Otto Borgner

Otto Borgner (born February 27, 1892 in Bielefeld , † July 4, 1953 in Hamburg ) was a German consumer cooperative, politician of the SPD and senator of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg .

Life

Otto Borgner was born the son of a staunch cooperative and co-founder of the old Bielefelder Konsumverein. He was the younger brother of the managing director of GEG Gustav Borgner . In his hometown he attended high school. This was followed by commercial training as an office assistant. He then initially worked in banking. He attended the university in Frankfurt am Main , but left it without a degree after the outbreak of war in 1915. During the war, he was a member of the Wehrmacht from 1915 to 1918.

In 1953 he succumbed to a persistent kidney disease.

Consumer cooperative

After the First World War, from mid-1919 he became an employee of the large-scale purchasing company of German Consumers (GEG) in Hamburg . He worked in the head office and administration of the tobacco factory and from 1923 switched to accounting. Then he took over the management of the banking department of the GEG, which was important for the financing of the consumer cooperative movement in Hamburg . He then went to Leipzig-Plagwitz and was a member of the management of the local consumer association . In June 1930 he went back to Hamburg to work in the management of "Production" . After the DC circuit of the consumer co-operative organizations in 1933 he remained until the collapse of 1945 consecutive organizations in leadership positions, most recently in joint venture of the German Labor Front (GW) , the GW-industrial enterprises GmbH (GWI) in Hamburg. During the Nazi era, he was temporarily imprisoned in August 1944.

On October 9, 1948 he was elected to the board of the Hamburg consumer cooperative "Production".

politics

Otto Borgner joined the SPD in 1919 and was a member of the Hamburg Parliament for his party for the first time during the Weimar Republic from September 1931 to April 1932 . In 1937 he became a member of the NSDAP . After the Second World War , he immediately rejoined the SPD. From June to July 1945 he took over the post of Senator for Economics and Food in the Senate appointed by the British occupation forces . From November 1946 to October 1948 he was again under Max Brauer Senator for Economics and Transport. In addition, he sat from February 1946 first in the appointed Hamburg citizenship and from November of that year in the first democratically elected parliament of the Hanseatic city. He was a member of the city council until his death in 1953.

Borgner took on several tasks in the committees of the Bizone . From September 1946 to August 1947 he was a member of the Board of Directors for Economics and the Board of Directors for Transport and from September to November 1946 a member of the Food and Agriculture Council.

Borgner was controversial within his party because he had become a member of the NSDAP and did not have to accept any professional restrictions during the Nazi era. Well-known party friends like Adolph Schönfelder tried to defend him by declaring his membership and cooperation with the Nazi regime as a "selfless step [to] save the savings of the small cooperative members". Even he could not completely switch off the criticism of the person. At the Hamburg state party conference of the Social Democrats on January 27, 1946, for example, there was a loud dispute about Borgner and his admission to the party.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Hamburger Abendblatt. No. 154 from July 6, 1953, page 3 ( Memento from July 28, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
2. ^ ^{A b} Christof Brauers: The FDP in Hamburg 1945 to 1953: Start as a bourgeois left party. Martin Meidenbauer Verlag 2007, ISBN 3899755693 , page 225 f. ( Some can be viewed online )

literature

• Josef Rieger, Max Mendel and Walther Postelt: The consumer cooperative “Production”, 1899–1949, history of a cooperative consumer association from the foundation to the fiftieth business deal and its predecessors. Hamburg 1949.

Web links

• Biography and picture
• Otto Borgner's biography . In: Wilhelm H. Schröder : Social Democratic Parliamentarians in the German Reich and Landtag 1876–1933 (BIOSOP) In this source z. T. Otto Borgner confused with Gustav Borgner . In addition, several factual errors, especially about the organization of consumer cooperative institutions. Accessed March 25, 2009
• Newspaper article about Otto Borgner in the press kit of the 20th century of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .