Jean Keppi

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Important information is missing from this article or section. Help Wikipedia by researching and pasting it .

Jean Keppi (1910)

Jean Keppi (born November 26, 1888 in Mulhouse , † February 19, 1967 in Dachstein ) was an Alsatian politician.

Life

Reichslandzeit (until 1918)

From 1908 to 1913, Keppi studied public and administrative law at the Universities of Strasbourg and Zurich . Since 1909 he had been in correspondence with the socially committed priest Carl Sonnenschein . Following his example, he organized successful holiday courses for blue-collar and white-collar workers in 1910 in Mulhouse . During stays in Duisburg and Mönchengladbach , he got an insight into the work of the Volksverein for Catholic Germany . From 1911 Keppi belonged to the Alsace-Lorraine Center Party . In the same year he actively supported the candidacy of the Strasbourg university professor and member of the Reichstag in Mulhouse, Martin Spahn , who at that time still represented positions of reform Catholicism . In 1913 Keppi published the brochure The Alsace-Lorraine newspapers. A statistical study in which he presented the numerical inferiority of Catholic newspapers and magazines compared to liberal and social democratic press organs in the realm of Alsace-Lorraine and called for the expansion of the Catholic press there. From April 1913 he held the post of permanent secretary of the Alsace-Lorraine Center Party. In the wake of the Zabern affair in October 1913, Keppi organized numerous demonstrations against the appearance of the military, which gave the authorities the cause of several house searches. An arrest warrant for the same reason was no longer carried out after Keppi was drafted as part of the mobilization in August 1914 . He saw the end of the First World War with the rank of lieutenant on the Western Front .

Interwar period (1919 to 1939)

In February 1919, Keppi was involved in the founding of the Union populaire républicaine d'Alsace (UPRA; more often simply UPR or "People's Party"), the successor party to the Alsace-Lorraine Center Party (ELZ) . He was a representative of the “left” (Christian-social and Alsatian- regionalist ) wing of the party, which increasingly led to fierce internal party disputes with representatives of “right-wing” (bourgeois-national and central-state) positions such as Emile Wetterlé and Nicolaus Delsor . From November 1919 to June 1922 he represented the party as elected alderman ( adjoint au maire ) of the city of Strasbourg . In May 1920 he addressed the memorandum “The Housing Crisis in Strasbourg” to the city council on the tense situation on the housing market. From July 1922 to 1936 Keppi Secrétaire général of the Haguenau city ​​administration .

On May 24, 1926, Keppi was one of the co-founders of the autonomist collection movement Alsace-Lothringischer Heimatbund , was elected its general secretary and was a co-signer of the founding manifesto “The Manifesto of the Heimatbund. Appeal to all Alsatian-Lorraine loyalists ”of June 8, 1926. Due to differences in content and increasing efforts by numerous federal members around Paul Schall to turn the Heimatbund into an autonomist political party, Keppi resigned from the Heimatbund in May 1927. In 1930, because of his reputation as a good organizer, Keppi was charged with reorganizing the UPR's party finances. After the defeat of the UPR in the municipal elections in 1936, he was elected 3rd Vice President of the UPR.

In September 1939, Keppi was housed in Périgueux as part of the evacuation of the Alsatian civilian population into the interior . There he was arrested on charges of endangering state security and on October 18 he was transferred to the military prison in Nancy , where other members of the Alsatian autonomy movement were already imprisoned. Although the interim investigations and interrogations of the detainees had not led to charges, they were transferred to various prisons in the interior of France before the approaching German troops, and Keppi finally to Privas via several intermediate stops . Friends of Christian Democratic politicians from Alsace and Lorraine , including Robert Schuman , campaigned for his release at the French Ministry of the Interior. Before these efforts had any effect, the prisoners were handed over to a special detachment of the Wehrmacht Abwehr by the French authorities on July 15, 1940 in Chalon-sur-Saône as part of the surrender of France .

Occupation (1940 to 1944)

Like the other “Nanziger” , Keppi also signed the “ Manifesto of Three Ears (Manifeste des Trois-Épis) ”, which was largely pre-formulated by Robert Ernst , in which Hitler was asked to integrate Alsace into the Third Reich . From November 28 to December 2, 1940, Keppi took part in the “Nanziger” trip to Berlin , where the group a. a. was received by Wilhelm Frick , Otto Meissner , Hans Heinrich Lammers and Heinrich Himmler .

From March 1941 Keppi was responsible for the “refugee system” in the civil administration of Alsace, from July he headed the “Settlement Office for Volksdeutsche from France”, where he was responsible for the repatriation of the Alsatians evacuated inland in 1939/40. He avoided any sign of collaboration with official German authorities, evaded official requests for public support from the German authorities and was considered unreliable because of his ties to the Catholic Church. He refused German citizenship, but like all other "Nanziger" (and probably without his consent) was accepted into the NSDAP . At the end of September 1943 he gave up his job with the “refugee system” and took over the management of a printing company for Alsatia publishing house .

As early as the spring of 1941, Keppi had been in contact, either directly or through the mediation of Joseph Rossé , with people from the German resistance against National Socialism , initially with members of the Kreisau Circle . From 1942 he was in regular contact with resistance figures in Baden and Württemberg , namely Eugen Bolz , Joseph Ersing and Reinhold Frank . In June 1943 Valentin Eichenlaub , August Kuhn and Jakob Kaiser initiated plans for an assassination attempt on Hitler for Christmas 1943. In September 1943 he stayed in Stuttgart for meetings with Bolz, Ersing, Frank and Carl Goerdeler . The topic was the reorganization of the political situation in Alsace after a successful attack. The planned attack had to be postponed by Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg . Keppi is said to have met Stauffenberg personally on a later occasion.

