Oswald Friedrich Wilhelm Merz

Oswald Friedrich Wilhelm Merz (born February 10, 1889 in Schwabach , † May 18, 1946 in Augsburg ) was a Bavarian politician ( SPD ) of the Weimar Republic .

Life

Oswald Merz was born in Schwabach near Nuremberg in 1889 as the oldest of six children. From 1895 to 1902 Oswald Merz attended the local elementary school and then until 1907 the teacher training institute, also in Schwabach . He then did preparatory service in Schwabach and Saxony near Ansbach . On October 1, 1907, he was appointed assistant teacher at the elementary school in Saxony and on September 1, 1909, he was transferred to the elementary school in Schwabach as an assistant teacher. In 1911 he passed the employment test in Ansbach with an overall grade of II. With effect from September 16, 1911, he was assigned to the preparatory school in Münchberg as teaching assistant. From October 16, 1914, he came to the preparatory school in Kulmbach. After the outbreak of World War I , he volunteered in October 1914 for the Royal Bavarian Infantry Regiment "Prince Leopold" No. 7 . From May 1915 he was deployed on the Western Front and promoted to officer in the spring of 1916. In December 1916, a bullet hit the right hemisphere . Due to a left-sided paralysis, he was unfit for front. He was taken to a hospital in Lach and then to the Elisabethenheim in Mainz and then back to the Bayreuth garrison. There it was used for training recruits. In January 1919 he was discharged from the army as a first lieutenant decorated with the Iron Cross .

From March to July 1919 he was company commander of the Huebner volunteer battalion in the clashes with the council uprisings in Nuremberg on the Egidienberg, in Regensburg and in Munich-Giesing, where the Huebner volunteer battalion was assigned to the von Oven groups.

In January 1919 he joined the SPD . After his voluntary corps activities until mid-1919, Merz returned to private life, but not to the teaching profession. From October 1, 1919, he applied for leave to study at university and took the subjects of history, education and geography at the universities of Erlangen and Munich. According to his own statements, he also studied singing, choral conducting, conducting, music theory and music history at the universities of music in Berlin and Munich. In 1922 he worked as a teacher at the study Praeparandenschule in Rothenburg ob der Tauber busy in 1923 as a teacher at the College of Education Schwabach, from December 1924 to March 1933 at the College of Education in Bayreuth. In Bayreuth he was involved in political education and in the Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold .

On the night of March 9-10, under the leadership of Hans Schemm, Oswald Merz was arrested in Bayreuth together with 37 SPD and KPD members, including the Reichstag deputy Friedrich Puchta and the editor of the public tribune Georg Hacke. Merz himself describes it as follows: “We were arrested on the night of March 9th to 10th. Hans Schemm himself insisted on playing the Büttel role. People overwhelmed by the supposed size of the moment watched our transfer to prison at the old town hall with enthusiasm. A capable SA man recorded the process with the camera. ”At that time, the Nazi opponents from all over Upper Franconia were placed in so-called“ protective custody ”in the St. Georgen-Bayreuth correctional facility . From Bayreuth these were z. B. the well-known social democrats Friedrich Puchta, Kurt de Jonge, Adam Seeser and his son Karl Seeser .

He was then held in the Dachau concentration camp from late April to early September 1933 . Karl Seeser was released on August 21, Oswald Merz stayed in Dachau until August 29. In October 1934, Merz reported to the Meyer-Viol / Warburg family, whom he had known from their time together in Bayreuth, in Switzerland, about what he had to endure over the three months. Lotte Warburg writes in her diary that he talked for hours about his stay in the concentration camp. “What the man has experienced and seen in Dachau over these six months is so terrible that it can hardly be described. He had to keep cleaning the toilet; The Jews in particular had to do so. ... Two of the hired and hired torturers had come from the Foreign Legion. He says they are all pure sadists who are allowed to torture people as much as they want. ... But he says he still hasn't told the worst, and he doesn't. He says many punishments start with 100 blows on the soles of the feet; many sentences are dark arrest with 25 lashes every few days. "

At the beginning of September Merz returned to Bayreuth. Here, however, he was not received in a friendly manner. A “Jünger Schemms” wrote on his door: “You shouldn't be dismissed, Merz, you should be shot.” ​​Then the law to restore the civil service was applied to him, whereby he lost his position as a teacher. This document was signed by his former political opponent Hans Schemm as the new Bavarian Minister of Culture , of all people . Merz then moved to Frankfurt am Main with his family in very poor circumstances , probably also because his mother-in-law Lisette Reingruber lived there.

