Karl Fiehler

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Karl Fiehler
Karl Fiehler at the age of 15 (No. 5) with parents and siblings - including Werner Fiehler (No. 1), Gerhard Fiehler (No. 2) and Otto Fiehler (No. 3)
Karl Fiehler (second row, light uniform, between Neville Chamberlain and Joachim von Ribbentrop ) at the Munich Agreement in 1938

Karl Fiehler (born August 31, 1895 in Braunschweig , † December 8, 1969 in Dießen am Ammersee ) was a German politician ( NSDAP ) and mayor of Munich from 1933 to 1945.

Life

Karl Fiehler was a son of the Baptist preacher Heinrich Fiehler and his wife Emma, ​​nee Wulff. He had four brothers and two sisters. One of his brothers was the writer Werner Fiehler , also a member of the NSDAP, who was interned in the Dachau concentration camp for twenty months for various frauds in 1936/37. Gerhard and Otto, two other brothers of Karl Fiehler, took part in the 1923 Hitler coup and, like Karl, were awarded the blood order for it.

In 1902, Fiehler moved to Munich with his parents. There he attended secondary school, completed a commercial apprenticeship at Diamalt AG in Munich, and from 1914 worked in Schleswig-Holstein as an assistant . In 1914 Fiehler volunteered as a war volunteer , but was initially rejected because of his weak constitution. He was drafted into the Reichswehr in May 1915. In the spring of 1917 he was promoted to lieutenant in the reserve . After a leg injury sustained during fighting, Fiehler was admitted to a Munich hospital. His discharge from the Reichswehr took place at the end of 1918. Shortly before, he had been awarded the Iron Cross 2nd Class (EK II).

In December 1918, Fiehler was given a temporary position at the Munich residents' office under Kurt Eisner's government . His job was to help prepare for the first free and general elections in January 1919. From March 19, 1919 he worked for the Munich city administration as a temporary worker in a food card distribution center . In February 1922 he became a civil servant after successfully passing the examination for the intermediate state and local administration service. His application for civil service in July 1921 had previously failed.

Before he was released from military service, Fiehler married the Munich forwarding daughter Regina Kiendl. Their marriage resulted in three daughters: Regina (* 1919), Annemarie (* 1923) and Gertrud.

Party career until seizure of power

Fiehler joined the NSDAP as early as 1920. On November 6, 1923, he became a member of Hitler's raiding party , which was supposed to protect the Nazi leader. On November 8 and 9, 1923, he took an active part in the failed Hitler putsch , after which Hitler's shock troop was banned, but from which the Schutzstaffel (SS) emerged in 1925 . On April 28, 1924, Fiehler was sentenced to 15 months imprisonment in Landsberg am Lech and a fine of 30 gold marks for aiding and abetting high treason.

From 1924 to 1933 he was an honorary Munich city councilor and in 1929 published the main features of National Socialist communal politics in his 80-page book National Socialist Municipal Politics in the Munich Eher Verlag , the central party publisher of the NSDAP . In the 1930s he published several times on local political issues from the National Socialist point of view.

After the re-establishment of the NSDAP in February 1925, Fiehler rejoined the party ( membership number 37). As an “ old fighter ” (or a member of the “old guard”) he made a steep career in the party: from 1927 to 1930 he was the local group leader of the NSDAP in Munich and from 1935 to the end of the Nazi regime in spring 1945 he held the rank of one Reichsleiter of the NSDAP, first as secretary, then as head of the main office for local politics. He belonged to the highest leadership circle of the NSDAP and to the 20 closest employees of Adolf Hitler in the party. He was a member of the Academy for German Law . Fiehler rose within the SS (SS-No. 91.724): on July 31, 1933, he became Standartenführer, on December 24, 1933, Oberführer, and finally, on January 27, 1934, SS-Gruppenführer (Ehrenführer Oberabschnitt Süd). On January 30, 1942, he was promoted to SS-Obergruppenführer and until November 9, 1944 was assigned to Heinrich Himmler's RFSS (Reichsführer SS) staff .

From 1933 to 1945 Karl Fiehler was a member of the aligned German Reichstag . From 1934 to 1946 he was a member of the Senate of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society .

Fiehler as Lord Mayor

On March 9, 1933, the "day of the seizure of power", two so-called old fighters occupied the board of directors of the Munich City Hall and took over the city administration. Christian Weber and Max Amann unrolled an oversized swastika flag from one of the upper windows of the Munich City Hall as a sign. The First Mayor Karl Scharnagl ( BVP ) defied the new rulers for eleven days at the top of Munich, but on March 20, 1933 he had to "give way to violence". On March 22, 1933, Adolf Wagner , Bavarian Nazi Interior Minister and Gauleiter of Munich-Upper Bavaria, initially appointed Karl Fiehler as First Mayor on a provisional basis. On the same day, the acting Munich police chief Heinrich Himmler opened the Dachau concentration camp .

