritte since 1860:
- Oldenburg with the offices of Oldenburg , Elsfleth , Westerstede and Friesoythe ,
- Delmenhorst with the offices of Delmenhorst and Berne,
- Varel with the offices of Varel and Rastede ,
- Jever with the city of Jever and the Jever office ,
- Brake with the offices of Brake , Ovelgönne , Stollhamm and Landwührden ,
- Vechta with the offices of Vechta , Wildeshausen , Steinfeld and Damme ,
- Cloppenburg with the offices of Cloppenburg and Löningen .
The division of riders was apparently given up before 1914 in favor of division according to districts.
In 1934 the Gendarmerie Corps was structured as follows:
A. Oldenburg part of the Free State of Oldenburg:
- District of Oldenburg with the locations Oldenburg, Oldenburg-Eversten, Oldenburg-Osternburg, Wardenburg , Huntlosen , Ahlhorn , Hude , Delmenhorst , Delmenhorst-Iprump, Stuhr , Grüppenbühren , Ganderkesee and Wildeshausen : 2 regional high commissioners and 23 regional commissioners.
- Ammerland administrative district with the locations Westerstede , Ocholt , Apen-Augustfehn, Edewecht , Rastede, Wiefelstede , (Bad) Zwischenahn and Ofen: 1 Gend.-Oberkommissar and 11 Gend.-Kommissars.
- District of Friesland with the locations Jever, Schortens, Fedderwarden, Hooksiel, Hohenkirchen, Tettens, Insel Wangerooge, Varel, Zetel, Neuchâtel, Bockhorn and Sande: 2 regional high commissioners and 16 regional commissioners.
- City I class Rüstringen (from 1937 Wilhelmshaven): 1 Gend.-Oberkommissar and 10 Gend.-Kommissars.
- District Wesermarsch with the locations Brake, Elsfleth, Berne, Lemwerder, Bardenfleth, Großenmeer, Jaderberg, Schweiburg, Ovelgönne, Rodenkirchen, Nordenham, Einswarden, Ellwürden, Stollhamm, Burhave, Ruhwarden, Seefeld and Dedesdorf: 2 Gend.-Oberkommissare and 22 Gend. Commissioners.
- District of Vechta with the locations Vechta, Lohne, Dinklage, Damme, Neuenkirchen, Steinfeld, Vestrup, Visbek and Goldenstedt: 1 Chief Commissioner and 14 Commissioners.
- District of Cloppenburg with the locations Cloppenburg, Emstek, Essen, Lastrup, Lindern, Löningen, Friesoythe, Barßel, Strücklingen, Scharrel and Garrel: 2 regional high commissioners and 16 commissioners.
B. Lübeck part of the Free State of Oldenburg:
- District court district Eutin with the locations Eutin, Hutzfeld, Malente, Süsel: 1 Gend.-Oberkommissar and 6 Gend.-Kommissars
- District court district Bad Schwartau with the locations Bad Schwartau, Ahrensbök, Timmendorfer Strand, Pönitz and Stockelsdorf: 7 Gend.-Commissioners.
The Birkenfeld region had its own gendarmerie from 1817 to 1937, which was not integrated into the structure of the Oldenburg Corps.
This results in a total strength of the corps as of October 1, 1934 of 11 high commissioners and 112 commissioners for the Oldenburg part and one high commissioner and 13 commissioners for the Lübeck part.
Personnel and training
The personnel were recruited exclusively from former sergeants of the Prussian army; Oldenburg citizens were given preference. A kind of one-year basic training took place during the probationary year in the gendarmerie barracks in Oldenburg. The officials received general instruction in German, arithmetic and local history from a civilian teacher; Service instruction by the staff sergeant, the mount guide Oldenburg and an official of the ministry. The civilian teacher, headmaster Stolle, had been on the job part-time for 40 years in 1917. In addition, Wintermann:
"The gendarmes owe a large part of their knowledge and skills to the teacher Stolle, who knew how to acquire the love and respect of the gendarmerie commanders and his students throughout his work."
A crime museum was also set up in the barracks around 1911 to make the officers vividly familiar with crime methods. From 1914 a criminal police training at the Hamburg Police Department was planned, but had to be broken off due to the outbreak of war.
The staff of the corps increased continuously from 69 men in 1867 to 115 in 1917 (now an additional 14 in the Principality of Lübeck). During the First World War, the strength of the corps increased considerably through auxiliary gendarmes and was probably around 200 men. In the Free State, the corps had a good 130 officials. In 1928 there were 81 gendarmerie locations, which were usually manned by a commissioner. The city of Rüstringen had, in addition to its local police and an Orpo command in strength (from 1923), a gendarmerie chief commissioner and 11 commissioners.
The shooting training took place there after the transfer to the field; apparently twice a year.
Uniforms and ranks
The corps wore a gray-green uniform, with a helmet on duty and, in exceptional cases, a cap. The gendarmes were armed with a saber and a revolver, which was replaced by a self-loading pistol in 1908.
