Karl Zörgiebel

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Karl Friedrich Zörgiebel in 1948 (left, with hat) at the Rittersturz conference , right: Hinrich Wilhelm Kopf

Karl Friedrich Zörgiebel (born September 30, 1878 in Mainz , † March 14, 1961 there ) was a German social democratic politician. During the Weimar Republic he was first police chief of Cologne (1922–1926), then of Berlin (1926–1929) and finally of Dortmund (1930–1933).

Zörgiebel gained notoriety above all as the politically responsible person for the violent suppression of the May demonstrations organized by the KPD in 1929 in Berlin , which were not officially approved . With more than 30 demonstrators killed by the police operation and uninvolved local residents, this fact forms a historically independent term as “ Blutmai ”.

Life

Karl Zörgiebel was born the son of a factory worker. He graduated from primary school in Mainz and then began an apprenticeship as a cooper , which was followed by his journeyman hike. He then did his military service from July 1897 to April 1900 , including on the warship Kaiserin Augusta and then worked again as a cooper.

He joined the trade union in 1900 and the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) a year later . In 1905 he became chairman of the SPD constituency commission for Mainz-Oppenheim, and in 1907 he became the full-time manager of the Böttcherverband in Mainz. In 1908 he moved to Cologne, where he was Gauleiter of the association. In October 1910 he finally became the SPD district party secretary for the Upper Rhine Province , initially in Koblenz, and from 1912 again in Cologne. During the First World War , he served again in the Navy from 1914 to 1917.

During the November Revolution he was a member of the Cologne workers 'and soldiers' council and second chairman of the workers 'and soldiers' council of the Upper Rhine Province. Until 1919 he was also a member of the Central Council of the German Socialist Republic . After that he was a member of the Prussian state assembly until 1921 , where he was active on the parliamentary committee. He was elected to the Reichstag for the constituency of Koblenz-Trier in June 1920 , to which he was a member until May 1924.

In September 1922 he was elected first acting, then full-time police chief of Cologne. He held this office until September 1926, when he was appointed Berlin Police President with effect from October 1.

Zörgiebel earned services to Berlin's modern traffic regulations. For example, traffic lights were introduced during his tenure.

In his function as Berlin Police President, before the traditional May Day rallies - at which he feared clashes between members of the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) and the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) - he appealed to a ban on demonstrations for Prussia issued on March 21, 1929 .

However, when tens of thousands followed the KPD's call for a May demonstration in Berlin, riots broke out, which went down in history as “ Blutmai ”. On instructions from Zörgiebel and the Prussian Interior Minister Albert Grzesinski, the police took rigorous action against the demonstrators and killed 32 demonstrators and uninvolved residents in the days that followed. As a result, on May 3, 1929, the militant, uniformed fighting organization of the KPD, the Red Front Fighter League (RFB) was banned . A little later it was extended to the entire territory of the Reich. From May 3 to 6, 1929, Zörgiebel also imposed a “traffic and light ban” in the Berlin districts of Wedding and Neukölln .

This approach was judged to be inappropriate and criticized both politically and by the police. On the part of the communists he was described as a "workers murderer".

"Mr. Zörgiebel, who has not qualified himself for his current office by anything, is one of those dignitaries received from the spirit of the ox tour, who consider themselves very demonized realpoliticians when they practice what they worshiped yesterday with the tips of their boots today. ... The guilty party is not the individual agitated and overworked police sergeant, but the police chief who carried the civil war apparatus to a peaceful city. More than twenty people had to die, more than a hundred lost their bones, just so that a state authority could be saved which was endangered by nothing but the incompetence of its owner. "

- Carl von Ossietzky : Weltbühne , from May 7, 1929, pp. 690–694.

In November 1930 he was given temporary retirement.

After the death of the Dortmund police chief Lübbring in autumn 1931, Zörgiebel was appointed to this post. He started work on December 6th. He was one of the few social democratic officials who were not removed from office after the Prussian strike. In general, this fact was attributed to Zörgiebel's good contacts to conservative politicians. During this time, too, he came under political attack again: the National Socialists charged him with the so-called Schwanenwall affair, in which the Dortmund police had penetrated the NSDAP party office; the communists the battle of the north market , in which two people were shot. Immediately after the National Socialist “ seizure of power ”, Zörgiebel was dismissed from his office.

He then moved to Cologne, where he was arrested in September 1933 and sent to the Brauweiler concentration camp and was imprisoned for four months. Then he had to leave the city and moved back to Mainz. There he was under surveillance by the Secret State Police (Gestapo), and his passport was revoked in 1937.

After the war he was involved in rebuilding the police force, became SPD chairman in Mainz in 1945 and was state police president of Rhineland-Palatinate from 1947 to 1949 . He retired on July 16, 1949.

Honors

The Zörgiebelweg in Berlin-Spandau, the Zörgiebelstraße in Cologne-Seeberg and the Karl-Zörgiebel-Straße in Mainz-Bretzenheim and Pulheim are named after him.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. a b c d e f g Dieter Knippschild: Zörgiebel, Karl . In: Hans Bohrmann (Ed.): Biographies of important Dortmunders. People in, from and for Dortmund . tape 2 . Klartext, Essen 1998, ISBN 3-88474-677-4 , p. 154 f .
  2. Josef Wißkirchen: Brauweiler near Cologne: Early concentration camp in the Provincial Labor Institute 1933-34, in: Jan Erik Schulte (Ed.): Concentration camps in the Rhineland and Westphalia 1933–1945, central control and regional initiative. Schöningh, Paderborn 2005, p. 65ff.