After the failure of the assassination attempt on July 20, 1944 , Keppi was wanted by the Gestapo with an arrest warrant from September 1944 , but initially under a false name ("Dr. Käppi"). After being warned by an employee of the Strasbourg police headquarters he knew, he was able to go into hiding and hide until the Allied troops marched into Alsace in November 1944.

Post-war period (1945 to 1967)

Keppi was after Libération not arrested like many other autonomists before the war. In the trial against Joseph Rossé (Nancy, May to June 1947) he testified in favor of the accused. In August 1947 a Commission d'Épuration in Strasbourg negotiated against him for cooperation with the enemy (“ intelligences avec l 'ennemi ”). Based on the testimony of exonerating witnesses , he was only sentenced to 15 years of dégradation nationale (roughly comparable to the loss of civil rights in German criminal law). He also had to reimburse the state treasury 240,000 francs in compensation for 12,000 Reichsmarks that the German authorities had paid him in April 1943 as compensation for his imprisonment in Nancy from October 1939 to June 1940. Although the fine was reduced to 180,000 francs in March 1949, Keppi got into serious economic difficulties as a result of the judgment.

After 1946 Keppi belonged to the Mouvement républicain populaire (MRP, in German often called "People's Republicans"), which represented Christian Democratic positions and was the strongest party in Alsace in the 1950s. Keppi continued to represent regionalist positions, but was unable to assert himself on a large scale and was no longer elected to public offices. Increasingly he withdrew from political life. From 1946 he was a regular employee of the Strasbourg bilingual Catholic weekly newspaper L'Ami du Peuple , responsible for legal issues and correction. He rarely published articles.

Publications

  • The Alsace-Lorraine newspapers. A statistical study of its geographical and political distribution and its content . Herdersche Buchhandlung, Strasbourg 1913.
  • Housing question and housing policy. Lecture given by J. Keppi at the II. Alsatian Christian-Social Holiday Course, autumn 1920, supplemented by numerous marginal notes . LeRoux, Strasbourg 1921

literature

  • Christian Baechler: Jean Keppi . In Christian Baechler (ed.): Nouveau dictionnaire de biographie alsacienne , Vol. 20 (Kam à Kie), p. 1928. Fédération des Sociétés d'Histoire et d'Archéologie d'Alsace, Strasbourg 1993
  • Jean-Marie Mayeur / Yves-Marie Hilaire (eds.), Dictionnaire du monde religieux dans la France contemporaine . Tome 2: L'Alsace de 1800 à 1962 . Beauchesne, Paris 1987. ISBN 978-2-7010-1141-7
  • Christopher J. Fischer: Alsace to the Alsatians? Visions and Divisions of Alsatian Regionalism, 1870-1939 . (Studies in Contemporary European History, Vol. 5). Berghahn Books, New York-Oxford 2010. ISBN 978-1782383949
  • Bernard Wittmann: Jean Keppi (1888-1967). Autonomist Chrétien Antinazi. Une histoire de l'autonomisme alsacien , Éd. Yoran Embanner, Fouesnant 2014. ISBN 978-2-36747-001-6

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Bernard Wittmann: Jean Keppi (1888-1967). Autonomist Chrétien Antinazi. Une histoire de l'autonomisme alsacien , Éd. Yoran Embanner, Fouesnant 2014, pp. 13-17
  2. ↑ Due to the departure of many old German families on the one hand and the large influx of families from the interior of France on the other, the composition of the population of Strasbourg changed significantly between 1917 and January 1919 and increased by 14%; Bernard Wittmann: Jean Keppi (1888-1967). Autonomist Chrétien Antinazi. Une histoire de l'autonomisme alsacien , Éd. Yoran Embanner, Fouesnant 2014, pp. 51-52
  3. ^ Bernard Wittmann: Jean Keppi (1888-1967). Autonomist Chrétien Antinazi. Une histoire de l'autonomisme alsacien , Éd. Yoran Embanner, Fouesnant 2014, pp. 157-215
  4. ^ Bernard Wittmann: Jean Keppi (1888-1967). Autonomist Chrétien Antinazi. Une histoire de l'autonomisme alsacien , Éd. Yoran Embanner, Fouesnant 2014, pp. 245–248
  5. ^ Lothar Kettenacker: National Socialist People's Politics in Alsace , pp. 124-125. Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, Stuttgart 1973, ISBN 3-421-01621-6
  6. ^ Bernard Wittmann: Jean Keppi (1888-1967). Autonomist Chrétien Antinazi. Une histoire de l'autonomisme alsacien (2014), pp. 263–264
  7. ^ Bernard Wittmann: Jean Keppi (1888-1967). Autonomist Chrétien Antinazi. Une histoire de l'autonomisme alsacien (2014), pp. 269–297. The information is based on a. to the statements of Keppi and others in the trial against Joseph Rossé , Nancy 1947. Wittmann cites the source for the meeting with Stauffenberg (without naming the author and title of the article): Moments. Contributions to regional studies of Baden-Württemberg (publisher: State Gazette for Baden-Württemberg GmbH on behalf of the state government). 04/2006, p. 26
  8. ^ Bernard Wittmann: Jean Keppi (1888-1967). Autonomist Chrétien Antinazi. Une histoire de l'autonomisme alsacien (2014), pp. 318–338
  9. ^ Bernard Wittmann: Jean Keppi (1888-1967). Autonomist Chrétien Antinazi. Une histoire de l'autonomisme alsacien (2014), pp. 344-349
personal data
SURNAME Keppi, Jean
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Alsatian politician
DATE OF BIRTH November 26, 1888
PLACE OF BIRTH Mulhouse
DATE OF DEATH 19th February 1967
Place of death Dachstein