Helmuth Brückner

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Helmuth Brückner (1934)

Helmuth Brückner (born May 7, 1896 in Peilau , Reichenbach district (Eulengebirge) ; † January 2, 1951 in the Ozernyj camp in Taischet , Irkutsk Oblast , Siberia) was Upper President and Gauleiter in Silesia until his fall in 1934.

Origin and political biography

As the son of an elementary school teacher, Brückner attended the secondary school in Reichenbach . After graduating from high school, he began to study history , geography , philosophy and economics at the Silesian Friedrich Wilhelms University in Breslau . In August 1914 he interrupted his studies to take part in the First World War as a volunteer . In December 1915 he became a lieutenant in the reserve . Seriously wounded on the Western Front in 1918 , he returned to his homeland after hospital and sanatorium stays. He was involved in the fighting during the uprisings in Upper Silesia . In 1919 he became active in the Corps Marcomannia Breslau . In 1921 he joined the self-protection group north as a staff officer . He resumed his studies that year, but soon dropped out. In 1924 he became editor of the Silesian People's Voice and began to work in a small organization that was already heavily influenced by National Socialism . From February 1926 to March 5, 1927 he was a city ​​councilor in Breslau for the German National Freedom Party . After the Hitler putsch and the ban on the National Socialist German Workers' Party , he played a key role in its reorganization after the ban was lifted in 1925. In the same year he was appointed Gauleiter with the (very low) party number 2023 .

Since 1925 Brückner was the editor of the Silesian observer , the counterpart to the Völkischer Beobachter . In 1930 he was involved in founding the central publishing house in Breslau . In the Reichstag election in 1930 Brückner was elected to the Reichstag (Weimar Republic) for the NSDAP and to the Prussian state parliament on April 24, 1932 . When he was appointed State Inspector East in the summer of 1932, Brückner took over party supervision not only for Silesia but also for East Prussia and the Free City of Danzig . After the victory of the NSDAP in the Reichstag elections in March 1933 , Brückner became President of the Province of Lower Silesia (Breslau) on March 25, 1933 and initially also provisional for the Province of Upper Silesia ( Opole ). The official handover took place on August 2, 1933. His deputy was Edmund Heines (who was also homosexual like Brückner) . On October 7, 1933, Brückner was appointed SA group leader . In 1934 he was suspected of belonging to the Röhm wing “because of various statements and his homosexual tendencies” . He was arrested, dismissed from his office and expelled from the NSDAP. Raimund Wolfert reports on his political end .

Banned from Silesia, Brückner lived as an industrial worker at Ernst Heinkel Flugzeugwerke with his family in Rostock from 1938 onwards . Here he was arrested by the Soviet military administration in July 1945 . He died after six years in the gulag , "half starved, half slain".

Quotes from contemporary witnesses

“I think I remember he started out as the chief of police. I can still see his assumption of office. He rode proudly into the police headquarters. He hardly received approval later when he had his residential area cordoned off from rolling traffic while his wife was very pregnant. "

- Karl-Heinz Buhse (* 1913)

“My knowledge of things is that he initially fell out of favor with the Nazis and was deposed as Gauleiter, with the suspicion of homosexuality that was popular at the time. At the end of the war, he was captured by the Russians and perished miserably as a prisoner. "

- Hans Dos (* 1911)

See also

literature

  • Peter Hüttenberger : The Gauleiter. Study on the change in the power structure in the NSDAP. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1969, (series of the quarterly books for contemporary history 19, ISSN  0506-9408 ), (extended dissertation, Bonn, 1966).
  • Wolfram Rothe: Banished by Hitler, perished under Stalin. Helmuth Brückner - from Gauleiter to Gulag prisoner . Regional contemporary history - Messages from Mecklenburg 1/2008, pp. 46–53.
  • Alexander Zinn: The social construction of the homosexual National Socialist. On the genesis and establishment of a stereotype. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1997, ISBN 978-3-631-30776-2

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Information from the Federal Archives .
  2. ^ A b Norbert Korfmacher: Provisional list of members of the Wroclaw City Council 1919 to 1933 (PDF; 300 kB).
  3. a b Helmuth Brückner, Gauleiter of the NSDAP (pink angle)
  4. ^ Excerpt from the German lists of losses (Preuss. 1087) of March 13, 1918, p. 22915
  5. Kösener Corpslisten 1930, 20/254
  6. ^ Hüttenberger: The Gauleiter. 1969.
  7. Raimund Wolfert : On the trail of the "inverted" in Breslau in the twenties and thirties. In: Invertito. Yearbook for the History of Homosexualities. 9th year (2007), pp. 93–135, here p. 133 f.
  8. ^ Corps list of Marcomannia Breslau 1959
  9. ^ A b Siegfried Schunke: Stories about Marcomannia and Marcomannes. Vol. 2, 2004, p. 373.