On May 20, 1933, Fiehler received the title of Lord Mayor . Within the NSDAP, Fiehler was not considered robust in the implementation of his goals. " Fiehler was not able to counteract the corrupt strings-puller Christian Weber or the excessive hegemonic claim of the Gauleiter [Adolf Wagner] effectively and permanently."

As in all of Germany, all parties and organizations that opposed political conformity were banned in Munich as a result of the National Socialist seizure of power . The book burning on Königsplatz in front of the Antikensammlung on May 10, 1933, and the persecution of non-ethnic writers, artists and scientists led to an exodus of Munich's intellectual elite. Thomas Mann did not return to Munich from a trip abroad.

In 1933, the central municipal associations were forced to found the German Association of Municipalities . The mayor of Munich, Fiehler, was appointed its chairman. The office was located on Alsenstrasse in Berlin-Tiergarten . On August 2, 1935, there was a memorable meeting between Hitler and Fiehler, during which Munich was given a new title: “ Capital of the Movement ”. This should point to the origins of the NSDAP in the Bavarian metropolis.

In the 1930s, Paul Ludwig Troost , who was Adolf Hitler's “court architect” before Albert Speer , built a series of model buildings of gigantic Nazi architecture in Munich . A fundamental redesign of Munich was intended, which Karl Fiehler built in 1937 as editor of the Munich illustrated book . Wanted to illustrate a factual and picture report about the National Socialist construction in the capital of the movement . Major projects such as relocating the main train station to Laim , however, did not get beyond the planning stage.

As a result of generous incorporation into the city of Munich , the number of inhabitants rose from 746,000 in 1936 to 889,000 in 1943 under Fiehler.

In order to prevent Christian Weber from accessing the office of Second Mayor after the death of Karl Tempel , Fiehler vehemently renounced the appointment.

Under Fiehler, three important Munich sacred buildings had to give way. In 1938 the main synagogue , St. Matthew's Church and the monastery church of the English Misses in the north wing of Nymphenburg Palace were demolished.

Fiehler was committed to increasing tourism. In his rank as Reichsleiter he was able to play a decisive role. In addition, he held important positions. He was chairman of the Bayerische Gemeindebank, member of the supervisory board of Deutsche Lufthansa , Deutsche Städtere-Reklame GmbH and the business consultancy Deutscher Gemeinde AG.

During the Second World War , Fiehler was one of the perseverance strategists. After heavy air raids, he always assembled his management staff that night in his service villa, the Thannhof house in Harlaching . In the last days of the war he was still involved in the suppression of the Bavarian freedom campaign.

Persecution of Jews in Munich

When it came to actions against Jews , Munich became a pioneer under Karl Fiehler. The first scheduled boycott of Jewish businesses in the spring of 1933 was pursued with great enthusiasm. Karl Fiehler ordered the shop boycott in advance obedience for March 30th, while the “official” date was April 1st. SA and SS groups had terrorized Jewish Munich businessmen as early as March 1933 and took 280 of them into “ protective custody ”. In the same year, Fiehler forbade - without a legal basis - to award municipal contracts to “non-German companies”. SA guards smeared shop windows in Jewish shops with the inscription "Jude" or "I'm on vacation in Dachau". Shop windows were smashed and customers intimidated by being molested, registered and sometimes even photographed by the SA. Munich was also particularly quick to demolish Jewish places of worship. Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels had the main synagogue demolished as early as June 1938 to find out whether the “ Aryan ” public would react in shock or indifference. The apathetic behavior of the population encouraged the Nazis to new excesses.

On November 9, 1938, at the invitation of Mayor Fiehler, almost the entire NSDAP leadership gathered in the great hall of the Old Town Hall in Munich for an evening of camaraderie. A wild anti-Semitic inflammatory speech by Joseph Goebbels was the signal for the SA and party leaders present for a general hunt for Jews. In the pogrom night, later euphemistically played down as “ Reichskristallnacht ”, numerous people were killed, tortured and injured. Many Jewish institutions, synagogues and shops fell victim to the devastation and looting .

Under Fiehler, the municipal burial office in Munich behaved in an absurdly strictly anti-Semitic manner. It refused to cremate deceased Christians of Jewish descent in the crematorium . In addition, so-called “ Jewish Christians ” were no longer allowed to be buried in their own, long-standing family graves in the Munich cemeteries . The office referred the relatives to the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde bureaucratically. At the funeral in the Jewish Orthodox cemetery was u. a. wearing the evangelical gown is no longer permitted. Johannes Zwanzger , who was appointed head of the Munich aid agency for non-Aryan Christians in December 1938 , formulated an unsuccessful complaint to Mayor Fiehler for the Evangelical Lutheran regional church council.