In the next two years, 1935 and 1936, little changed in the situation of the Merz family in Frankfurt. As can be seen from his letters to many of his fellow travelers from this time, Oswald Merz despaired more and more of his situation. "Mentally, mentally, economically, physically you slide slowly but surely downwards and - that is the essential point - you have no way of successfully fighting against it ... My nerves have suffered badly. I would love to say valet in a decent way to this world. But I don't want to smell bad deeds or bring joy to my 'friends' ... "

On September 7, 1937, a total of eight people, including Merz, were arrested in Tucherbräustübl in the Hammerstatt working-class district of Bayreuth . During house searches , the Gestapo accused them of continuing a workers 'singers' association in the support association, they found 1152 paying members and confiscated a cash fortune of 859.64 Reichsmarks . The indictment from Chief Public Prosecutor Christian Rößler of April 14, 1938 names 17 suspects. According to the indictment, they were sufficiently suspicious of having undertaken to maintain the organizational cohesion of a political party other than the NSDAP - namely that of the dissolved former SPD. Each of these acts constituted a crime under no. 2 of the law against the formation of new parties of July 14, 1933. With the exception of Johann Franz and Oswald Merz, all of the accused were released. On May 31, 1938, the so-called opening order of the criminal chamber of the Bayreuth Regional Court was issued against Merz and Franz. In it the charges of April 14th are repeated and summarized: "The accused acted with the intention of maintaining the organizational cohesion of the former Social Democratic Party of Germany ... for their part." The accused Oswald Merz was sentenced to one year and six months in prison, Johann Franz acquitted. He was credited with the fact that "the defendant Franz is a simple worker who did not fully understand the scope of his actions."

In the verdict of July 13, 1938, Merz was credited with seven months' imprisonment for “the pre-trial detention suffered”. Since he had been imprisoned since September 7, 1937, he would have served his prison sentence in March 1939. However, his entire pre-trial detention was not credited to him, and so he had to spend in the prisons in Bayreuth and Nuremberg until July 1939. Of course, Oswald Merz feared that he would not be released afterwards. So his lawyer Dr. Zernetschky said that the Secret State Police “do not intend to go any closer” to a release. As a result, on June 21, 1939, he wrote a six-page letter to Zernetschky and asked him to appeal to the Gestapo for his release. Merz pointed to his military service and emphasized that he had never sought a party office in the SPD. He also responded to his bitterness after 1933, his stay in Switzerland and his visit to Bayreuth in 1937. “I am not hostile to the state. I was emotionally and spiritually struggling and bitter about his and his family's hard lot. I see and see with admiration the tremendous achievements of the Fuehrer and Reich Chancellor and the Nat. social state ... ". After serving his sentence, he was immediately taken into protective custody and taken to Dachau concentration camp , although the exact time has not been determined; July 29, 1939 is noted in the access book of the Dachau concentration camp. A short time later, Merz was brought to the Flossenbürg concentration camp because an SS division was to be re-housed in the Dachau concentration camp, a project that was not carried out. At the beginning of 1940, dysentery broke out in the camp and it was quarantined. Oswald Merz also fell ill, as he wrote in a later letter. There are few sources about the other four years that Oswald Merz had to spend in the Dachau concentration camp. There are around twenty letters from 1942 and 1943, but all of them were "official", that is, they were censored. It was not until May 1944 that “illegal” letters appeared that Merz was able to smuggle outwards. At this time Merz switched frequently between the Dachau concentration camp and the Lauingen satellite camp. There, around 3,000 prisoners were used in aircraft production for the Messerschmitt. Oswald Merz writes about this time: “In the morning ½ 5 o'clock: getting up, a hoarse voice croaks. I turn around again. Because I'm a - civil servant. I can no longer sleep. At ¼ 6 I crawl out of the bug box. Old smelly blankets that are never tanned or knocked - not for years - like in the Nbg Police Prison. or Frkf.! In the washroom, which smells of ships and shit, I wash my bare upper body (the Russians wet their hair & pretend to be “washed” because otherwise they would not get any bread and a few with the ox pizzle). In the "living room" it smells like a monkey pen. They pooped heaps in the corners. The ships wobble in vats. Then comes breakfast (bread & sausage or margarine). Then I go to the office, happy to be outside. (A platoon of the Air Force here to guard me) Nobody looks out for me. People go to work, the workshop, the construction team, etc. I calculate meals, reports, orders and deliveries, etc. Most of the time I don't even go to dinner at 12 o'clock. And eat cold here. The dance continues from ¾ 1 to 7. And then the torment of the night begins for me in the scent of the bodies and souls of the noble people. Is stolen - and you are amazed at the sophistication. Usually at night. Alarm with departure. You can't get out of coughing, Katharr & restlessness. "

In April 1945, the horror period in the concentration camp finally came to an end for Oswald Merz. As announced by the Dachau concentration camp memorial, he was herded to the Augsburg-Pfersee satellite camp on foot when the Lauingen subcamp was dissolved. There he was freed by the Americans and immediately admitted to the Augsburg hospital because of typhus, where he stayed until mid-June 1945.

