Josef Heinrich Sommer

Josef Heinrich Sommer (born July 26, 1888 in Dux , Bohemia , † November 22, 1946 in Vienna ) was an Austrian politician .

Life

Josef Sommer, the son of a miner grew up, graduated from the Law and Political Science Faculty in Prague Law , and received in 1913 the Doctor of Laws. After a year of legal practice in Linz , he became a concept intern in the Lieutenancy in Upper Austria in 1914 . Probably his best-known case, which he had to take care of, was Adolf Hitler's flight from Austria to Germany in order to evade the obligation to report in Austria. Years later, the so-called Hitler files would cause him problems. Sommer served in World War I from 1915 to 1918 , where he was last promoted to the rank of lieutenant .

From 1918 he resumed his service in the Upper Austrian provincial administration. Sommer headed the agricultural health insurance fund in Upper Austria from 1922 to 1927, before he was again active in the governorate from 1927 to 1938. He also sat on numerous economic supervisory boards, including the Elektro-Bau-AG EBG in Linz. Sommer made his first political experiences as a member of the Christian Social Party (CSP) in the Linz municipal council , of which he was a member from 1923 to 1934.

After Austria was "annexed" to the German Reich , Sommer had to give up his public office and was even arrested twice. When the Secret State Police questioned him about the Hitler files already mentioned , but he was unable to provide any information about the whereabouts of the documents, he was punished with a district ban. Nevertheless, Sommer was able to go into hiding in Vienna, where he survived the Nazi era under a false name as an employee of a forwarding company.

In the early summer of 1945, Sommer was briefly employed in the Ministry of Finance before he took over the office of State Commissioner for the Mühlviertel in August 1945 . Only one month later, in September 1945, he was appointed Undersecretary of State in the Renner Provisional State Government for the Austrian People's Party (ÖVP) . His primary task was to prepare the National Council elections in Austria in 1945 , in which his party, the ÖVP, won almost 50 percentage points of votes. In January 1946 he was appointed head of the presidential section in the Federal Chancellery and in February 1946 head of the section .

Josef Sommer died eleven months after taking office at the age of 58 in Vienna.

Literature and Sources

• W. Schuster:  Summer Josef Heinrich. In: Austrian Biographical Lexicon 1815–1950 (ÖBL). Volume 12, Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vienna 2001-2005, ISBN 3-7001-3580-7 , p. 413.
• Gertrude Enderle-Burcel , Michaela Follner: Servants of many masters. Biographical manual of the section heads of the First Republic and 1945. Ed. By the Documentation Archive of Austrian Resistance and the Austrian Society for Historical Source Studies, Vienna 1997, ISBN 3-901142-32-0 , pp. 439–441.

Web links

• Josef Heinrich Sommer on the website of the Austrian Parliament