Hugo Recken

Hugo Recken (born May 27, 1891 in Oedt ; † August 2, 1953 in Osterath ) was Mayor of Osterath from early 1934 until he was deposed by the Allies in April 1945. At the end of January 1946, he was again municipal director of Osterath.

Both times his predecessor was Rudolf Bartels , who was ousted from office by the Nazi regime in October 1933 .

Life

Gerhard Johann Hugo Recken was born on May 27, 1891 in Oedt. He was the eldest of four sons of the innkeeper Peter Joseph Recken and his wife Maria Sibilla.

education and profession

He grew up in a strictly Catholic home. In Oedt he attended elementary school and then, from sixth to upper secondary, the royal high school in Kempen .

Recken began his professional training as a state tax officer on April 1, 1910 as a trainee at the municipal administration in Oedt, but later switched to a career as a municipal official.

After working in the administration in Vorst , Kempen, he became administrative secretary for the mayor's office of Kerpen (1914-1916) and the mayor's office of Munich-Gladbach-Land (1916-1919).

From 1919 to 1929 Recken was an administrative officer in the rural community of Breyell . There he married Anna Christina Buch on August 8, 1922, and the marriage had two children.

Public offices until 1933

In 1923 Hugo Recken joined the Center Party . The Center Party was the political representative of Catholicism, which was particularly strong on the Lower Rhine. He was a member of the central parliamentary group in the Breyell office and in the district council. In addition, he worked in the association of municipal officials and employees (Komba) and also in managerial positions in the non-profit building and home cooperative e. G. mb H. Breyell.

On September 27, 1929 Hugo Recken became provisional mayor of the Forst office in the Kempen-Krefeld district .

In March 1933 Hugo Recken left the Center Party and joined the NSDAP . After 1945 he wrote in the denazification process that he had joined the NSDAP “to prevent the loss of the civil service post in late autumn 1933” , the date would then have been backdated.

Mayor of Osterath 1934 to April 1945

Hugo Recken was appointed mayor of Osterath on December 22, 1933, and then took up his post as mayor on January 24, 1934.

His predecessor, Mayor Rudolf Bartels , who was still elected during the imperial era in 1918 , was not ready to join the NSDAP and was therefore forced out of office by the new rulers.

On the initiative of the Osterath municipal administration, the Jewish cemetery that had been in use in Osterath since 1867 was "reburied" in Krefeld. On December 6, 1934, the relevant resolution was passed at a local council meeting. In the Meerbusch history booklet this was named as an example, "shows (the) Osterath reburial project that there (in the Rhineland) the propaganda had not failed." Only months after the administrative decision and the reburial, the local NSDAP leadership confirmed retrospectively this measure by the mayor against the Jewish cemetery.

On November 9, 1938 , Recken had many of the local Jewish citizens arrested, including Julius Gutmann, who was disabled and decorated from the First World War. Mayor Recken had them transported from the municipal prison to Anrath prison .

Subsequently, Julius Gutmann's house and his butcher's shop, as well as the other “Jewish houses”, were badly demolished by the SA. Sabine Gutmann, one of the only two survivors of the Holocaust in Osterath, later said: “No saucer remained whole. Everything, but also everything, was destroyed. ... They were SA people ... "

After the US troops occupied Osterath in March 1945, Hugo Recken was deposed as mayor after eleven years. His predecessor Rudolf Bartels was appointed as his successor.

Municipal director of Osterath 1946 to 1953

Shortly after his removal, Hugo Recken tried to be reinstated. Among other things, he was able to rely on the support of the Catholic pastor Hövelmann and the Nazi local farmer leader Olfs. In the final report of the city of Meerbusch on Hugo Recken from December 6, 2012, it says “(On) July 18, 1945 Rudolf Lensing (who later became mayor of Osterath for many years), who stressed that he was not a party member, wrote to the district administrator in English because of the lack of a pension for Recken and about Recken's behavior during his tenure. "

Sabine Gutmann wrote on December 17, 1945 after she and her husband Julius had returned to Osterath as the only survivor of the people deported from Osterath from the Theresienstadt concentration camp : “Recken has always been eager to get out of the National Socialists in his capacity as mayor. He was particularly implacable on the Jewish question ... Recken had two of four Jewish houses sold so that there weren't as many Jewish houses in place as Recken himself said. "

At the end of January 1946 Hugo Recken was appointed municipal director. In the denazification proceedings in 1948/49, he was classified as unencumbered in the second instance.

