Nikolaus Arndt

Nikolaus Arndt in January 2006 at the opening of the exhibition "Germans in Northern Ukraine - Volhynia and Kiev" of the Historical Association Wolhynien eV in the Maximilianeum , Munich

Nikolaus Arndt (born December 19, 1928 in Rowno , Poland ; † May 2, 2016 in Wiesentheid ) is a German architect, historian and local politician. As a historian, he dealt primarily with German and other minority settlement groups in Eastern Europe in the context of a pan-European perspective. He initiated the Volhynia Historical Association .

Life

Arndt was born in the then Polish Voivodeship Volhynia in western Ukraine . After the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, the family moved to occupied western Poland ( Kujawisch-Brest , Leslau district in the Wartheland ) in 1940 . In 1941 the mother died of typhoid fever. With other high school students he was deployed in 1944 as an air force helper and flak gunner for a heavy flak battery in Poznan . During this time he also provided interpreting services for Soviet prisoners of war deployed. From January 1945 he experienced the battle for Berlin as a Wehrmacht soldier after retraining to become a "tank hunter" . Despite the adverse circumstances, he managed to meet his uncle Theodor, who was also a French slave laborer in Berlin at the time. In May 1945, Nikolaus Arndt was taken prisoner by the Soviets , from which he was released in July 1945. During his imprisonment in the Landsberg / Warthe and Woldenberg camps, the camp police called on him for interpreting services. He was not able to find his family members again until December 1945 , who had fled the advancing Red Army through several stations to Wiesentheid in Lower Franconia . After attending the high school in Kitzingen from spring 1946 to March 1947, in which he completed the prescribed year of repetition with the completion of the secondary school leaving certificate, he left his parents and other relatives and moved to Stuttgart to do an apprenticeship there (at that time "retraining" ) to take to the bricklayer. Due to a serious accident at work on a construction site, Arndt returned to his parents in Wiesentheid. After temporary work in 1949 in an architecture office in Kitzingen and at the Wiesentheider construction company Seiling, he began studying structural engineering at the Ohm Polytechnic in Nuremberg (later TH Nürnberg ) in the winter semester of 1949/1950 , which he did at the Balthasar Neumann Polytechnic in Würzburg (later Fachhochschule Würzburg ) graduated in 1953. After his early professional years in an architecture firm in Schwabach (until 1957) and as a building inspector in the administration of the Princely Castell banks and various agricultural and forestry properties for Prince Castell (until 1962), he increasingly took on his own planning assignments. From 1963 he set up his architecture office in Wiesentheid and worked successfully as a civil engineer and independent architect until the late 1980s.

In addition to starting a family and being involved in local associations and in local politics, he did family research from the mid-1960s and visited relatives who had been scattered over several European countries since the First World War. After visiting his cousin in Moscow and his aunt in Leningrad (1966) he gave lectures on the USSR and Poland in southern Germany. In 1970 his first book, Die Shitomirer Arndts, appeared on the cross-generational history of his family's settlement in Volhynia. Impressed by Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik , N. Arndt joined the SPD in 1970 .

From 1973 Arndt also worked as a teacher, interpreter and translator for Russian , and later also for Polish . For eight years he worked on the federal board of the German-Polish Society (Düsseldorf). He also studied history at the Julius Maximilians University of Würzburg . In his hometown of Wiesentheid in Lower Franconia, he was committed to building a partnership with Rouillac .

A joint initiative by N. Arndt and Pastor Hugo Karl Schmidt (1909–2009) led to the foundation of the Historisches Verein Wolhynien eV in 1975. The association is dedicated to coming to terms with the history of the Wolhynia Germans and Wolhynia. In this context, Arndt also acted as chairman and co-editor of the publication series Wolhynische Hefte . In April 2014 the general meeting of the association elected him honorary chairman.

From 1981 he was a member of the Historical and Regional Studies Commission for Poznan and Germanness in Poland , based in Mainz and Marburg. After 1976 he held the post of deputy district administrator in the Kitzingen district for eight years . During this time, as a founding member and 1st chairman of the Friends' Association of the former Kitzingen synagogue, he campaigned for the preservation of the Kitzingen synagogue and its use as a cultural center. In 2001, a trilingual text and photo documentation of Germans in Northern Ukraine - Volhynia and Kiev was created in cooperation with the Ambassador of Ukraine, Jurij Kostenko , and supported by the Federal Ministry of the Interior . The exhibition was presented in Kiev , Odessa , Linstow and in the Maximilianeum in Munich .

Honors

• Certificate of honor for the personal contribution to international understanding between the two countries , presented on October 20, 1995 by the Ambassador of Ukraine Jurij Kostenko in the Wiesentheid town hall
• Federal Cross of Merit on Ribbon of the Federal Republic of Germany , presented on May 4, 1998 by the Lower Franconian District President Franz Vogt
• Kulturpreis des Landsmannschaft Weichsel-Warthe, Dr.-Kurt-Lück-Prize for special merits in the cultural, scientific or local political field , awarded on June 9, 2001 by the chairman of the Dr.-Kurt-Lück-Foundation in Wiesbaden
• Honor plate of the Wiesentheid market , presented by Mayor Walter Hahn on December 19, 2003
• Medal for special services to local self-government (bronze) ,
• Willy Brandt Medal and Certificate of Honor of the SPD , presented by Frank Hofmann (Member of the Bundestag) on ​​December 28, 2008 in Wiesentheid
• Honorary Chairman of the Historical Association Wolhynien eV (May 2, 2014)

