Herbert Meet

Herbert Wilhelm Adolf Treff (born April 27, 1898 in Charlottenburg , † April 25, 1945 in Berlin-Steglitz ) was a German local politician in the Weimar Republic and at the time of National Socialism . In 1930 he was elected as the first and, before 1933, the only National Socialist to the unpaid Berlin city council and was district mayor of the Berlin district of Steglitz from 1933 to 1943 .

Life

Treff was born one of six children to a bank clerk. He left the school in 1914 without a high school after Obersekunda and was candidate in magistrate of the city of Charlottenburg. From 1917 to 1918 he fought as a soldier in the First World War . From 1919 to 1924 he was a member of the DNVP and city ​​and district councilor . Between 1922 and 1925 he attended the Berlin administration seminar. In June 1926 he joined the NSDAP ( membership number 39.217).

For the NSDAP, Treff was a city and district councilor in Berlin between 1929 and 1934. In 1930 he was elected to the city ​​council in Berlin's Tiergarten district. He also took over the management of the Berlin Gauamt for local politics. In 1932 he was one of the founding members of the National Socialist People's Welfare (NSV).

In the course of the " Gleichschaltung " after the " takeover " of the National Socialists , Treff received additional offices. He became leader of the National Socialist parliamentary group, member of the board of the parliamentary group in the Prussian State Council and Vice President of the State Council. As head of the "Office for Local Politics at the Supreme Leadership of the NSDAP", he organized National Socialist training for local administrations across the empire. On April 1, the Steglitz district assembly elected him district mayor for twelve years . Treff became deputy chairman of the German Municipal Assembly , chairman of the Berlin Mayors' Conference and district office manager of the NSDAP of the Gaus Mark Brandenburg . From March 1934 he published the newspaper Berliner Kommunale Mitteilungen , which was discontinued in April 1938 . In March 1935 he joined the SS as Sturmbannführer (membership number 259400); In 1940 he was promoted to Obersturmbannführer .

Treff developed political ambition. At the end of the 1930s he applied several times for the post of Lord Mayor of cities such as Hanover , Leipzig , Karlsruhe and Dresden . However, the responsible authorities did not trust him to have the format for such a position. He had also made himself unpopular with Hermann Göring and Joseph Goebbels by redesigning the Steglitz water tower against their express prohibition as a “memorial for those who fell in the First World War and the movement” and financed this in 1934 through a “Steglitz home week”.

Treff not only implemented the Aryanization , but also benefited personally from it. In 1941 he moved into a house that was owned by Jews and was restituted after the war.

In 1943, Treff was relieved of his office as district mayor for violating “food management regulations”. On April 26, 1945, he, his wife and two of his children were found dead in the basement of their house. They were most likely killed by Red Army soldiers .

literature

• District Office Steglitz of Berlin (Hrsg.): Steglitz in the Third Reich. Contributions to the history of National Socialism in Steglitz . Berlin 1992.
• Christian Simon: The riddle about mayor meeting . In: Steglitzer Heimat 50, No. 1 (2005), pp. 30–34. Digitized version ( memento from August 11, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 1.9 MB)
• Christian Simon: Some of the riddles about Mayor Treff solved . In: Steglitzer Heimat 50, No. 2 (2005), pp. 11-13. Digitized version ( memento from August 11, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 605 kB)