Fiehler's name is also linked to a rather bizarre complaint. The popular Munich comedian Karl Valentin complained in a letter to the Nazi mayor on February 20, 1940 about the loss of his stage stock. Shortly afterwards, however , Valentin finally lost his props when his panopticon and cellar bar Ritterspelunke , which was located at 33 Färbergraben, had to give way to an air raid shelter in June 1940 .

The disenfranchisement of Jews followed in the Second World War, the genocide . On November 20, 1941, the first deportation transport with 1,000 Jews left Munich for Riga . The frightened people were tricked into thinking it was an " evacuation ". The transport was diverted to the Kauen ghetto in the Lithuanian city ​​of Kaunas because the Riga ghetto was overcrowded at the time. In Fort IX of Kaunas, shortly after their arrival on November 25, 1941, members of Einsatzgruppe A , which was under the command of SS Brigade Leader Walter Stahlecker , murdered the people in a mass shooting. By February 1945, a total of 42 transports left Munich at irregular intervals: for extermination to Kaunas, Piaski (near Lublin ) and Auschwitz, as well as to the “old age and celebrity ghetto” Theresienstadt .

End of career and old age

On April 30, 1945 soldiers of the 7th US Army reached Marienplatz ; at 4:05 p.m. the town hall was handed over to them.

This ended the Nazi era in Munich. Munich became part of the US zone of occupation . On May 4, 1945, the Americans reinstated Karl Scharnagl as Lord Mayor. When the US troops marched in, Fiehler, together with Gauleiter Paul Giesler and other staff officers, left for Traunstein . When Hitler's death became known on May 2, 1945, Giesler dismissed everyone, including Fiehler, who then made his way through Munich to his country house in Buch am Ammersee .

After the Holocaust , Jewish life in Munich was almost extinct. Of the 12,000 Jews in Munich, 7,500 were able to flee the Nazis in time. Almost 3,000 were deported to concentration camps, more than half of them to the Theresienstadt ghetto . Only 430 surviving Munich Jews returned to their hometown in 1945.

On January 14, 1949, Fiehler was classified as an “activist” by the main court in Munich and sentenced to two years in the Hammelburg labor camp, where he worked as a blockfourier. The conviction included the confiscation of a fifth of his property, the loss of the right to vote and stand as a candidate, and a twelve-year professional ban. The fact that Fiehler had prevented the Isar bridges from being blown up by the Wehrmacht and thus secured the electricity and water supply for Munich was taken into account as mitigating the penalty . Fiehler did not have to go to prison because he was credited with three and a half years of internment. He lived in seclusion until his death in 1969 in Dießen am Ammersee , from August 1, 1958 in Breitbrunn am Ammersee and worked as an accountant. Fiehler's wife died on December 17, 1949. His second marriage was to a widow with four children.

In 1962, an administrative court order obliged the city of Munich to pay Karl Fiehler the pension of a city ​​secretary . He had held this position before his appointment as mayor. Fiehler appealed against this decision in order to secure the retirement pension of a lord mayor. In 1963 the appeal was rejected by the Bavarian Administrative Court . In 1965 the Federal Administrative Court upheld this judgment.