Honor

On December 6, 1954, the Osterath municipal council honored the mayor and municipal director, who died in 1953, by naming the street between Willicher Strasse and Bommershöferweg as Hugo-Recken-Strasse .

The laying of stumbling blocks in Osterath in December 2011 triggered a discussion in Meerbusch about the responsibility of Mayor Hugo Recken in the persecution and extermination of the Jewish fellow citizens of Osterath. One of the points of contention was the classification of the final sentence in a letter from the mayor about the treatment of the Sabine and Julius Gutmann couple to the Gestapo office in Krefeld on June 4, 1942: "The deportation of the Jew (sic) is requested." The Gutmanns were also deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp . For this purpose, the mayor had the savings book "of the Jew" handed over personally.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d} Michael Regenbrecht, Paul Hoffmann, Robert Rameil: “Final report on Hugo Recken”. Presented to the main committee of the city of Meerbusch and submitted on 6 December 2012 documents the city Meerbusch ( Memento of the original November 27, 2015 Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link is automatically inserted and not yet tested. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . 
2. ^ Michael Regenbrecht, Paul Hoffmann, Robert Rameil: Final report on Hugo Recken . of the city of Meerbusch on December 6th, 2012 ( documents of the city of Meerbusch ( memento of the original of November 27th, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove it Note. ) P. 31 (part 3) 
3. ^ Michael Regenbrecht, Paul Hoffmann, Robert Rameil: Final report on Hugo Recken . of the city of Meerbusch on December 6th, 2012 ( documents of the city of Meerbusch ( memento of the original of November 27th, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove it Note. ) P. 7 (part 1) 
4. ↑ 14. Meerbuscher history booklet, Günter Janß: “The Osterather Judenfriedhof and the history of the Jewish community”, page 60: “New major actions did not begin again until the spring of 1935. They began in Berlin and were soon felt throughout the empire. Even if it is correct that the new aggression against the Jews in the Rhineland started with some delay, the Osterath reburial project shows that the propaganda had not failed to have an effect there too and that the National Socialist idea of ​​'racial segregation' was one of the firmly anchored ideas in had become the heads of very many people. "
5. ^ Michael Regenbrecht, Paul Hoffmann, Robert Rameil: Final report on Hugo Recken . of the city of Meerbusch on December 6th, 2012 ( documents of the city of Meerbusch ( memento of the original of November 27th, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove it Note. ): “Recken's request for consent to this procedure in this matter to the Osterather local branch of the NSDAP on December 10, 1934 received a positive answer by telephone only after eight months on October 25, 1935, but the completion of the reburial work was in the files held by the mayor's office in Osterath on August 20, 1935. " 
6. ↑ 16. Meerbusch history booklet 1999, Marie-Sophie Aust: “A Jewish fellow citizen from Osterath: Julius Gutmann and his family”, page 57.
7. ^ Renate-Wilkes-Valkyser: Rheinische Post November 25, 1978: Sabine Gutmann survived three years of concentration camps. "Many of us died on the first night". Now the old Jew is threatened with homelessness
8. ^ Horst Klemt: From the chronicle of the St. Nicholas parish in Osterath . In: Meerbuscher Geschichtshefte 27 (2010), p. 110–116, p. 115: “The mayor Hugo Recken was pushed aside in a very strange way. His predecessor and colleague behaved very unfairly in this matter, so that it took about a whole year before Mr. Recken could take up his post again. "
9. ↑ Final report of December 6, 2012: "(NS) local farmers leader Olfs also declared that Recken was an opponent against the Nazis inside."
10. ↑ Lothar Klouthen: The death was a master from Osterath: A Catholic Lower Rhine community elite from the Weimar Republic to the Federal Republic of Germany: Remembrance versus history policy in Meerbusch-Osterath , ISBN 978-3-00-038570-4