Martha Fuchs

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Martha Marie Fuchs b. Büttner, (born October 1, 1892 in Grubschütz ; † January 8, 1966 in Braunschweig ) was an SPD politician. From 1959 to 1964 she was Lord Mayor of Braunschweig. She is one of Braunschweig's honorary citizens .

Live and act

Martha Büttner was born as the eldest child of the married couple Maria Johanna and Karl Büttner, a restaurant owner in Grubschütz. She attended the citizen school and the commercial school in Bautzen. At the age of thirteen, after the untimely death of her mother, she had to look after her four smaller siblings and worked with Georg Fuchs as an accountant and clerk until her marriage in 1919. The couple lived in Magdeburg from 1919 to 1923. From 1923 they lived in Braunschweig on Comeniusstrasse, because their husband became an editor for the social democratic newspaper Braunschweiger Volksfreund . As a representative of the SPD, the Brunswick elected her to the city council in 1925 and to the Brunswick state parliament in 1927 .

After her husband died in 1930, Martha Fuchs looked after his three children from their first marriage (Hans, Nora, Gretel), with Otto Grotewohl acting as the official guardian of the children . The eldest of the three children was the daughter Gretel (* 1910), who was active with the Kinderfreunde and had graduated from a high school graduate course at the Karl Marx School in Berlin in 1930 . Until 1932 she studied educational science at the TH Braunschweig . Gretel Fuchs had been friends with Hermann Ebeling since she was a student, and she emigrated to France at the end of 1932/1933. The two had been married since October 11, 1934.

Martha Fuchs accepted the position as a trade supervisor in the Braunschweig civil service from 1930 to 1933. In her work she paid special attention to questions of schooling and upbringing.

In 1933 her political work and her professional life came to an end. She was persecuted, interrogated and tortured by the Gestapo as a “politically unreliable element” . In the period August 1944 of bis April 1945 it was in the concentration camp internment. When the camp was evacuated shortly before the end of the Second World War , she managed to escape with two Jewish women. Her son-in-law, Hermann Ebeling, who had meanwhile become an American citizen with his wife and returned to Germany as an employee in the service of the Office of Strategic Services , came back to Braunschweig for the first time in 1945 and learned of the fate of his mother-in-law. Thanks to his military position, he was able to bring Martha Fuchs to Switzerland, to Intragna in Ticino, for a six-week recreational stay . During her stay in Switzerland in September / October 1945, she wrote down her memories of her imprisonment in the camp and sent her transcript to her daughter Gretel, who lived in New York. This long letter, posted on October 18, 1945, was published under the title Ein Ewiges Schandmal , beginning with the edition of March 1, 1946, over several episodes in the South American émigré magazine Das Andere Deutschland (La otra alemania) . In a preliminary editorial note, it said with reference to the title:

“Under this title we are starting the publication of a letter that the wife of the former editor-in-chief of the social-democratic Braunschweig 'Volksfreund', Dr. Fuchs, wrote to her daughter in New York. The letter, which we are reprinting unchanged and unabridged, gives an impressive description of the conditions in the women's concentration camps. This portrayal, an eternal stigma for the Nazi system, should find as wide a distribution as possible in the circles of Germans in South America, who are still not sufficiently informed about which criminal and sadist society has tyrannized the German people and led Germany into the abyss. We therefore have a special print produced and ask our friends and readers to ensure that the special print is distributed as necessary. More details will follow later. "

politics

After the war, Martha Fuchs was councilor in Braunschweig. From May to November 1946 she was Minister of Education for the State of Braunschweig and then from January 20, 1947 to June 9, 1948 State Commissioner for Refugees in Lower Saxony with the rank of minister. She was the first woman in the western zones to hold a ministerial office. In 1949 she became the first woman to be chairwoman of an SPD district. From 1947 to 1951 and 1954 to 1955 she was a member of the Lower Saxony state parliament .

On May 27, 1959, she became mayor of the city of Braunschweig and held the office until October 21, 1964. As Lord Mayoress, she obtained the resolution to demolish the Braunschweig Castle , which was badly damaged in the war but could be rebuilt, despite protests from the population and public institutions and regardless of existing reconstruction plans. The decision was made on January 20, 1960 in the city council with a majority of two votes in the SPD parliamentary group against all other parties. Martha Fuchs sponsored the construction of the town hall on Leonhardplatz , which opened in 1965.