Awards

See also

literature

  • Ulrike Haerendel: Municipal housing policy in the Third Reich. Settlement ideology, small house construction and “housing renovation” using Munich as an example. Oldenbourg, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-486-56389-0 (also dissertation, University of Munich, 1995/96).
  • Andreas Heusler: Karl Fiehler. Lord Mayor of the “Capital of Movement” 1933–1945. In: The Mayor of Munich. 200 years of lived city history. Edited by Friedrich H. Hettler and Achim Sing . Volk, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-937200-42-2 , pp. 117-134.
  • Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich . Who was what before and after 1945. (= Fischer pocket books. Volume 16048). 3. Edition. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 3-596-16048-0 .
  • David Clay Large: Hitler's Munich. The rise and fall of the capital of the movement. Beck, Munich 1998, ISBN 3-406-44195-5 (original title: "Where ghosts walked." See the German review by Claus-Christian W. Szejnmann and the English review by Raffael Scheck).
  • Münchner Stadtmuseum , Richard Bauer (Hrsg.): Munich - "Capital of Movement". Bavaria's metropolis and National Socialism. 2nd Edition. Ed. Minerva, Wolfratshausen 2002, ISBN 3-932353-63-3 .
  • Helga Pfoertner: memorials, memorials, places of remembrance for the victims of National Socialism in Munich 1933–1945. Literareon, Utz, Munich. 3 volumes:
  • Mathias Rösch: The Munich NSDAP 1925–1933. An investigation into the internal structure of the NSDAP in the Weimar Republic. Oldenbourg, Munich 2002, ISBN 3-486-56670-9 (also dissertation, University of Munich, 1998).
  • Gavriel D. Rosenfeld: Architecture and memory: Munich and National Socialism. Strategies of forgetting. From the American by Uli Nickel and Bernadette Ott. Dölling and Galitz, Ebenhausen near Munich / Hamburg 2004, ISBN 3-935549-81-4 (original title: "Munich and memory").
  • Hildegard Vieregg: Does grass grow over it? Munich: stronghold of National Socialism and center of resistance. Museum Pedagogical Center Munich (MPZ), Munich 1993, ISBN 3-929862-25-5 .
  • Robert S. Wistrich : Who was who in the Third Reich: Followers, followers, opponents from politics, business, the military, art and science. Translated from English by Joachim Rehork . Revised, expanded and illustrated German edition. Harnack, Munich 1983, ISBN 3-88966-004-5 (original title: "Who's Who in Nazi Germany").
  • Friedrich H. Hettler, Achim Sing (ed.): The Munich mayors. 200 years of lived city history. Volk, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-937200-42-2 .
  • Fiehler, Karl. In: Alfons Labisch , Florian Tennstedt : The way to the "Law on the Unification of the Health System" of July 3, 1934. Development lines and moments of the state and municipal health system in Germany , Part 2, Academy for Public Health in Düsseldorf 1985, ISSN  0172 -2131 , pp. 402f.
  • Andreas Heusler, Hans Günter Hockerts, Christiane Kuller, Winfried Süß, Margit Szöllösi-Janze , Michael Stephan (eds.): Munich under National Socialism (all volumes published by Wallstein Verlag ):
    • Volume 1: Authority and Public Health. Public health in National Socialist Munich . 2013, ISBN 978-3-8353-1258-6 .
    • Volume 2: Florian Wimmer: The völkisch order of poverty. Communal social policy in National Socialist Munich. 2014, ISBN 978-3-8353-1402-3 .
    • Volume 3: Paul-Moritz Rabe: The city and money. Household and rule in National Socialist Munich. 2017.
    • Volume 4: Image politics of the "capital of the movement". 2017, ISBN 3-8353-3090-X .
    • Volume 5: Mathias Irlinger: The supply of the 'capital of the movement'. Infrastructures and urban society in National Socialist Munich. 2018, ISBN 3-8353-3205-8 . (at the same time Phil. dissertation Munich 1917).

Web links

Commons : Karl Fiehler  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Andrea Strübind: We Christians among spectators. The German Baptists and the persecution of the Jews during the Nazi dictatorship. in Faith - Freedom - Dictatorship in Europe and the USA. Festschrift for Gerhard Besier on the occasion of his 60th birthday (edited by Katarzyna Stokłosa and Andrea Strübind), Göttingen 2007, p. 121.
  2. ↑ State Archive Munich SpK 407 Bund II (Karl Fiehler) writing Werner Fiehler of 25 September 1947th
  3. ↑ Infantry-Assault-Badge.de: Blood Order ; see list numbers 580 and 672. Karl Fiehler can be found under number 16.
  4. ↑ Andreas Heusler: The brown house. How Munich became the capital of the movement . Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt: Munich 2008. ISBN 978-3-421-04352-8 . P. 183
  5. ↑ NS-Dokumentationszentrum.de: Karl Fiehler ; accessed on October 23, 2019
  6. ↑ Andreas Heusler: The brown house. How Munich became the capital of the movement . Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt: Munich 2008. p. 183
  7. ↑ Wolfgang Benz, Hermann Graml, Hermann Weiß (eds.): Encyclopedia of National Socialism . Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag: Munich 1997. ISBN 3-423-33007-4 - Short biography Fiehler, Karl . P. 834; Sp II.
  8. ^ Andreas Heusler: Karl Fiehler. Lord Mayor of the "Capital of the Movement" 1933–1945., In: Friedrich Hettler / Achim Sing (Ed.): The Munich Lord Mayors. 200 years of living city history, Munich 2008 (p. 126), ISBN 978-3-9372-0042-2
  9. ↑ sueddeutsche.de: When the Americans liberated Munich
personal data
SURNAME Fiehler, Karl
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician (NSDAP), MdR
DATE OF BIRTH August 31, 1895
PLACE OF BIRTH Braunschweig
DATE OF DEATH December 8, 1969
Place of death Dießen am Ammersee