In 1917 a field gray uniform based on the model of the Prussian army and the Prussian gendarmerie was to be introduced for the gendarmerie in Oldenburg . In addition to the oldenburg blue-red cockade, the imperial cockade (black-white-red) should now be worn analogously to the army. This uniform was obviously no longer used across the board. After the war, the old uniform continued to be used. At this point the uniform was already very anachronistic and ineffective. Nevertheless, like in other German federal states, it remained in use until the state gendarmerie was dissolved in 1936. In 1934, the gendarmerie and protection teams of Bavaria, Braunschweig, Oldenburg, Baden and Bremen still used helmets in the form of the " Pickelhaube ", while peaked caps were used in Mecklenburg, Thuringia and Württemberg and shakos in Prussia, Anhalt and Lippe . The law enforcement and protection police of the federal states all used the shako as headgear in the event of an incident.
The ranks of the corps in the Kaiserreich were staff sergeant major, sergeant major and sergeant; in the Free State inspector, high commissioner, commissioner and candidate.
Calls
Six gendarmes took part in the Franco-German War as field gendarmes. From this, the gendarmes Hanje and Nagel were assigned to Versailles as top gentlemen for personal service by Grand Duke Nikolaus Friedrich Peter .
In August 1894 there was a large-scale deployment of the gendarmerie in the industrial community of Osternburg , now part of the city of Oldenburg, for several weeks . Around August 11, the glassworks worker Carl Ohlendorf on Langenweg, today Stedinger Strasse, was insulted and physically attacked by striking work colleagues as a strike breaker. The scene of the crime was near the Brokat'schen bread factory, later the Bahlsen company. Ohlendorf was seriously injured by a total of six knife wounds, one of them in the head, and died a few days later in the Protestant hospital. The perpetrators were arrested the day after the crime. To prevent further incidents of this kind, the glassworks itself was occupied with four gendarmes. Ten additional gendarmes patrolled Easter Castle day and night. The strike, one of the largest that ever took place in Oldenburg and lasted a good three months, was stopped in September 1894 because the factory management had recruited new workers from southern and western Germany.
In 1897 private bicycles of the gendarmes were approved for official purposes on a trial basis.
A permanent watch was set up in Delmenhorst in 1899 and in Rüstringen in 1903.
In 1902 the Mauser self-loading pistol cal. 7.63 mm was introduced and the revolver introduced in 1886 was abolished. The revolvers were sold to the management of the Vechta prison.
In 1904 the gendarmes of the Principality of Lübeck joined the corps and were now also subject to the military penal law.
From 1907 the gendarmes were allowed to join associations or cooperations, as long as this did not result in any collisions with their official duties. The accession had to be applied for and approved by the command.
In 1908 most of the locations received binoculars. From this year it was also allowed to take private dogs with you as service dogs. The gendarmes received a monthly allowance of nine marks for the care and food of the dogs.
In 1911, instead of the previous service journals, service diaries were introduced, which made the usual entries much easier. The design of the previous monthly report has also been simplified.
In the same year, through the formation of the town of Rüstringen, the two locations Bant and Heppens were combined to form the Rüstringen station. Also from 1911 onwards, the gendarmes were granted housing aid. With one exception, the apartments built up to 1917 were all single-family houses with an average value of 10,000 marks.
Also in 1911, a new service regulation came into force on October 1, which made numerous older individual regulations obsolete.
In 1914, four gendarmes were assigned to a course at the Hamburg Police Department to promote criminal police knowledge . With the outbreak of war, no further officials were posted.
Shortly before the outbreak of war, the gendarmerie locations were equipped with telephone connections, presumably often in combination with the construction of their own houses. This process was completed by 1922. However, even at the end of the 1920s, the connections in the countryside could not be reached at night because the switching centers were not manned at night.
The First World War
During the mobilization on August 1, 1914, numerous gendarmes volunteered, according to Wintermann, but the commando could not do without any officials.
During the war, the Deputy General Command of the X Army Corps in Hanover assigned a few dozen members of the military with the character of non-commissioned officers (non-commissioned officers, sergeants, sergeants and sergeants of the artillery or cavalry) to the Oldenburg gendarmerie as auxiliary gendarmes. However, the auxiliary gendarmes (later called security sergeants) were not subordinate to the gendarmerie command in Oldenburg, but to the authorities, but there again the local gendarmes. The auxiliary gendarme and security sergeants wore their military uniform with a gray-green armband on their left upper arm, which marked them as auxiliary gendarme. As a result, the number of personnel in the corps was increased by around 35% from the end of 1916, but the demands on the service also rose sharply, e.g. B. by monitoring prisoners of war or looking for escapes, stopping the smuggling of food (so-called hamsters ) and criminal offenses by military personnel.
On July 1, 1917, the ordinance sheet for the Grand Ducal Gendarmerie Corps was published for the first time. This continued to appear monthly, presumably until the corps was dissolved in 1936.
In the summer of 1918, the so-called butter scandal aroused outrage in the city of Oldenburg, in the clarification of which the gendarmerie played a role, since one witness deliberately reported the gendarmerie and non-city police officers of massive butter pushing from Oldenburg to Berlin and Leipzig had been handed over. This resulted in a dispute in the press from which it becomes clear that the population trusted the state police more than their own city police, at least in this matter, than their own city police, which were viewed as too dependent on the city administration.