Works

• The Shitomir Arndts. A family history against the background of a hundred and fifty year history of the western Ukraine , with 13 illustrations, Holzner Verlag, Würzburg 1970, 151 pp.
• Sbornik russkirch i ukrainskich pesen , ed. (Russian and Ukrainian songbook), Wiesentheid 1976/1985, 75 pages, 78 songs
• A Wolhynier tells , From the life of Alexander Arndt in Tsarist East Wolhynia, in West Wolhynia in Poland, in "Warthegau" and in Lower Franconia, with 16 illustrations, Wiesentheid 1982, self-published 131 pp.
• The two former Jewish cemeteries in Rehweiler , Geiselwind community in 1988, 11 pages with 4 illustrations, with a foreword by district home keeper Hans Bauer
• The Germans in Volhynia. A cultural-historical overview , (picture book large format), Kraft Verlag, Würzburg, 1994, 96 p., Reviews in: Weg und Ziel , 1995, No. 2, p. 9 by Ewald Weiss, in: Weichsel-Warthe , December 1995 by G. Rudolf and Harald Schäfer
• The families Arndt and Stebner , illustrated book about family branches from East Germany, Volhynia in the western Ukraine, from Poland, the East Sudetenland and from Franconia, Wiesentheid 1996, self-published, 132 p. Incl. Illustrations
• The rescue of the synagogue building , About the arduous work of the "Friends of the former Synagogue Kitzingen" in the years 1982 to 1993, as well as about other efforts - Chronological sequence, Wiesentheid 2001, Verlag Wolyn in Shitomir (Ukraine), 56 pp.
• As a medical soldier in World War II , during fighting in Yugoslavia, Russia, Italy and in captivity in North Africa - diary, letters, poems, reflections by Walter Mix , compiled, edited and edited by Nikolaus Arndt, Wiesentheid 2001 (Verlag "Wolhynien", 2000 ), 107 pp., ISBN 966-7390-75-6
• Germans in Northern Ukraine - Volhynia and Kiev , booklet to an exhibition of the historical association Wolhynien, Wiesentheid 1999, 66 p., Report on it in yearbook Weichsel-Warthe , 2003, p. 137-143, also in: DOD Deutscher Ostdienst 10/2003 , P. 30, new edition of the catalog for a trilingual version of the exhibition: German, Ukrainian, Russian, Wiesentheid 2001, 55 p.
• Post-war years - The painter Unbehauen and others record the time after 1945 in Wiesentheid , edited by Nikolaus Arndt, Marktgemeinde Wiesentheid 2005, 85 pages, including images of the pictures by the painter Ernst Unbehauen
• Search for home , a boy moves from Wolhynia, over the "Warthegau", over the "final battle" in Berlin in search of his family across Germany to his new home Franconia and his great home Europe, Wiesentheid 2005, self-published, 171 pp. including pictures.
• Inappropriate guides - explanations on the situation in Ukraine. Past and present , Wiesentheid 2011,
• Volhynia and its Germans over the centuries - historical overview from the 13th to the 20th century, Wiesentheid 2012,
• The other Kitzingen. City and surrounding area in the Third Reich, non-adjustment - resistance - forced labor , compiled reports by Nikolaus Arndt, edited by Siegfried Eschner, Medienzentrale Kitzingen 2012, 109 p., With a foreword by Böhm

Volhyn booklets

• Kolonie Korist - emergence, development and dissolution of a German farmers' settlement in central Volhynia in the years 1867–1940 , in: Episode 1, 1980, pp. 5–41
• Famous porcelain factory and first Evangelical Lutheran congregation in Korec , in: Volume 2, 1982, pp. 66–75
• The Wolhyniendeutschen and the power interests in Eastern and Central Europe , in: Episode 2, 1982, pp. 91–140, comments on this v. Gotthold Rhode , Mainz, in the 4th episode, p. 222
• Timeline for the history of Volhynia , in: Episode 2, 1982, pp. 141–148
• Motives for the exile of the Wolhynia Germans in World War I , in: Episode 4, 1986, pp. 184–222, (with contribution to the discussion by Edgar Hösch , Munich / Estenfeld)
• Resettlement of Wolhyniendeutscher colonists in the Baltic States 1907–1913, a sample for planned and begun Germanizations during the two world wars in Eastern Europe , in: Episode 5, 1988, pp. 91–214, also as a special edition
• Families from Anette and Josefine . in: Episode 5, 1988, P13
• Czechs in Volhynia From the history of the settlement 1862–1947 With comparisons to the situation of the Germans, in: Episode 6, 1990, pp. 71–84, translation into English in Wandering Volhynians 9/96, pp. 12–14 by Irmgard H. Ellingson
• Poland's eastern border within Volhynia - historical and current aspects , in: Volume 6, 1990, pp. 144–152
• The forgotten, enigmatic benefactor Baron Theodor Steinheil from Gorodok near Rowno and his first Wolhynisches Museum , in: Volume 6, 1990, pp. 93-95
• 15 years of the Volhynia Historical Association - review. The history of origin , in: Volume 6, 1990, pp. 5-8
• The fate of Jews 1941-1944. Excerpts about extermination, resistance, but also support from Jews , in: Volume 8, 1994, pp. 103-105

Web links

• Volhynia Historical Association
• Willy Brandt and the home of Nikolaus Arndt (Mainpost, for his 80th birthday)
• Volhyn booklets

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Nikolaus Arndt obituary on trauer.infranken.de ; accessed on November 1, 2017
2. ↑ Volhynia Historical Association