Johannes Maier-Hultschin

Johannes Carl Maier-Hultschin , pseudonym John S. Steward , (born May 2, 1901 in Hultschin , Ratibor district , † October 18, 1958 in Düsseldorf ) was a German journalist.

Life and activity

Maier-Hiltschin was the son of foreman Nikolaus Maier-Hultschin and his wife Aloisia, nee. Bogdal.

After attending middle school, Maier-Hultschin completed an apprenticeship as a locksmith. In 1920 and 1921 he received in-depth training at the Leohaus Social University in Munich. During this time he got to know the later North Rhine-Westphalian Prime Minister Karl Arnold , who attended some courses with him.

Around 1921 Hultschin turned to the journalistic profession: He began his career with the newspaper Volksstimme in Gleiwitz, but in 1922 he switched to the Oberschlesischer Kurier in Katowice as an editor . The Kurier , the largest German-language daily newspaper in Poland, supported, under Maier-Hultschin's aegis, the line of the German Catholic People's Party, led by Eduard Pant , which represented the interests of the German minority in the country within the Polish parliament, including one among the German minority population in Poland loyal attitude to the Polish state while preserving the individuality and equal rights of this minority. In 1926 he became editor-in-chief of this newspaper.

In 1933 Maier-Hultschin resigned as editor-in-chief of the Oberschlesischer Kurier , which came under the influence of the Nazi state after the National Socialists came to power in Germany. Instead, he and Pant founded the newspaper Der Deutsche in Polen. Weekly newspaper for politics, culture and business . He converted this newspaper, which was the official organ of the German Christian People's Party, into a forum for Christian-conservative opponents of National Socialism. In the following years he dealt theoretically with the Nazi ideology and distributed news and information that was suppressed in newspapers within German territory. His sharp criticism of the Nazi system came from a decidedly Catholic perspective, but was not blind to the suffering that the National Socialist dictatorship inflicted on other population groups: for example, he denounced the pogroms of November 1938 in the edition of Der Deutsche in Polen from November 20, 1938 with the headline "Synagogues today - churches tomorrow!" on. The basis for Maier-Hultschin's reporting on what was happening in Germany was information he received from Catholic circles in the Reich, from emigrants and from the SPD in exile in Prague. During these years he maintained contacts with Heinrich Brüning , Carl Spiecker , Friedrich Muckermann , Otto Strasser , Hermann Rauschning and members of the army.

Because of his active advocacy for the German preservation of his Hultschiner homeland, he was sentenced by a Czech court in absentia to 7 years in prison, but later pardoned.

In August 1939, Maier-Hultschin fled from Katowice to Warsaw in view of the impending start of the war. From there he reached London via Bucharest, Yugoslavia, Greece and France in 1940. There he continued to work as a journalist and directed the broadcast for German Catholics on the BBC. He has also written articles for the Tablet and Catholic Herald newspapers .

Maier-Hultschin had already been declared an enemy of the state by the National Socialists in the early 1930s: The German in Plen had already been banned in the Reich territory in August 1934 and was regarded by the Nazi police as "one of the worst propaganda papers". He anticipated his expatriation, which was announced in April 1938, by taking on Polish citizenship in February 1938. In addition, he was classified by the National Socialists as an enemy of the state: In the spring of 1940, the Reich Main Security Office in Berlin placed him on the special wanted list GB , a list of people who, in the event of a successful invasion and occupation of the British Isles by the Wehrmacht, would be followed by special commands from the occupying forces SS should be located and arrested with special priority.

In 1946 Maier-Hultschin became a correspondent for the Christian Intelligence Service in Munich, Great Britain. In addition, he published several works on the church's resistance to the Nazi system. In 1950 he returned to Germany. In the following year he became press chief of the state government of North Rhine-Westphalia led by his old compadre Karl Arnold with the rank of ministerial director. However, his relationship with Arnold turned out to be tense. In 1957 he retired due to illness.

Maier-Hultschin's estate is now being kept in the Koblenz Federal Archives.

family

In 1942 Maier-Hultschin married Johanna Loewenstein (* 1902), a daughter of Felix Loewenstein . The marriage remained childless.

Fonts

• Victory of faith. Authentic Gestapo report on church resistance in Germany , 1946. (under the pseudonym John S. Steward)
• "Structure and character of German emigration", in: Politische Studien 6, 1955.

literature

• Brigitte Kaff: Maier-Hultschin, Johannes in: Neue Deutsche Biographie 15 (1987), p. 705 f.
• The German-language press. A biographical-bibliographical handbook , p. 671.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Michael Hepp / Hans Georg Lehmann: The expatriation of German citizens 1933-45 according to the lists published in the Reichsanzeiger , 1985, p. 45.
2. ^ Entry on Maier-Hultschin on the special wanted list GB (reproduced on the website of the Imperial War Museum in London) .