Karl Vogt (District Administrator)

Karl Vogt (born on 17th October 1915 in Bellheim , died on the 30th September 1997 in Ulm ) was a German district administrator of the district Bitburg (1962-1970) and this subsequent district Bitburg-Prüm (until 1979).

Life

Origin and education

Born in 1915 in the Palatinate as the son of the father of the same name, a businessman, Karl Vogt attended the humanistic grammar school in Speyer after elementary school , from which he graduated in 1935 when he passed his school leaving examination . He then began studying philosophy and theology in Eichstädt and Würzburg , his semesters were interrupted by six-week military service at the Westwall , before he was called up as a soldier a few months after the start of the Second World War in December 1939 and continued into the last days of the war May 1945 also stayed. He was used as a motorcyclist , accounting officer or as a directing sergeant in an assault gun brigade, mostly with locations on the Eastern Front . Shortly before the end of the war, not far from Braunau am Inn , he was taken prisoner in the US for a short time . His only brother fell in Russia .

1946 to 1962

In 1946 Karl Vogt was able to continue his studies, but he not only switched to the University of Heidelberg , but also to law and political sciences . Vogt put his first exam still in Heidelberg from, the second in Neustadt on the Wine Route , before and there also the large state examination on 11 September 1948 with the second big state exam on September 1, 1951 his lawyer time than now to Assessor graduated, he spent at several local courts in the Palatinate, at the Landau Regional Court and at the Higher Regional Court in Neustadt. From 1949 to April 1962, Karl Vogt worked in the higher civil service of the state of Rhineland-Palatinate , first at the district government in Neustadt and from January 1953 at the district office in Landau . During this time, in May 1955, he was appointed government councilor .

Bitburg reservoir (2016)

1962 to 1979 district administrator in Bitburg

Karl Vogt moved from Landau to Bitburg in May 1962 , after he had been appointed to succeed Konrad Schubach as the new district administrator of the district of the same name. Vogt moved from the Palatinate wine-growing region to the climatically inhospitable Eifel , whose people were also from "a different breed" than at home. In retrospect, he said about the residents of the new circle he headed: "But when you got to know the Eifel people, when the 'ice was broken', then they were upright, real guys!"

His years of service were marked by numerous changes that were intended to make the Eifel district more modern and to realign it economically. From an administrative point of view, the Rhineland-Palatinate district reform was the focus of his work, as it was necessary to implement the territorial reform decided on in other places . In the course of this, the district of Bitburg experienced the first area increases in 1969, but essentially the largest part of the economically and structurally backward old district of Prüm was added in 1970 . Not all residents agreed with this connection or the changes that went with it. Vogt then worked three days a week in Prüm and Bitburg.

Other projects during his term in office in Bitburg included school reform and the expansion of the school system. It all began with the laying of the foundation stone for the new construction of the St. Willibrord grammar school in Bitburg ; in addition to other new buildings, secondary schools were built in Neuerburg , Speicher and Bitburg, a special school center in Prüm and, since August 1, 1973, a technical college for social care, social pedagogy and education in Prüm and one for engineering in Bitburg.

The emerging tourism also changed the landscape, the Bitburg reservoir , completed in its first stage of development by May 1973, was Vogt's life's work from the point of view of the then First District Deputy Fritz Mohr (1979). Hotels and other facilities were set up to promote tourism. The winter sports center on the Black Man , founded by the last Prüm District Administrator Hermann Becker , was further developed, a new youth hostel was built in Bollendorf (1969) and in 1974 Vogt opened the Deutsche Wildstrasse , on the course of which the wildlife park near Gondorf was laid out in 1964 .

The sparsely populated West Eifel region, the Eifelkreis Bitburg-Prüm is the largest in terms of area and at the same time the most sparsely populated in Rhineland-Palatinate, was served by several railway lines in the period from 1870 to the First World War , on which except for the main line during Vogt's service time without exception Passenger traffic ended. Starting from the still existing Eifel line Cologne-Trier , the Westeifelbahn was added from 1883 to 1888 , which came from Gerolstein via Prüm, Pronsfeld , Bleialf and Steinebrück on the border with Belgium and ran through the northern district and led to St. Vith . On it the passenger traffic was stopped in several steps until 1980, so that only an increasingly decreasing freight traffic remained. The remnant Gerolstein-Prüm has also been formally closed since 2001. On the branch line Pronsfeld – Neuerburg going south in Pronsfeld , passenger traffic ended on June 1, 1969, there was only a small amount of goods traffic here. Passenger traffic on the Pronsfeld – Waxweiler railway had already been discontinued on January 1, 1966 , and freight traffic was not of any great importance there either.
In 1969 passenger traffic on the Nims-Sauertalbahn was also stopped. The route led from the Bitburg district of Erdorf on the Cologne-Trier railway line , via Bitburg to the Luxembourg border to Igel . In terms of rail technology, it also developed the US Air Base Bitburg until it was closed in 1994 and also connected the Bitburg brewery to 2005 . Since then, both commercial areas have been approached exclusively by truck, freight traffic no longer takes place on either of the routes. With the exception of the Erdorf – Bitburg and Gerolstein – Prüm sections, the rails have been dismantled and some of them have been rededicated and expanded as cycle paths.

