Ludwig Walz

Ludwig Peter Walz (born February 7, 1898 in Ulm , † July 24, 1989 in Riedlingen ) was a German clothing merchant and mayor. He was honored as Righteous Among the Nations in 1974 .

Life

Walz graduated from middle school in his hometown and did a commercial apprenticeship . During the First World War he was called up as a soldier in 1916 and fought in the field artillery regiment "King Karl" (1st Württembergisches) No. 13 on the Somme , near Verdun and the Maas, among others . In 1918 he was awarded the Iron Cross 2nd class for his conscientiousness of duty . On February 4, 1919, he was released from the Württemberg Army . After initially working in his parents' clothing store for men and boys in Ulm, he opened a clothing store for men and boys in Riedlingen in 1924. He was originally a Seventh-day Adventist through his mother, but soon became involved in the pietistic Michael Hahn community in Riedlingen .

From 1934 until 1942 he drove once a week at night to Buttenhausen, 35 kilometers away, to the local Jewish community in order to supply them with food. He also supported them with food when they were deported to Riga and Theresienstadt . He warned against the Nazis early on and wrote numerous letters to Protestant pastors, some of which he put on their pulpits himself. When he was drafted into the Wehrmacht , he refused to serve in a uniform decorated with a swastika and to take oath of the flag , but got away with a three-day prison sentence after a Protestant pastor had pointed out that he had been awarded the Iron Cross II in the First World War. Class had been awarded. He refused the Hitler salute all his life and also refused to display flags on his office building.

After the Second World War , Walz was elected to the local council in 1945, and in 1947, although he was Protestant, he was elected mayor by the almost entirely Catholic population of Riedlingen. He held this office until 1954. In this office he founded the Eichenau district of Riedlingen, where he offered a new home to 150 German refugees from Szarazd , Hungary , who were previously housed in Vilshofen , Bavaria . He ran his clothing store for a total of 47 years until 1971. On September 10, 1974, following a tip from the Jewish survivor Jutta Gut, he was honored by the Yad Vashem memorial as Righteous Among the Nations for his activities in the Third Reich . On February 9, 1975, he was presented with the medal and the award certificate in the hall of the Jewish community in Stuttgart. Until his death in 1989 he lived in the Riedling district of Eichenau, which he founded.

At the beginning of 2009 a Riedlinger Strasse was named after him as Ludwig-Walz-Strasse , with which both his actions for the Jewish population in the Third Reich and his lifelong commitment to the weak, including people with disabilities, should be honored.

literature

• Christoph Knüppel: On the history of the Jews in Riedlingen. P. 22ff. ( Online version ; MS Word ; 134 kB)
• Alexander Schweda: A Righteous Among the Nations. Evangelisches Gemeindeblatt für Württemberg 15/2009, p. 26f.
• Hans Petermann: Address by Mayor Petermann when Ludwig-Walz-Straße was named on January 17, 2009. ( online version )
• Eberhard Zacher: Ludwig Peter Walz (1898-1989) - Helper of oppressed Jews in Buttenhausen . In: Angela Borgstedt et al. (Ed.): Courage proven. Resistance biographies from the southwest, Stuttgart 2017 ( S chriften political geography of Baden-Württemberg; 46), pp 259-268 ISBN 9783945414378 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Schwäbische Zeitung online : Ludwig-Walz-Straße reminds of the original  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.   , January 19, 2009