In the Free State of Oldenburg. The dissolution in 1936
The structure and function of the corps did not change for the time being. The decisive factor , however, was the establishment of the Ordnungspolizei in 1919, which was first called the Security Police (Weimar Republic) (Sipo), but was renamed Orpo in 1920. This paramilitary police force became in a certain way competition, as it was used for normal police service (patrol duty) first in the city of Oldenburg and then in Rüstringen and Delmenhorst. The gendarmerie now concentrated more and more on their criminal investigation activities and was therefore completely busy. At the end of the 1920s there were various disputes over competence; z. B. in the city of Oldenburg through the incorporation of suburbs that had a gendarmerie location.
Especially at the beginning of the 1920s, the gendarmerie locations were massively strengthened by delegated Orpo officials during unrest. The confusion of competencies in the various police forces is illustrated by the example of the city of Nordenham around 1925. As a town, Nordenham had its own local police, but their night duty was operated by night watchmen. At the same time, Nordenham owned a gendarmerie site, where Orpo officers were working to reinforce.
At the end of the 1920s, various gendarmes apparently owned private motorcycles that could be used for business purposes. When a motorized raid command (Üko) was set up in the city of Oldenburg in 1929 , which was provided by the Orpo, the rule was that the Üko should be accompanied by either a gendarme or a city police officer so that he could immediately initiate criminal investigations. It is unclear when the Üko was dissolved again; probably 1933/34.
There is no investigation into the dissolution of the corps in 1936. The only thing that is certain is that a certain part of the old order police, which had not converted to the armed forces in 1935, as well as the old gendarmerie, were taken over in the new gendarmerie corps, which was now under the Reich Main Security Office (RSSHA) under Heinrich Himmler . Administratively, the new gendarmerie continued to be subordinate to the Oldenburg Ministry of the Interior.
See also
- Royal Bavarian Gendarmerie Corps
- Royal Württemberg Landjäger Corps
- Police dragon corps of the Duchy of Oldenburg
- Ducal Oldenburg Dragoon Corps
- (Grand) ducal oldenburg land dragon corps
- Princely Lippisches Gendarmeriekorps
- Mecklenburg-Strelitzsche District Hussars
- Grand Ducal Hessian Gendarmerie Corps
- Royal Prussian Land Gendarmerie
literature
- Section: B. The Gendarmerie , in: Oldenburg Police Handbook. Edited by Dr. Heinrich Lankenau , Police Captain, Oldenburg 1929, pp. 106–154.
- Staff-Oberwachtmeister Wintermann: Grand Ducal Oldenburg Gendarmerie Corps 1817–1917. Memorandum for the 100th anniversary of the corps , Oldenburg 1918.
- Udo Elerd (Ed.): From the vigilante to the armed forces . On the history of the garrison and the military in the city of Oldenburg , Oldenburg 2006.
- Service regulations for the Grand Ducal Oldenburg Gendarmerie Corps , Oldenburg 1911.
- Oldenburgisches Gendarmerie-Korps: Division of the service districts in the regions of Oldenburg and Lübeck from October 1, 1934 , Oldenburg 1934.
- Holger Tümmler (ed.): On the history of the Third Reich. The organizations, uniforms, badges, flags and standards 1933–1935. With a uniform primer from 1933 , Wolfenbüttel 2008.
- About the attack by non-striking glass workers in Easter Castle , in: Nachrichten für Stadt und Land (Oldenburg) of August 12, 1894.
- Note about the death of the worker Carl Ohlendorf, in: Nachrichten für Stadt und Land (Oldenburg) from August 16, 1894.
- Note about the termination of the glassworks workers' strike, in: Nachrichten für Stadt und Land (Oldenburg) from September 11, 1894.
- Matthias Schachtschneider: Easter Castle. A place with many faces , Oldenburg (Isensee) 1999. ISBN 3-89598-655-0
- Ordinance sheet for the Gendarmerie Corps , 4th year, No. 4 of December 25, 1920, pp. 281ff.
- News for town and country of April 3, 1918.
- News for town and country of November 3, 1915.
- Helmut Lieber: History of the Police in the Birkenfeld Land. From the principality to the district , Birkenfeld (district adult education center) 1987.
- City of Oldenburg - City Archives (Ed.): Oldenburg 1914–1918. A source volume on the everyday, social, military and mental history of the city of Oldenburg in the First World War . (Publications of the Oldenburg City Archives, Vol. 7), Oldenburg (Isensee) 2014. ISBN 978-3-7308-1080-4 .
- Gerhard Wiechmann / Guillaume Payen: The Complex Policing System of Oldenburg, a Middle German State Far Away from the War? In: Jonas Campion / Laurent López / Guillaume Payen (eds.): European Police Forces and Law Enforcement in the First World War , Cham (Palgrave Macmillan) 2019, pp. 121–139. ISBN 978-3-030-26102-3 . ISBN 978-3-030-26101-6
Web links
- Pictures of the Grand Ducal Oldenburg Gendarmerie Corps
- Photo of the gendarmerie barracks around 1960
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