Honors

120 years after her birth, a personality plaque was unveiled for the former honorary citizen and mayor of the city of Braunschweig on October 1, 2012 at Comeniusstrasse 20. Because that's where Marta Fuchs had lived for the last few years before her death. The board was donated by Isolde Saalmann , it is the seventh of 39 personality boards so far (as of 2012), which reminds of a deserving woman.

Works

  • An eternal disgrace . This long letter to her daughter Gretel has appeared in several sequels in the newspaper La otra Alemania / Das Andere Deutschland and can be found in the Exilpresse Digital collection of the German National Library :
  • The refugee problem , in: La otra Alemania , Vol. 9, June 15, 1947, No. 144.

literature

  • Regina Blume: Martha Fuchs. Stages in the life of a Braunschweig politician , Johann Heinrich Meyer GmbH printing and publishing house, Braunschweig, 2019, ISBN 978-3-926701-90-9 .
  • Gabriele Armenat: women from Braunschweig, Martha Fuchs, first and only Lord Mayor of Braunschweig. Braunschweig City Library 1991, p. 144.
  • Antje Dertinger : women from the very beginning. From the founding years of the Federal Republic , J. Latka Verlag, Bonn 1989, ISBN 3-925-06811-2 . (Pp. 47–59)
  • Antje Geiß: Martha Fuchs - The picture of a politician in Braunschweig in the 1960s. In: Hans Steffens: Braunschweig in the picture. Press and documentary photography from 1946 to 1980. Appelhans Verlag, Braunschweig 2004, ISBN 978-3-937664-15-6 .
  • Bernd Rother : Fuchs, Martha. In: Luitgard Camerer , Manfred Garzmann , Wolf-Dieter Schuegraf (eds.): Braunschweiger Stadtlexikon . Joh. Heinr. Meyer Verlag, Braunschweig 1992, ISBN 3-926701-14-5 , p. 78 .
  • Annette Schütze : Martha Fuchs. In memory of an extraordinary woman and social democrat. SPD sub-district Braunschweig, Braunschweig 1992 (23 pages with illustrations).
  • Henning Steinführer , Claudia Böhler (Ed.): The Braunschweiger Mayors. From the establishment of the office in the late Middle Ages to the 20th century. oeding print GmbH, Braunschweig 2013, ISBN 978-3-941737-68-6 .
  • Hermann Ebeling: A dangerous woman. In: La otra Alemania, Volume 8, August 15, 1946, No. 124, p. 6.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Biography of Martha Fuchs . In: Wilhelm H. Schröder : Social Democratic Parliamentarians in the German Reich and Landtag 1876–1933 (BIOSOP)
  2. ^ Bundesarchiv Koblenz: Holdings BArch N 1374/49: Personal memories of Grete Ebeling, p. 30
  3. ↑ Hildegard Feidel-Mertz / Hermann Schnorbach: teachers in emigration. The Association of German Teacher Emigrants (1933–39) in the traditional context of the democratic teachers' movement, Beltz Verlag, Weinheim and Basel, 1981, ISBN 3-407-54114-7 , p. 229
  4. ↑ Munzinger biography on munzinger.de
  5. ↑ Bundesarchiv Koblenz: Holdings BArch N 1374/49: Personal memories of Grete Ebeling, p. 27 ff.
  6. ↑ La otra Alemania , Vol. 8, March 1, 1946, No. 113, p. 12. There is no further information about the announced special edition.
  7. ↑ In memory of Martha Fuchs  ( 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. on christoph-bratmann.de@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / christoph-bratmann.de  
  8. ↑ Martha Fuchs - The picture of a politician in Braunschweig in the 1960s. at appelhans-verlag.de
personal data
SURNAME Fox, Martha
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Büttner, Martha Marie (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician (SPD), Member of the Bundestag and Lord Mayor of the city of Braunschweig
DATE OF BIRTH October 1, 1892
PLACE OF BIRTH Grubschütz , Bautzen
DATE OF DEATH January 8, 1966
Place of death Braunschweig