In the mid-1970s, planning began for the expansion of the A 60 as a continuation of the Belgian A 27 from Steinebrück via Bitburg and Spangdahlem to Wittlich. It was an important part of the planning, with around 100 km of newly built or expanded roads in the district every year during Vogt's tenure.

After the Second World War, the US military with the air base in Bitburg, which was dissolved in 1994 , the still existing air base in Spangdahlem and the radar station north of Prüm am Schwarzen Mann (until 2004) were among the important economic factors in the district . Vogt maintained good contacts with the US commanders, they said goodbye to him in 1979 with a very personal celebration - a sightseeing flight in a military plane over his Palatinate homeland, as well as to the French garrison. He also developed a "good personal relationship" with the Rhineland-Palatinate Prime Ministers Helmut Kohl (1969 to 1976) and Bernhard Vogel (1976 to 1988). Vogt was a member of numerous committees and associations, he was a member of the executive boards of the German-Luxembourgish and German-Belgian nature parks and played a decisive role in the creation of the State Treaty of Rhineland-Palatinate-Luxembourg, signed in Echternach in 1974 . German border communities in the Bitburg-Prüm district have since shared a large-scale sewage treatment plant with Luxembourgish ones on the territory of Luxembourg .

On his departure from Bitburg and his retirement in autumn 1979, Kurt Böckmann, then Minister of the Interior of Rhineland-Palatinate, presented him with the Federal Cross of Merit 1st Class .

family

In October 1948 Karl Vogt married Elfriede Baumgärtner (died 1993), with whom he had three children, a daughter and two sons. Her children attend the St. Willibrord high school in Bitburg and later embark on an academic career, the daughter as a fully qualified lawyer and the sons as a doctor. Buried Karl Vogt was in Burrweiler , his last place of residence.

Web links

• Entry on Karl Vogt in the Rhineland-Palatinate personal database

Individual evidence

1. ^ Heinrich Studentkowski: Vogt, Karl, District Administrator . In: Heinz Monz (Ed.): Trier biographical lexicon , Trier Wissenschaftlicher Verlag 2000, ISBN 3-88476-400-4 , p. 481 f.
2. ↑ ^{a b} Peter Neu: We remember ... Karl Vogt. District Administrator of the Bitburg district 1962 to 1970. District Administrator of the Bitburg-Prüm district 1971 to 1979 in: District administration Bitburg-Prüm (ed.): District Bitburg-Prüm, home calendar 1996 , Bitburg 1995, pp. 50–56 (with pictures), here P. 50.
3. ↑ Peter Neu: We remember ... Karl Vogt. District Administrator of the Bitburg district 1962 to 1970. District Administrator of the Bitburg-Prüm district 1971 to 1979 , here p. 50 f.
4. ↑ Peter Neu: We remember ... Karl Vogt. District Administrator of the Bitburg District 1962 to 1970. District Administrator of the Bitburg-Prüm District 1971 to 1979 , here p. 52.
5. ↑ ^{a b} Peter Neu: We remember ... Karl Vogt. District Administrator of the Bitburg district 1962 to 1970. District Administrator of the Bitburg-Prüm district 1971 to 1979 , here p. 53.
6. ↑ Peter Neu: We remember ... Karl Vogt. District Administrator of the Bitburg district 1962 to 1970. District Administrator of the Bitburg-Prüm district 1971 to 1979 , here p. 53 f.
7. ↑ Peter Neu: We remember ... Karl Vogt. District Administrator of the Bitburg district 1962 to 1970. District Administrator of the Bitburg-Prüm district 1971 to 1979 , here p. 54.
8. ↑ Peter Neu: We remember ... Karl Vogt. District Administrator of the Bitburg district 1962 to 1970. District Administrator of the Bitburg-Prüm district 1971 to 1979 , here p. 54 f.
9. ↑ Peter Neu: We remember ... Karl Vogt. District Administrator of the Bitburg District 1962 to 1970. District Administrator of the Bitburg-Prüm District 1971 to 1979 , here p. 56.
10. ↑ Peter Neu: We remember ... Karl Vogt. District Administrator of the Bitburg district 1962 to 1970. District Administrator of the Bitburg-Prüm district 1971 to 1979 , here p. 52 f.
11. ^ District administration Bitburg-Prüm (ed.): In memoriam. District Administrator Karl Vogt † 1915–1997 in: District Bitburg-Prüm. Heimatkalender 1998 , Bitburg 1997, ISSN  1431-2956 , p. 16 f.