Merz turned to the then Prime Minister Fritz Schäffer with a request for rehabilitation just a month after his liberation. There was initially no reaction there for six weeks, and it was not until mid-July, after an interview with the ministry, that he was promised the position of director of the teacher training institute in Bayreuth or Erlangen. After that, nothing happened again until the end of October, although he asked three to four times a month. In the meantime, the position of director of the teacher training institute was filled on August 22nd by the senior teacher Danzer, who was described as politically unencumbered. Merz lived on welfare support during these months. At the beginning of November 1945, Merz then wrote a letter to his party friends in Bayreuth, namely Georg Rösch, and asked them to contact Prime Minister Dr. Wilhelm Hoegner to turn. It is unclear whether this was the decisive factor. In any case, a letter was written in the Bavarian Ministry of Culture in December 1945, which was sent to him on January 8, 1946, and he was appointed senior director at the Bayreuth teacher training institute. At the same time, with effect from December 1, 1945, he was transferred to the State Ministry for Education and Culture "until further notice to provide services and entrusted with the management of a department".

He did not take up his post in Bayreuth at the beginning of 1946 either. He stayed in Munich and commuted between his apartment in Augsburg and his place of work for three months. At the end of March he was admitted to the Augsburg hospital because his health problems had increased. Since his release, Merz has suffered from the consequences of his stay in the concentration camp, and since then there have been hardly any improvements in his condition. During an operation, Merz was diagnosed with stomach cancer with metastases. A month later, his health deteriorated further and he died in hospital on May 18, 1946.

Merz is buried in the Bayreuth city cemetery. A street was named after him in the nearby Altstadt district . The prisoner suit, which he wore during his several years imprisonment in various concentration camps, was on view from June 19, 2015 in the exhibition Fear, Fear, Hope at the Franconian Switzerland Museum in Tüchersfeld .

Individual evidence

1. ^ Official criminal proceedings, December 12, 1940.
2. ↑ Material for the assessment of rehabilitation ..., October 20, 1945
3. ↑ Manuscript of Oswald Merz's speech on November 18, 1945 in the parish hall of Bayreuth, copied by Karl Seeser, p. 3.
4. ↑ A complete fool through my eternal feelings. From the diaries of Lotte Warburg 1925 to 1947. Edited by Wulf Rüskamp, ​​1989, p. 231f.
5. ↑ Manuscript of the speech of November 18, 1945, p. 4.
6. ^ Protocol Gestapo Nuremberg - Fürth, 1937, p. 176.
7. ^ Letter of February 26, 1936 in Akt StadtABt 11555 => Albrecht Bald, p. 199.
8. ^ Rainer Trübsbach: History of the City of Bayreuth, p. 336
9. ↑ Nordbayerischer Kurier of February 11, 2014, p. 12
10. ↑ 3 Js. 142/38, opening resolution, May 31, 1938, a total of seven pages.
11. ^ Judgment, page 3.
12. ^ Letter from O. Merz to Attorney Dr. Zernetschky dated June 21, 1939, copy in the possession of the author.
13. ^ Message from the archive, Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site, Mr Albert Knoll, August 20, 2015.
14. ^ Statement by Wolfram Hohl, Oswald Merz's son-in-law, in 1985
15. ↑ All information from a copy of the handwritten notes by Oswald Merz: "Material for assessing the rehabilitation", in the possession of the author.
16. ^ So in a letter No. II 30041 AI of the Bavarian State Ministry for Education and Culture, January 8, 1946, in Bay HStA MK 57439.
17. ↑ Gertraut and Erwin Herrmann: National Socialist agitation and rule practice in the province. The example of Bayreuth . In: Journal for Bavarian State History , Vol. 39 (1976), Issue 1/2, pp. 201-250, especially p. 227, ISSN  0044-2364 ( archived copy ( Memento of the original from February 22, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. ). 
18. ^ Oswald Merz's concentration camp uniform in: infranken.de from August 2015